Don't Know the Half of It

Despite its collective efforts, the scientific community knows a lot less about how the world works than I usually give it credit for.

Curious, Thorough, and Open

I should spend more time in Critical Thinking class on cultivating an intellectually honest mindset, specifically the virtues of curiosity and thoroughness, not just open-mindedness. (chapter 2 - Mindset - of Reason Better by David Manley)

Counting Cancels

Based on the testimony of a relevant expert (FIRE's Greg Lukianoff) who documented a noticeable uptick in campus-related incidents related to free speech starting roughly 5 years ago, arguments that "cancel culture doesn't exist" are probably less plausible than I thought.

Bayes As Odds

 An intuitive way to understand Bayesian updating is via odds instead of probabilities or percentages. (chapter 8 - Updating - of Reason Better by David Manley)

Polarized By Ambiguity

Group polarization may be less puzzling than I often treat it, since it's usually a natural result of topics in which we mostly only have ambiguous evidence.

Map Ain't Territory Reminder

Scientific models like causal DAGs are probably much cruder instruments for understanding real-life complex phenomena than I have been hoping recently.

Science is 'Kaleidoscopic'

Science is collaborative in a variety of ways: many individuals working on the same or related problems, and those individuals employing several distinct methodologies to attack those problem clusters.

Scaffolding

One way to address my worry that philosophy classes inadvertently teach students that reasoning skills are useless is to better scaffold courses, beginning with puzzles that are clearly solvable using reasoning.

Keeping Students in College

I've learned a lot about things that help retain college students this past year as a first-year advisor.

Paucity of Evidence for Causal Closure

The widely-held assumption of causal closure of the physical world may not have much evidence supporting it.

Natural Law's Broader Project

One way of understanding natural law is that its project is less about defining ‘law’ than about considering the legal system’s role within social, practical reasoning.

Fake-Data Simulation

Fake-data simulation is an extension of abductive reasoning, specifically exploring the implications of various competing hypotheses.

Indexicals & the Origins of Language

 A crucial step between one-dimensional communication that animals and computers can do and the "speech triangle" of human language may be utilizing indexicals, literally pointing to focus joint attention.

Contingent Racial Capitalism

 One way Marxists and critical race scholars may talk past each other is in conflating whether capitalism and racism are necessarily linked and whether they are merely actually, historically linked.

Deference and Meritocracy

I may need to figure out the tension in my thoughts on deference to experts and criticisms of meritocracy.

Guess Culturist

 I grew up in a Guess Culture, and am biased against members of Ask Culture.

How Hard Is Morality?

Being moral is not hard in the same way calculus or rock climbing is. It's maybe hard in the way dieting is, or, more apt, inconvenient in the way walking 10 miles instead of driving is.

Good Faith

At the start of disagreements it's important to establish good faith before almost anything else.

Anti-Staff Bias

 As a faculty member, I have inherited an anti-staff bias.

Focus on Disconfirmation

The confirmation/disconfirmation bias asymmetry is such that our criticisms of opposing arguments are more epistemically valuable than our own arguments for our positions.