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15321.34962
In this paper, we present an agent-based model for studying the impact of ‘myside bias’ on the argumentative dynamics in scientific communities. Recent insights in cognitive science suggest that scientific reasoning is influenced by ‘myside bias’. This bias manifests as a tendency to prioritize the search and generation of arguments that support one’s views rather than arguments that undermine them. Additionally, individuals tend to apply more critical scrutiny to opposing stances than to their own. Although myside bias may pull individual scientists away from the truth, its effects on communities of reasoners remain unclear. The aim of our model is two-fold: first, to study the argumentative dynamics generated by myside bias, and second, to explore which mechanisms may act as a mitigating factor against its pernicious effects. Our results indicate that biased communities are epistemically less successful than non-biased ones, and that they also tend to be less polarized than non-biased ones. Moreover, we find that two socio-epistemic mechanisms help communities to mitigate the effect of the bias: the presence of a common filter on weak arguments, which can be interpreted as shared beliefs, and an equal distribution of agents for each alternative at the start of the scientific debate.
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29720.349757
Preliminary Note: As usual, the end of the year is hectic, and I’m spending quite some time preparing special content for this newsletter that should be ready for Christmas Eve. Posting should be light until then, and today’s post is more a digression from my usual topics than anything else. …
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182852.349773
The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato ’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world ’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition.
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188280.349803
This paper interrogates the concept of luck in cancer diagnosis. I argue that while it might have some utility for individuals, at the clinical and research level, the concept impedes important prevention efforts and misdirects sources of blame in a cancer diagnosis. Such use, in fact, has the possibility of harming already vulnerable efforts at ameliorating social determinants of health and should therefore be eliminated from research and clinical contexts.
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446902.349814
In 1979 Bob Dylan became a born again Christian, and worse, released three albums of songs about God. About this perceived betrayal, I was too young to have an opinion; it was part of a lore I learned much later. …
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477100.349823
Is stand-up comedy akin to psychotherapy? Yes, argues psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir in Animal Joy:
As part of my research … I had frequented comedy clubs and noticed how each performance, had it been delivered in a different tone of voice and context, could have been the text of a therapy session. …
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548914.349833
The standard way of thinking about ethics distinguishes axiological questions (about value) from deontic ones (about right action). On this way of carving things up, it’s the deontic question that’s central to ethical debates—after all, a non-consequentialist could agree with a consequentialist about which action results in the best outcome, yet disagree about which action is right. …
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632568.349842
Many moral theories hold individuals responsible for their marginal impact on massive patterns (for instance overall value or equality of opportunity) or for following whichever rules would realise that pattern on the whole. But each of these injunctions is problematic. Intuitively, the first gives individuals responsibility for too much, and the second gives them responsibility for too little. I offer the outlines of a new approach to ethics in collective action contexts. I defend a new collaborative principle that assigns recognisably worthwhile responsibilities to agencies wherever possible. This principle supports a fractal model of moral responsibility, one that favours restructuring divisions of labour in ways that enhance the prospects of recognition at every resolution of social organisation. This essay is programmatic: starting from a conjecture about the moral significance of recognition, it sketches a new way of approaching a range of collective action problems that combines the importance of the perspectives of both moral and political philosophy.
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681403.349856
Living systems are complex systems made of components that tend to degrade, but nonetheless they maintain themselves far from equilibrium. This requires living systems to extract energy and materials from the environment and use them to build and repair their parts by regulating their activities based on their internal and external conditions in ways that allow them to keep living. The philosophical and theoretical approach discussed in this Element aims to explain these features of biological systems by appealing to their organization. It addresses classical and more recent issues in philosophy of biology, from origins and definitions of life to biological teleology and functions, from an original perspective mainly focused on the living system, its physiology and behavior, rather than evolution. It discusses and revises the conceptual foundations of this approach and presents an updated version of it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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707941.349877
How do social factors affect group learning in diverse populations? Evidence from cognitive science gives us some insight into this question, but is generally limited to showing how social factors play out in small groups over short time periods. To study larger groups and longer time periods, we argue that we can combine evidence about social factors from cognitive science with agent-based models of group learning. In this vein, we demonstrate the usefulness of idealized models of inquiry, in which the assumption of Bayesian agents is used to isolate and explore the impact of social factors. We show that whether a certain social factor is beneficial to the community’s epistemic aims depends on its particular manifestation by focusing on the impacts of homophily – the tendency of individuals to associate with similar others – on group inquiry.
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707967.34989
Concerns over medical paternalism are especially salient when there exists a conflict of values between patient and clinician. This is particularly relevant for psychiatry, the field of medicine for which the phenomenon of conflicting values is most present and for which the specter of medical paternalism looms large. Few cases are as glaring as that of anorexia nervosa (AN), a disorder that is considered to be egosyntonic (meaning its symptoms are reflectively endorsed by the patient) and maintained by the presence of pathological values. One might think, given this, that an approach to medicine that foregrounds the role of values in clinical encounters would be particularly well suited to address the problem of medical paternalism in treating AN. As it happens, this is precisely the goal of values-based medicine, an approach to medicine that prioritizes the integration of patients’ unique values into the aims of treatment and that has been touted as being particularly applicable to psychiatric conditions such as AN.
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733390.349903
My colleague and co-author Alexandre Chirat published with Basile Clerc an op-ed in Le Monde a few days ago defending the use of non-linear pricing as an efficient and fair way to reallocate resources in the fight against climate change (in French). …
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765837.349913
Scienti c collaboration is taking place with increasing frequency, at least since the Manhattan project. Globalization and rapid advancement in communication technologies have made easier national and international inquiry across di erent scienti c disciplines. Boyer-Kassem, Mayo-Wilson, and Weisberg have collected eleven chapters that address conceptual and normative issues about collaborative research and ensuing collective knowledge in the sciences. These issues are clustered around four core topics, each forming one part of the book: (i) information sharing among scientists, (ii) the reasons and strategies for (fruitful) collaboration, (iii) challenges, in terms of accountability, to the ordinary notions of authorship and refereeing, and (iv) the relationship between individual and group opinions in social decision-making problems. Most of the authors employ formal tools (mathematical models, computer simulations) to discuss and analyse di erent aspects of the dynamics of scienti c communities and collaborative research. Here, I focus on the notable contributions of each chapter.
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801372.349926
PEA Soup Blog is pleased to be hosting this Ethics discussion with Lowry Pressly (University of Stanford) and Wendy Salkin (University of Stanford). This discussion focuses on Pressly’s paper “The Right to Be Forgotten and the Value of an Open Future”, with a critical précis from Wendy Salkin. …
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1010593.349938
Someone who worked here once said...that I was not interested in a story unless it contained a first-semester philosophy question. There is definitely some truth to that. (Errol Morris, in an interview.) …
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1054422.349947
In Chapters 1—4 and 7, Guala clari es and defends his favoured approach to social institutions. The concepts at the centre of his approach are drawn from game theory: individual preferences and motivations, individuals’ expectations, and game-theoretic equilibrium. Students and non-experts will bene t from Guala’s careful and clear exposition. And they will also welcome his sustained use throughout the book of three stylized examples: the institutions of property, of money, and of marriage. Experts, in contrast, will already be very familiar with game-theoretic approaches such as Guala’s. Nevertheless, many will value the sharpness with which Guala characterizes his account, carefully spelling out how concepts such as ‘rule’ can be rigorously de ned and analysed using more basic game-theoretic concepts.
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1054602.349959
Experimental biology has witnessed an industrial revolution. Increases in computational power and investment from private industry, as well as the development of sequencing techniques, has enabled the emergence of high-throughput biology on a factory scale. ‘Big data’ has arrived. And undoubtedly it has changed the face of biology. But what’s interesting about big data philosophically, and how is a philosophical perspective illuminative of it? Here’s a tempting thought: big data matters because it pursues data for its own sake. Investigation doesn’t aim to formulate and test hypotheses. Instead, studies are data-driven—Baconian—we generate masses of data, then hunt for meaningful patterns. Big-data science is data-driven science: theory takes a back seat, and the experimental generation of data takes on a ‘life of its own’.
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1088669.349971
Intro Ethics
This fall, I’ve been teaching Intro Ethics for the first time in years. It’s a strange assignment, as though the students were previously feral and my task was to begin their moral education, age 18 to 22. …
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1112505.34998
Working together creates mutual obligations. For example, the members of a football team owe it to each other to work hard for the good of the team. A player who doesn’t try hard enough, or who makes a costly mistake, lets the side down. When the team loses, feelings of responsibility, guilt, and shame ensue. Players ought to feel committed to the team and responsible for its failures. If they don’t, they deserve to be dropped. The idea at the heart of Michael Tomasello’s ‘natural history’ of human morality is that these oughts—the oughts of teamwork—were the rst oughts. The lives of our Palaeolithic ancestors revolved around collaboration: initially in pairs, then in teams, and, nally, in large, ‘tribal’ groups. E ective social foraging, be it hunting or gathering, relied on agents forming and executing joint intentions. Tomasello hypothesizes that the basic architecture of human moral psychology—holding ourselves responsible for our actions, feeling that we owe things to others, and that others owe things to us—evolved to make us better collaborators.
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1112631.349992
In Making Medical Knowledge, Miriam Solomon describes a variety of epistemological approaches, or ‘methods’, employed by medical researchers and practitioners. In particular, there is a detailed discussion of consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine. The book ends with a case study of the recent controversy over whether screening mammography leads to a reduction in breast cancer mortality. An important thesis of the book is that such a controversy is best explained by acknowledging that medical researchers rely upon a plurality of methods, and that sometimes these methods give con icting results. In other words, in medicine there is ‘a developing, untidy, methodological pluralism’ (p. 208).
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1165967.350012
Daniel Klein recently published on Bryan Caplan’s Substack an essay on “popuphobia.” A popuphobe is someone who “propagates revilement of something that he or she calls populism.” Klein’s main argument is that popuphobia is unjustified from a classical liberal perspective because populism is “not necessarily bad.” He takes Argentine’s president Javier Milei as his main example to make his point. …
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1169026.350022
A common claim in the philosophy of technology is that technologies can alter social values. That is to say, technologies can change both how we perceive and understand values, and the way in which we prioritise and pursue them. …
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1285793.350041
I cannot remember the last time I read a book of philosophy that taught me something new and also took me on such a journey of images and sounds—a powerful reminder that, yes, rigorous philosophical ideas can be expressed in many forms, including excellent prose. Justin Garson’s Madness reads like a novel but instructs like an encyclopaedia. I revelled in an engaging narrative lled with suspense and cli -hangers, where I challenged myself to anticipate the next twist: will my favourite philosopher be a strategist or a dysfunctionalist about madness? This was a journey of self-transformation and, as such, it was an often uncomfortable read: I have always thought of myself as someone who accepts a largely medicalized view of madness but is vocal about madness having meaning and purpose. While reading the book and for a long time afterwards, however, I became seriously concerned that I could not be both; that I had to choose. Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion that we can see madness as purposeful in a medical framework, although Garson may disagree.
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1285819.350053
The theory of evolution by natural selection is likely the most revolutionary idea in the history of science. Arguably, Darwin’s original thesis, and its ne tuning by evolutionary biologists since, has done more to transform mankind’s understanding of our place in the world than any philosophical theory.
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1373513.350065
There is a philosophical puzzle about blaming people for their attitudes that arises because we lack direct voluntary control over our attitudes. The fact that we lack direct voluntary control over our attitudes suggests that we are not responsible for them. Defenders of blaming people for their beliefs have appealed to various senses in which we are responsible for our beliefs, despite our lacking direct voluntary control over them. In this paper, I pursue a different strategy. I argue that it is something fitting to be ashamed of your beliefs, or, to put this another way, that it is sometimes fitting to feel shame for believing something. I articulate an account of shamefulness, on which the shameful is a species of legitimate expectation violation. By contrast with blameworthiness, shamefulness does not entail responsibility. For this reason, the fittingness of shame for beliefs (i.e. doxastic shame), unlike the fittingness of blame for beliefs (i.e. doxastic blame), is orthogonal to questions of responsibility. Independent of whether we are responsible for our beliefs, doxastic shame can be fitting.
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1399340.350075
Six months ago, I’m not sure that I’d ever heard of demographer Lyman Stone. Now, people in my circles randomly drop his name on a weekly basis. His favorite topic, in case you haven’t heard, is global fertility decline. …
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1401428.350085
Chimpanzees might have social structures, elephants burial rituals, and prairie dogs communication systems, but it is undeniable that these do not come close to analogous phenomena in humans. What is it that makes us so unique? Which traits enabled humans to develop such intricate life form? The Normative Animal? seeks to explore an answer to this question that could subsume properties often considered unique to humans, such as rationality, morality, sociality and language, under one fundamental structural property: normativity. The book is a culmination of a years-long e ort by a group of scholars from various disciplines—including philosophy, anthropology, behavioural biology, psychology, and linguistics—all of whom are committed to interdisciplinary interaction and the belief that to understand norms, it is necessary to undertake both conceptual and empirical work. Their annual meetings contributed to the formation of the normative animal thesis, whose likelihood the contributors to the volume aim to assess.
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1405445.350097
A while back, I interviewed the philosopher Jessica Flanigan about her views on teaching and research. The interview was part of my series on the ethics of academia. In the midst of that interview, I asked her a question that I asked many of my guests: do you really believe in the ideas/arguments you develop in your research? …
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1508600.350108
Consider the two following propositions:
(1) Persons must live by the principles, values, and rules of way of life X. (2) It is wrong to impose on persons any way of life X, Y, Z…
Obviously, propositions (1) and (2) are mutually exclusive – one contradicts the other. …
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1510664.350117
Financial economics has been steadily maturing as a subfield of economics for many decades now. Finance scholars have received some of the most prestigious research awards in economics, and the key finance journals belong to the most respected outlets in economics as a whole. Financial economics is also a research field that is—there can be no doubt—of enormous practical importance and consequence. Its models and theories inform actors on financial markets, in financial regulation, and in central banking.