Political Philosophy and EVE Online

Even if you don’t dabble in massively multiplayer games, EVE Online is worth a look just for the revelations that emerge from creating a loosely regulated world and opening it up for nerds to play with.

This interview with The Mittani, who is CEO (or guild leader) of Goon Fleet, the largest corporation in EVE, is solid gold. Enlightening even. It touches on politics, human nature, psychology and even has traces of game theory lurking just under the surface

One of the greatest advertisements of all time.

First, a bit of context for those unfamiliar with the game. EVE is a space-based massively multiplayer online (MMO) game where thousands of players flit between hundreds of solar systems, each with unique planets, moons, asteroid fields and space stations, and they mine, trade and fight. Often they fight each other.

EVE has one of the most active player-versus-player (PvP) communities of any MMO. A large tract of space in EVE is called nullsec, meaning it is effectively lawless. While a player will become an outlaw and be hunted by computer-controlled authorities for attacking another player in high security (highsec) space, in lowsec there’s no automated retribution. It’s true frontier stuff.

Players can also band together to create corporations, mining the rich resources in nullsec, using those resources to build ships, equipment and even space stations. These corporations effectively gain sovereignty over that sector, and they protect it from invasion by other corporations.

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Chaos, Levels of Explanation and Interdisciplinarity

I’ve been thinking a lot about interdisciplinary research (IDR) of late. (One day I’ll spend a lot of time thinking about finishing my thesis, but hey.)

It seems that one of the most fundamental questions to ask is: why do we have separate disciplines at all?

Seems obvious, but often the unanswered obvious questions are the most interesting. Delving into them can reveal something illuminating about our assumptions about how things are, and even reveal some false intuitions.

The simple answer might be that there’s no one discipline that can tackle every question we might want to ask. Okay, why?

Well, probably because such a discipline would be unmanageably complex. Far easier to carve up nature – and the questions we want to ask about her – into bite size pieces.

But why carve it where we do?

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Morality Without God

It keeps being said that without God, there can be no morality. It keeps being said that if we’re evolved from selfish genes, there can be no altruism. It keeps being said that a universe without a divine creator is a universe without meaning.

It keeps being said.

And it’s flat out wrong.

I’m sympathetic to religious sentiments, even if I think the accompanying metaphysical interpretation of those sympathies is in error. But I’m entirely unsympathetic to those of a religious persuasion spreading untruths and fallacious arguments about secular morality.

It’d be like me saying that there is a God, and He is malevolent.

Disagreement over the existence of God is one thing, but to misrepresent the religious view is not acceptable. Not for anyone. Likewise, misrepresentation of the secular view by the religious is ignorant at best, malicious (and immoral) at worst.

So, in the interests of providing a clear and unambiguous exposition of the secular moral position, I’ve compiled a list of false claims made by some in the religious community and the reasons why they’re in error.

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Ockham’s Beard Goes Latvia

Exciting news. For Latvians! I’ve had a paper accepted to the Morality and the Cognitive Sciences conference, held in Riga, Latvia, in May. Abstract below: Evolution and Moral Diversity If humans have an evolved moral psychology, then we should not necessarily expect it to function in an identical way between Read more…

Moral Rules or Moral Strategies

I’ve been struggling to articulate an aspect of my unfolding story of morality as shaped by evolution, and one of my key criticisms of moral realism. And I think I might have stumbled on a metaphor that expresses this point. Moral realists often talk about the reality/objectivity of moral facts. Read more…

From Genes to Politics: How Biology Influcences the Way You Vote

It might seem a leap too far, but bear with me, because I’m going to attempt to show that genes influence the way you vote. Let’s start at the end and work our way towards the beginning.

Your adopted political ideology strongly influences the way you vote. Certainly, there might be circumstances in which a liberal might vote for a conservative candidate, such as if the liberal candidate was an obvious dud (or the conservative candidate was a shining star), or if the conservative candidate happened to offer a better policies for the present environment (say, being a hawk in a time of war). But, all things being equal, self-identifying liberals vote for liberal candidates and parties.

However, your political ideology isn’t something you come to adopt from out of the blue. We’re not political blank slates. One of the greatest influences on what ideology you adopt is your worldview, which I loosely define as the implicit framework you use to make sense of the world around you.

Your worldview is both descriptive and prescriptive – it helps understand the way the world is, and it’s value-laden, so it helps you understand good and bad, desirable and undesirable. Many empirical and theoretical studies have shown that underneath our political attitudes lie (often unconscious) beliefs about the way the world is.

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Science and Politics: Why Conservatives Don’t Get Science

Only 6% of scientists self-identify as Republican. Six per cent! And there are five times as many who don’t even have a partisan affiliation. And only 9% self-identify as conservative. Fascinating.

But not entirely unexpected.

These numbers, uncovered by the PEW Research Center, have been the topic of much discussion, sparked by this piece on Slate by Daniel Sarewitz, followed up by a number in The Economist’s Democracy in America blog. Both express concern about the implications of so few conservatives in science. And both speculate as to the cause, first Sarewitz:

It doesn’t seem plausible that the dearth of Republican scientists has the same causes as the under-representation of women or minorities in science. I doubt that teachers are telling young Republicans that math is too hard for them, as they sometimes do with girls; or that socioeconomic factors are making it difficult for Republican students to succeed in science, as is the case for some ethnic minority groups. The idea of mentorship programs for Republican science students, or scholarship programs to attract Republican students to scientific fields, seems laughable, if delightfully ironic.

And The Economist:

I can think of three testable hypotheses they might look into. The first is that scientists are hostile towards Republicans, which scares young Republicans away from careers in science. The second is that Republicans are hostile towards science, and don’t want to go into careers in science. The third is that young people who go into the sciences tend to end up becoming Democrats, due to factors inherent in the practice of science or to peer-group identification with other scientists.

I’d like to advance a fourth hypothesis: the same psychological proclivities that predispose individuals towards conservatism and the Republican party are the same psychological proclivities that predispose those individuals to not have a strong interest in science.

Contrary to the popular view that political attitudes and ideological commitments are the product of environmental factors, such as family upbringing, socio-economic conditions, or rational reflection, in fact it’s psychology that plays a dominant role in influencing an individual’s political leanings. And career choices.

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