Friday Hodgepodge

Blog Roundup

1. Jason Crawford entertains as he tells us what he has learned from his six-month-old daughter:

But -- as she reminds me, with every striving crawl across the room, with every curious coo at a strange new object -- relaxation is not the goal of life. Not of hers, nor of mine, nor of humanity's. Our lives are not complete without challenge, adventure, play, and curiosity. When the mere struggle for survival does not provide enough of that -- and it has not, since hunter-gatherer times -- we invent it for ourselves: through games and sports, through travel, through storytelling, through math and science. We run races, climb mountains, compose ballads, peer through telescopes. These things don't put food on one's table, a shirt on one's back, or a roof over one's head. That's not why we do them. We do them in order to be fully human and fully alive. And so does she, even if, for now, she is climbing sofa cushions instead of mountains, and peering at a set of plastic measuring spoons from the kitchen rather than at the cosmos.

This post reminded me of watching my own daughter learn to do "simple" things when she was that age while also reading like a missing chapter from Steven Johnson's Wonderland, whose message is that delight and play are integral to being human.

Any new parent or parent-to-be would do well to read this post, and see that there is even more wonder and delight in parenting for one with a mind prepared to find them.

2. Brian Phillips considers the problem of being overwhelmed with large amounts of information supplied by sides that contradict each other, specifically the two loudest sides of the vaccination debate:

Liberals are positing vaccines as the perfect solution to the pandemic. Conservatives are saying that if the vaccine doesn't stop the disease, then it isn't perfect. In this context, both sides of the debate agree that perfect means stopping the disease from spreading. But this is a false standard. Some vaccines stop an infection from occurring and some don't. Sometimes, the purpose of a vaccine isn't the elimination of a disease, but a reduction in its severity.

An acrimonious debate can indeed really be squabbling between two sides in basic agreement, as Phillips shows us here. In such cases, identifying an incorrect standard can indeed save time and mental effort, and spare us emotional energy. This frees us to follow his example and judge the merits of whatever is being discussed for ourselves.

Relatedly, I'll mention here that I heard a nice, short discussion yesterday by Cal Newport on how to get the best arguments on each side of an unfamiliar issue. The video is embedded below.

3. Continuing with the themes of the previous item, Don Watkins recently wrote a must-read exploration of how best to form intellectual communities or alliances when one rejects some aspect of the intellectual mainstream:

[T]he better approach is to build a community around shared cognitive values. I don't mean that you forego subcultures based on shared ideas and values. What I mean is that within those communities and beyond those communities, you form alliances based on a commitment to high methodological standards.

To use an analogy: when you go to the gym, don't focus on befriending the people who have the body you want, but on befriending the people with the work ethic you want.

I think just about anyone with an active interest in philosophical or political ideas ought to read this, but it will be of particular interest to anyone who has wondered why non-mainstream movements so often attract or manufacture cranks.

4. Today's roundup will conclude by staying with the same theme as the previous two items and return to the first author. At Roots of Progress, Jason Crawford asks, "What would a thriving progress movement look like?" Here's part of his answer:

The foundation of all of this is intellectual work: a lot of hard research, thinking, writing and speaking. The philosophy of progress has barely begun to be elucidated. To succeed, this movement will need much more than just "yay progress!" or "look at this hockey-stick graph!" Those notions are the beginning of this body of thought, not the end. As I wrote recently, we need to answer the challenges that arose in the 20th century and caused many people to sour on the idea of progress. Without more serious intellectual work here, we risk falling back on the naive 18th- and 19th-century notions of progress that proved wrong and led the world to start questioning the entire enterprise. [links omitted]

The frank admissions that the goals of a movement will be difficult to achieve, are not obviously good to everyone, and require hard intellectual work are all positive signs that an intellectual movement is on good cognitive footing.

Indeed, I smile at the thought that the lack of instant solutions and conspiracy theories that "explain" everything might even scare away the cranks -- or at least lots of them, anyway.

-- CAV