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Liam Bright Profile picture
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21 Sep, 4 tweets, 2 min read
This from @jehsmith was very interesting! I don't agree with him re where we should be going, but I do think he's responding honestly to something that most humanists wont squarely face up to. We don't have a clear purpose if not as elite taste makers...

justinehsmith.substack.com/p/covid-is-bor…
...I do share Smith's worries about purportedly left-liberal intelligentsia credulously rallying around massive expansions of state surveillance. I agree it seems to be thoughtless extension of habitual culture war stances. I wrote a bit about it here...

nature.com/articles/s4159…
... But, despite some Herderian sympathies myself, I don't really share the kinda romantic sensibility he evinces. I've something of the gradgrind within me too, if I am honest with myself. But it's not like I am optimistic about my own style either! ...
sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-en…
... what I think is clear though is that in general there has been a rout of high culture, that this rout has left much of the humanities without its corresponding social or cultural role, and even where we have found institutional niches we still have not regained purpose.

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More from @lastpositivist

Liam Bright Profile picture
22 Sep
So this document (urban.org/urban-wire/equ…) is causing a bit of a fuss. The first pic is the controversial claims they make about research methodology, and the next three pics are the remedies they propose for their issues. My thoughts thereon in a thread... ImageImageImageImage
... I'm struck by three things here. First, the objections to objectivity and rigour just elide the difference between taken-for and actual objectivity/rigour. So it is a bit hard to tell which is being objected to, and how plausible the claims are depends a lot on that...
... To illustrate, the claim that objective inquiry can never challenge established belief systems is just *intensely* implausible if by that it is meant any moderately disinterested researcher using intersubjectively checkable methods will always affirm majority belief...
Read 9 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
27 Aug
Ok so I now have the following picture of how race came to be: the European intelligentsia of the 15th-16th centuries were absorbed in a series of distinct but overlapping debates: how the hell are there people in the Americas and does this mean there were multiple creations?…
…Why is it that, in general, people differ in custom and appearance in various parts of the world? Are the people of the new world all Aristotlean natural slaves? If not them, how about Africans? Where are the boundaries of the human, how different are great apes from us?…
…Piety dictated there can have been no separate creation since we’re all children of Adam and Eve, humanity is sharply distinguished by presence of a rational soul with physiological differences irrelevant, and everyone must be converted and Christians should not be slaves…
Read 10 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
7 Jun
I've genuinely worked hard today, I deserve a reward. Gonna break out the big guns, time to watch James Lindsay discuss Kant and Hegel.
So what's up with the alchemy thing?
Just had Lindsay saying Hegel's dialectical engine is Thesis-Anthesis-Synthesis (which Hegel nerds will deny but he's right about) and O'Fallon draws out the conclusion from this that our ethnicities prevent us from learning absolute truth. Lindsay corrects him tho!
Read 9 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
29 Apr
Hannah Rubin with fascinating new paper on how the structure of professional networks can cause citation gaps (e.g. women's work less cited than men's). She also shows how a runaway Matthew effect could be worsened by abolishing peer review. Check it out!

philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18947/1/Citati…
@CT_Bergstrom and @KevinZollman and @Helenreflects may be interesting to yinz.
For the record I agree with Hannah completely. @RemcoHeesen and I said runaway Matthew effect was speculative but if borne out compensatory institutional mechanisms should be designed. Hannah agrees on both fronts, and her contribution is proposing a mechanism. It's great stuff!
Read 4 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
17 Apr
I guess the reason I find moderate centrism irritating is I think a fair look at the evidence suggests the status quo is a wasteful death cult with all industry and culture serving at the behest of a tiny global elite whose status basically requires callous indifference from them
Of course it's far from obvious what to do next, and maybe even the best we can do is working-from-within incremental reforms away from here. I don't think the latter is true and I have opinions on the former. But I find the Sensible Set disdainful sneer at radicals infuriating.
Given the scale of the problems and the potential for improvement, the sheer amount of misery we could alleviate through better organisation, sneering at radicals just strikes me as what one does if one is either thoughtless or a base propagandist with no integrity whatsoever.
Read 4 tweets
Liam Bright Profile picture
17 Apr
I think the Voyager episode "One Small Step" is an excellent piece of Star Trek world building. It's basically about humanity's first encounter with a negative space wedgie, and also Seven of Nine coming to appreciate the too-science-to-live ethos of the Federation...
... (where science is always understood on the, like, Doc Brown mad scientist model, it basically consists of approaching negative space wedgies and poking them to see what happens) ....
... in Star Trek canon, but not irl, these are genuinely significant features of the universe and the human spirit respectively, and so it feels like an episode fleshing out its own world for its own sake, not just using the setting as a means of exploring real world issues...
Read 4 tweets

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