Penetrate the hoo-ha and self-aggrandising bluster about attributions of what, or who, caused the Arab Spring, and there might actually be some truth to the notion that social media, and Twitter in particular, were pivotal to sparking the revolutions that have punctuated the Middle East and North Africa. This is Read more…
I call it “pulling a Cameron,” in reference not to the present British Prime Minister, but to the broadcaster Deborah Cameron who handles the morning slot on Sydney’s ABC Radio 702.
A common refrain a few minutes in to her maddeningly predictable morning routine of following the happenings of the first several pages of the Sydney Morning Herald is to enquire of some expert or other: “what are we doing to prevent X from ever happening again?”
And by “X” I mean whatever undesirable event has appeared on the front pages, whether that’s a case of callous bullying in our schools, a death by accident or some other unsavoury turn of events.
One recent example was the tragic death of a young university student at a rural college after being thrown from an ex-racing horse that was being used to train horse riding skills. The horse was deemed safe for students yet it possessed a fierce distemper that flared on that day, throwing the student
The question posed by Cameron, seemingly predictable and justifiable in the circumstances, was along the lines of: “what are we doing to prevent more deaths of students during riding training?”
The presumption is that the outcome is unacceptable so, clearly, our current process that led to this outcome must be deficient.
Yet that’s a presumption that is unfortunately as fallacious as it is common.
For we chase outcomes on an ad hoc basis at the risk of employing processes that undermine our very intentions to produce better outcomes. In short: we focus myopically on each good or bad outcome at the danger of forgetting that it’s good processes that are of primary importance.
And even a good process – nay, the optimal process – can result in bad outcomes from time to time.
One of the privileges of being a philosopher is you can create new terms, define them how you please, and damn be to any conventions that would have the term used otherwise. So, I’ve created a few new terms – well, at lease one is new. Here they are, in Read more…
There’s every possibility that I’ve missed something utterly obvious, but I’ve been reading up on the fickle nature of cooperation for my thesis, and I’ve found what appears to be a gaping hole in the literature. There are countless studies that explore the challenges of encouraging cooperation – primarily via Read more…
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.
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?
It seems my previous post may have been made in haste. After reading this enlightening post on Zunguzungu about Julian Assange’s philosophy, it’s now clear that his intention isn’t just to provide a medium by which whistleblowers can expose individual cases of wrongdoing, he’s instead attempting to alter the communication Read more…
I’ve posted a new static page with an outline of my PhD thesis on evolution and moral ecology. If you’re interested in my overarching theory, it’s worth reading. Hopefully it’ll put a lot of the other missives I write in context. Although I don’t doubt it’ll also raise a lot Read more…
Where you can find contemporary moral philosophers talking about the content of morality (instead of their preferred pastime of quibbling over metaethics), you’ll often find them talking about issues concerning harm and fairness. But is this all there is to morality? What of moral prohibitions concerning food, or cleansing rituals, or burial practices? Can you just translate such norms into norms about harm and fairness? Or is the domain of morality larger than many philosophers might readily suggest?
This was one of the questions broached by ANU’s Ben Fraser in a seminar at Sydney University yesterday. Fraser’s paper was about the limits of the moral domain, specifically defending Richard Joyce’s account of morality from criticisms mounted by Stephen Stich. I won’t cover everything said by Fraser (you can read his entire paper here), but I am particularly interested in what it is that we’re really talking about when we’re talking about morality.
And I tend to believe that defining morality in terms of harm/fairness exclusively is a bit narrow – but understandable. Even so, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to issues of harm/fairness if we want to understand the full scope of morality and moral phenomena.
Does a commitment to normative value pluralism logically entail a commitment to liberalism? Isaiah Berlin is a known proponent of both pluralism and liberalism, and at times he’s appeared to suggest there is a logical connection between the two – although at other times he suggests the connection is only Read more…