Philosophy

2022 - 8 - 22

Post cover
Image courtesy of "The Times of Israel"

New book encourages adults to nurture the little philosophers in ... (The Times of Israel)

Writing with a good dose of humor about his own two sons, University of Michigan professor Scott Hershowitz explains why we should always take kids' ...

Many of the problems that we face are hard, and I think it is worth encouraging kids who are already inclined to want to think deeply to hold onto that as an activity that they engage in and show them that it is valued. I suspect that kids everywhere are trying to make sense of gender — of why people dress differently and have different roles in the world. They are not as confused about the world as little kids are, and I think a lot of the philosophical questions come from this confusion. A lot of philosophers and lawyers are Jews, at least in the US. Rex got me to see that though I think that for real God is pretend, there is some value in pretending that God is real in that it enriches my life in a variety of ways. You’d rather not have them draw their conclusions from what they hear in the playground or pick up on their own, so that’s a place where I have raised conversations rather than wait for them to raise questions. Every kid who says, “You’re not the boss of me,” or wonders why their parents get to make decisions and they don’t, is a kid with a philosophical question. The first is I think we need more people in the world who think deeply and carefully about the problems that we face, especially as we live in a world dominated by soundbites and social media. I also want to help adults recapture the sense of wonder they had as kids, and that willingness to ask hard questions and think deeply about them,” he said. “I wanted to convey that philosophy is not this thing that is over with, that was in the past and done by famous people who were mainly old white guys. I wanted to convey that philosophy is this living activity and that there are maybe more philosophers in the world now than there ever were. For example, an account about the unintended results of giving toddler-age Rex a time-out as punishment for screaming in his high chair has segued into a serious conversation with students about what society is trying to accomplish by punishing adults.

Post cover
Image courtesy of "Eco-Business"

'Rosewood' explores China's philosophy of ecological protection as ... (Eco-Business)

China wants to allow sustainable cultivation of threatened species, in contrast to the Western model of banning trade, explains Annah Lake Zhu in this ...

As this relates to rosewood conservation, she observes that “rather than exaggerating the scarcity of the wood through trade restrictions and logging prohibitions, conservation policies might be more effective in focusing on reforestation and other sustainable forestry activities.” Rosewood from Madagascar, she notes, “was worth next to nothing in China in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was valued at US$60,000 per ton by 2013”. It is also a call for dialogue towards what Zhu dubs a “global environmentalism of the twenty-first century”. She believes the global community should emulate China’s approach, in which the establishment of rosewood plantations offers an alternative to help preserve species and meet future demand. Instead, perhaps the solution lies in bringing Chinese conservation approaches into the governance of rosewood plantations, writes Zhu. (Plantations exist in southern China and Madagascar, and China has exported the model to Cambodia and Laos too, she shows us.) According to Zhu, the demand for rosewood is closely linked to the historical and cultural renaissance China is undergoing. For instance, in West Africa, felling rosewood can dry out forests and leave them vulnerable to fires and desertification. Sought after in China for crafting into antique-style furniture and contemporary art, rosewood is the world’s most trafficked group of endangered species by value. It also, Zhu writes, “invariably channels Western anxieties about the growing economic and geopolitical power of Asia.” “Its ups and downs – its original grandeur, momentary devaluation, and contemporary revitalisation – mirror those of the country writ large.” In other words, should it preserve the remaining individuals of endangered species or try to replenish them by rearing or planting afresh on a large scale?

Post cover
Image courtesy of "The Intercept - First Look Media"

Seven Philosophies Better Than Longtermism (The Intercept - First Look Media)

There's literally no belief system humans won't adopt in order to avoid dealing with the obvious problems right in front of them.

(The most painful irony is that such an AI wouldn’t even produce paper to clip together.) But we must accept that there’s a chance making paper clips actually is the highest value in the universe, and therefore we should build such an AI and see what happens. Certainly we know there’s literally no belief system humans won’t adopt in order to avoid dealing with the obvious problems right in front of them. [Paperclip Maximizer](https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html), an AI that concludes that the highest value in the universe is creating paper clips. There’s also a chance that the greatest joy available in the universe is mental masturbation. The danger of artificial intelligence is not just that it could be actively hostile toward us; it could destroy us even if it were simply indifferent. Conversely, imagine there’s a 1 in a quadrillion chance that there’s an intelligent alien species out there with the potential to breed a quintillion times more prodigiously than us. I know that if I were an adolescent in another dimension who’d bought The Sims: Milky Way with my allowance, I’d wait a little bit to see if humanity comes up with something that entertaining again. On the other hand, the entire edifice of longtermism is built on a foundation that is largely arbitrary and highly disputable, and with other starting points, you can derive pretty much any philosophy you want. If so, it is also possible that our creator will get bored with us and shut our simulation down. But this is the price of seeing the world clearly. However, I have read two articles and almost a dozen tweets about it, and so am qualified to have an opinion on the internet. In any case, no one can deny that this kind of thought experiment is fun, especially if you’re super high.

Post cover
Image courtesy of "Daily Nous"

New Data about Philosophy Graduate Programs (guest post) | Daily ... (Daily Nous)

In the following guest post, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, associate professor of philosophy at UC Merced, shares some new data about graduate programs in ...

If we look at the first-listed areas of specialization for those 2012-2021 graduates in permanent academic employment, only three areas are at least one standard deviation above the mean permanent academic placement rate for all AOS’s: Comparative (9 graduates; 89%), Asian (38 graduates; 68%), and American (including Latin American: 31 graduates; 52%). Technology, for instance, has the highest slope but only three years worth of data (.36, 1.19, and 1.64 for 2018, 2019, and 2020), whereas Decision Theory has the lowest slope but only two years worth (1.15 in 2016 and 0.64 in 2019). Because most graduates (around 90%) prefer academic employment, and because permanent academic employment is preferred over temporary employment, this metric is the standard for our project as a measure of successful placement. The [table](https://prezi.com/i/xlzuqydltzt6/philosophy-phd-program-data-2022/) on the homepage of [APDA’s website](https://philosophydata.org/) is intended to provide just that. In this case graduates are split into three groups depending on the permanent academic placement rate of their PhD program, with those in programs of the highest placement rates in Group 1, middle rates in Group 2, and lowest rates in Group 3. That is, whereas the permanent academic placement rate does drop for more recent graduates, this is largely because it takes time for most graduates to find this type of position—recent graduates have had less time, and so are less likely to have a permanent academic placement. clusters, based on some measure of similarity between the variables that characterize them (James, Witten, Hastie, & Tibshirani 2013, 10.3). (Below, “*” is used to indicate programs that show up on both lists.) Permanent academic placement rate just means the proportion of graduates whose most recent employment is in a permanent academic job. [for years now](https://www.newappsblog.com/2014/07/an-ideal-ranking.html) and have come to the conclusion that it is more useful to have sortable lists based on different criteria. Its blog, which has been running since 2017, has had tens of thousands of visitors, and its most popular post is [Best PhD Programs in Philosophy](https://apda.ghost.io/top-philosophy-programs/). This is an update to that post, based on this year’s [data collection efforts](https://apda.ghost.io/2022-data-collection-results/).

Explore the last week