Retributive punishment is punishment carried out because it is felt to be deserved, not because it rehabilitates, incapacitates or deters. In practice of course punishment is usually thought to have many purposes, and retribution will only be one. Many people argue though that a concern for retribution should -while being balanced against other concerns- play … Continue reading A thought experiment against retributive punishment in judicial contexts.
The egalitarian past (and future?) of politics
Let’s say that politics is the formation and use of coalitions for determining matters of social concern within a group. I was listening to a talk today about human evolution as a process of finding a cognitive niche by Andrew Whiten when he made two critically important points which, while I was aware of them … Continue reading The egalitarian past (and future?) of politics
Carving up the philosophical terrain around personal identity a little differently
Warning: I haven’t studied personal identity since a single undergraduate subject, so I’m guessing this distinction already exists in the literature and I just didn’t find it with a cursory search, I claim no originality for this, and if someone can find a source, let me know so I can give credit. Many people are … Continue reading Carving up the philosophical terrain around personal identity a little differently
Heading left: The stories of people who have moved from the political right to the left.
I asked in half a dozen left-wing sub-reddits for the stories of people who had moved from the right to the left and received well over one hundred responses, here is my synthesis on themes and patterns which emerged in the sample. Brief notes on method I don’t normally do qualitative research, I’m a quantitative … Continue reading Heading left: The stories of people who have moved from the political right to the left.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the origins of religion
Obsessive Compulsive Disoder (OCD) is well known to interact with pre-existing cultural and religious beliefs and practices. I was interested in coming at it from the other direction- is there evidence that culture, particularly religious culture, has been shaped by OCD? Although I can’t prove it absolutely, I believe I there is enough evidence to … Continue reading Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the origins of religion
Through-going subjective Bayesianism as a solution to the problem of scepticism
A common argument for the existence of God is that there is something rather than nothing. There are many good replies to this argument, but one of the more sophisticated challenges our sense that ‘nothing’ is the ordinary state of things and ‘something’ is an exception that needs explanation. There is an enormous, uncountably infinite … Continue reading Through-going subjective Bayesianism as a solution to the problem of scepticism
Contra the Lebowski Theorem
See: https://kottke.org/18/04/the-lebowski-theorem-of-machine-superintelligence The fundamental mistake behind this thinking is the premise that agents with goals seek to be in a position where they no longer have unfulfilled goals or where they have important fufilled goals. This isn’t true, rather agents with goals seek to fulfil their goals. The difference between these things is subtle, and … Continue reading Contra the Lebowski Theorem
Seeing Like a Communist
I read this: “I picked up Inventing The Future… because I feel bad that I’ve never been able to get my head around the communist paradigm. In the past, I’ve learned new paradigms by reading a lot of books from within that paradigm (and hating them) and debating people from within that paradigm (and thinking … Continue reading Seeing Like a Communist
What I wish Science-Fiction writers knew about disasters
Probably as many science-fiction books as not feature disasters, and most of those reproduce what are sometimes termed by experts ‘disaster myths’. I find a lot of speculative fiction frustrating because of how it treats the human response to disasters. It is the near unanimous view of science fiction that, during a disaster, humans become, … Continue reading What I wish Science-Fiction writers knew about disasters
A third option in the UBI/Job Guarantee debate- shortening the working week.
Both a Job Guarantee and UBI have been proposed as solutions to the perceived threat of a decline in demand for labour following increasing automation. We’ll take it as a given that the threat is real. While automation in the past has not reduced employment, we never faced the creation of machines progressively able to … Continue reading A third option in the UBI/Job Guarantee debate- shortening the working week.
DePonySum 