Philosophy & Ethics

So Stephen Hawking doesn't believe in Heaven.  This is apparently a big deal.   It's not that he is wrong, he is most likely right, though the nature of faith is belief in defiance of any evidence so that doesn't matter, the important question is why anyone cares. Everyone in the public has heard of Stephen Hawking, he is quite famous, but for what?  I can't find a single thing where he has been correct - it's not like we have experimental evidence for his idea on how black holes emit radiation, we just don't have a better answer, which sounds a lot like religion.  …

Economists of all stripes for the last generation have demonstrated their audacity time and time again, holding dearly onto their attempts to make Economics a hard science.  Though good intentioned, the attempt to convince everyone that economics is a hard science has likely caused as much trouble as organized religion has in the last era.  Prior to the 1850s, economics, as we know it today, operating on a national and international scale was never considered a science, but was rather considered a speculative study rooted in politics, philosophy, psychology, and accounting -- the…

I often joke, in reference to a black person, woman or gay complaining about some reference or joke in society or in the media about them, that I am all five groups every one of them jokes about, stereotypes and ridicules without any liberal guilt at all; a white, Catholic (not so much these days but you get the idea), Republican (66% of the time), male who was raised in the South.   Seriously, when is the last time anyone felt bad ridiculing any of those? Turns out I am not quite complete in my persecuted state.  Atheists can't catch a break either.   Long after it became a…

If you are in science and you have heard the name Paul Feyerabend, it is likely because you have heard the term "post-modernist" and, if you know about post-modernism, you likely do not think much of deconstructionist silliness like that evolution and creationism are both 'cultural traditions' because sociology and psychology play a role in how science is done. It's not the worst thing post-modernism has said but it is the legacy of Feyerabend and others like him who replaced science with cynicism.    They never admit to that, of course.  If you mention they are always critical…

Why should technology not go on and accelerate like it has before? Why should humanoids not get ever brighter; why should democracy not grow until true communism emerges? Techno-progressives emanate an air of renegade radicalism. They like to accuse critics of not thinking things through sufficiently and stopping at the point best befit to rationalize beliefs. Yet both, the critics and many proponents of technological enhancement alike agree on where to stop asking: a racist ‘we (I, humans, our planet) must survive and conquer’ plus lip-service toward a pseudo-democratic doctrine so…

In the 1970s, the federal government mandated that only universities that adhered to racial quotas could receive federal money - as a result, nearly all U.S. universities today receive federal funding of some sort and all receive state money. If the government can mandate admission policies, schools are de facto extensions of the government, so are university employees bound by Freedom Of Information requests?    Journalists request emails and documents all of the time under the auspices of knowing what people who get taxpayer money are doing.   William Cronon, historian at the…

(Or, if you prefer, "Employing Utilitarian Eudaemonism.") Today's lesson will be about ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem attacks are “attacking the messenger, rather than the message.” This happens in every facet of life you'd care to contemplate, but, because it is timely, I wish to talk about celebrity. For instance, Charlie Sheen, (no wait, he's useless anyway.) Ok, how about Mel Gibson? (A man who is a talented actor and filmmaker.) So you're boycotting his new film, eh? Why? (You say, “He's a racist, anti-semite, wife-beater, etc.”) I say, “Oh, and...” Not because I agree with his stance…

In Australia, babies born since 1971 have had drops of blood taken, which are then tested for a variety of genetic conditions such as cystic fibrosis.  It has been an effective health check, according to Dr. Diana Bowman from the Melbourne School of Population Health, but because there are no laws which define the ownership, storage and use of those blood drops, it could threaten public trust in newborn screening (NBS) programs in Australia. The tests and what is done with the blood afterwards raises many legal questions. "The main problem is that there is no focused set of…

More and more, policy decisions and what medications doctors prescribe for their patients are being driven by large 'studies of studies' called meta-analyses, which statistically combine results from many individual drug trials. There's a problem, though.   A group analyzing meta-analyses writes in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that important declarations of financial conflicts-of-interest in individual drug trials disappeared when those studies were combined in meta-analyses. In other words, the information was right there, it wasn't hidden in the studies…

One of the subtleties of the human condition is that if you like or support someone or something, you can understand the nuances of what words mean differently than if you do not.   If you are a fan of WikiLeaks, for example, the ends justify the means and how they obtain information is unimportant whereas if you are a fan of the climate researchers behind the so-called ClimateGate, the fact that the emails about them were stolen is most important.    And if those researchers are cleared of scientific misconduct you say they are cleared. Well, yes and no on being cleared.…