Biology Aware is finished. Now for something different 14 May 202414 May 2024 So I finished presenting the book Aware on my substack, which will now ferment in my bottom drawer (metaphorically) until it ripens. While that is happening I am preparing to edit some nineteenth century sources for discussions of classification, taxonomy, species, higher and lower taxa, and many other subjects. Does… Read More
Administrative Are you a HPS scholar? 30 Apr 2011 If so I invite you to join our group blog Whewell’s Ghost, even if you already blog. You can either write for WG directly or repost some or all of your blog’s posts with alink back to your home blog, thereby increasing your readership. Contact me or the other WG… Read More
Biology Henry Gee’s book “The Accidental Species” 9 Oct 20139 Oct 2013 I have three rules in life. One is, Never get into a land war in Asia. The second is, Locate the nearest exit. The third and most important is: When Henry Gee writes something, believe it. I first encountered Henry through his book In Search of Deep Time, which covered… Read More
This one was brilliant, as usual, but it mostly made me sad, since the pervasiveness of this attitude — far beyond economists — seems to be one of the main things fucking up our society right now.
It is a triumph of a particular kind of utilitarianism, where utility functions are specified in terms of returns on a fictive property. Apropos of nothing, did you see that recent paper in which utilitarians score high on sociopathy measures?
Don’t you find it slightly bizarre that 2 philosophers both named John (Jon) Wilkins are having this conversation across the world about a web comic that the majority of the worlds population knows nothing about?
It was obvious from the beginning of neuro “trolleism” that psychopaths would be included in the group of people deciding to kill the fat man on the bridge. Psychopaths have emotional deficits that impair their empathy, so they would not suffer an emotional block deciding to sacrifice the lesser number for the sake of the majority. It doesn’t imply IMHO that all utilitarians are to some extent proto-psycopaths. On the other hand, defending a supposed superiority of utilitarianism because the “trolley-utilitarians” suffer a greater activation of the “rational” parts of the brain is bullshit. What is usually called a “rational person” wouldn’t be so without a certain balance between strictly rational or cognitive or “cognitive” capacities and emotional ones.
I’m puzzled at the choice proposed as if there were really only two outcomes possible. Natural scenarios are never that simplistic. Maybe economists are particularly used to simplistic scenarios.
The neoliberal economic schools these days start off with an assumption that humans are economically rational. That’s simplistic enough for me.
Chimps are economic rationalists (in the game theoretic sense of being rational egoists with no tendency to eusociality): Humans are not. We do have that eusocial bias. Moreover, economic rationalists presume that we are, well, rational, which ten minutes reading the business news should dispel. Finally, they presume we are given full information, or some approximation of that, when information is partial, unreliable, and lags for large parts of the market. It is a wonder that markets do as well as they do. The real problem with economics seems to me the a priori view that markets will optimise: rather like a biologist presuming that ecologies will stabilise on the most effective distribution of resources. Like Russell’s prisoner, they are then completely surprised when the ecosystem collapses.