Moral reasoning is hard. It’s so hard, in fact, that most people do little moral reasoning. Instead, as Daniel Kahneman would expect, they perform a mental substitution. Rather than wonder, “What’s morally right?,” they ask, “What’s socially acceptable?” In decent societies, this seems fairly harmless. When your society is even selectively evil, however, the substitution is disastrous. Strictly following standard social norms in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China is murder. Which brings us to a pressing question: How do you know whether your society is evil?
Tag: science
Anarchist Colonization of Mars
I was on a recent episode of the Anarchy Bang podcast with the topic being Anarchist Colonization of Mars. Here are the pieces that I wrote for the intro and the editorial for this episode.
Instead of Explaining Greta Thunberg, Debate Her Claims
Critics slam Thunberg as everything from “mentally ill” (a claim which got one Fox News guest blacklisted), to naive pawn in a well-funded propaganda operation, to just plain annoying teenager. I think those critics miss the point. If they disagree on the facts, they should dispute those facts rather than focus on Thunberg at all. But since the focus IS on her, let’s take a closer look.
Carl Watner: For Conscience’s Sake (31m)
This episode features an audio essay written by historian and voluntaryist Carl Watner in 1992, which comprises Chapter 9 of Everything Voluntary: From Politics to Parenting, edited by Skyler J. Collins and published in 2012. He explores the voluntaryist roots of religious freedom.
Mismeasurement
Science is fine, but logic is better. Ayn Rand often challenged, “check your premises!” (And if one automatically tunes out whenever the name, Ayn Rand, is mentioned, one needs to check one’s premises.) A bad premise should, logically, go into the round file, because you cannot do science on the absurd. Garbage in, garbage out.
Co-Working Meets Co-Learning
Workspace helps to cultivate personal and professional opportunities for parents, while supporting their children.
Seek Not to Be Understood
If you make your life an interesting life, the confluence of events, the collision of unforeseen consequences, will make it an unique life — a life that will not fit in an academician’s box, a life that will not constrain you to climb into a box.
Science + Politics = Crap
I like to listen to scientific lectures. Unfortunately, it’s becoming rare to be able to listen to an entire lecture without hearing an awkward jab at the anti-science mindset of the Republican Party. I don’t disagree, but it’s still the pot calling the kettle “black”.
Science “Knows” Nothing
The object of the process is to make educated guesses toward future probabilities, and that those educated guesses will still, in an ongoing fashion, be the subject of splitting and clumping. A knowledge set produced by science is a transitory thing — a mass that is soon to be split and re-clumped.
UBI: Some Early Experiments
The Universal Basic Income is only a tangential interest of mine. Yet when I’ve debated it, I’ve been consistently impressed by how little the eager advocates try to teach me.* Case in point: I learned more from reading three paragraphs in Kevin Lang’s Poverty and Discrimination than in my typical conversation with a UBI enthusiast.