procrastinating

I need a concrete task.

symbolic gestures and moral absolutism

always insightful:

Amazingly, when you consider that this conflict regularly takes the lives of hundreds of people, it was the gesture that counted. It was the fact that one side showed willingness to even budge on matters of principle that prompted the other to do the same. It just goes to show that when people promote their ideas to the rank of beliefs, they risk losing the ability to view those issues rationally.

I don't know if I like the wording of the last point, however. Maybe I'm reading too much into "risk", but it's not necessarily a pitfall of moral reasoning that it resist a utility calculus. In fact, insofar as we admit that these "beliefs" of the moral absolutists are epistemically distinct from the "facts" of the pragmatic non-absolutists, we also imply that there are cognitive reasons to keep them distinct. The gesture, after all, is what makes possible the value of facts; and so, while rationality informs us, by utility calculus, what is useful, moral reasoning and beliefs are the means by which we select the very goal of that utility.

To put it circularly: we shouldn't be surprised that moral absolutists are enraged by tangible bribery, just as we don't expect moralist to fight against materialism. It is a rational domain that is, in some sense, defending itself. Though I think we could also give some sort of materialist, pop-evolutionary account of why moral reasoning is useful for the material survival of a social species.

The most interesting thing I've read all week.

Mobbing and the Virginia Tech Massacre

This analogy brought it all together:

It was only after Cho committed his murders that observers
discerned in him a murderous personal identity. This is like calling a
substance dynamite after it explodes. If it could not be recognized as dynamite earlier, it may well have been something else, maybe a benign substance like garden fertilizer, sawdust, or ripening fruit, that detonated under an unusual combination of specific conditions.

Especially after having a discussion over whether sociology should be considered a science, and whether the social sciences are led astray by mimic the scientific rigor of the hard sciences.

*Although I must say that the author's account uses a lot of very unprofessional language.  Since when did sociologists start using the term "going postal"?

(Which was a great conversation, btw. I've certainly had to rethink a few of my points, which is often the manner of my dreams following drunken discourse. I've also learned that, when I'm losing a conversation, attribute the opponent's position to something Keith might say.)

"smart" people believe in souls

Why is it that so many intellectuals don't believe that there can be pyschological harm? Do they think that our minds don't work under the same causal principles as the rest of the universe; that brains under-determine the mind? Do our top scientists really believe in anti-empirical and anti-scientific concepts such as immortal souls? Or, better, believe what they will - do we really want to be funding people who think they know about these immortal souls?

What is this talk about souls? Isn't this exactly what the anti-PC movement is doing? Psychological research in the 60s and 70s showed that there are strong correlations between language, self perception, mental health, and bodily health. It's perhaps unfortunate that this arose in the time of post-modern hoopla. But they were at least effective in attempting to integrate this information into other fields. If I can identify an empirical correlation, is that any less useful than a correlation between fists and bruising? (Well, of course it is! But smart people should understand how to think about and draw generalizations from different standards of statistical significance!)