How a few days sailing in the Aegean changed my mind about the fundamental nature of things. A few years ago, my wife, Sarah, and I went on a sailing trip on the eastern Aegean. It was heaven: the two of us out at sea, charting a course between Greek islands and the coast of Turkey, taking turns helming the boat and dozing below, surrounded by all the glittering blue of the sea. As we hopped from port to port, I couldn’t help but notice that the names of many of the places we passed were familiar to me, as I had come across them in my work as a historian. Thirty or forty miles to the south of our boat was Miletus, the birthplace of some of the first recorded theorists of the physical world. Twenty miles to the east in Ephesus was the home of Heraclitus, the earliest person whose reflections on the interrelatedness of things have come down to us. Across a nearby peninsula, just 70 miles away, was Lesbos, the island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the greatest early lyric poets. To the south in Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras, an early theorist of an everlasting soul. … (New York Times)
Fake news as noxious markets? We’ve all heard of fake news. But what exactly are we talking about? Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) define fake news as articles that are “intentionally and verifiably false,” for instance the “news” in 2016 that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency. Despite somewhat natural disbelief that anyone could actually take such “news” seriously, plenty of people did. And, as a consequence, at least some of them were reinforced in their belief that voting for Trump was, in fact, a good idea. I mean if the Pope says it! Because fake news is, ahem, a real thing, the question obviously arises: What are we going to do about it? Many skeptics have argued that we need to teach critical thinking. In a complementary fashion, some philosophers have suggested that we should put more emphasis on “epistemic virtues,” i.e., on nurturing people’s respect for truth and the sort of behaviors that are truth-conducive. … (Skeptical Inquirer)
An ancient solution to our current crisis of disconnection. At the risk of sounding mawkishly positive, I think I’ve discovered a cheap, simple fix for our fraying social, emotional and political health. It’s easy to bemoan our problems as intractable, blaming familiar culprits like rising wealth inequality, technology (including social media) and the corporate capture of our political system. But what if our alienation stems, at least in part, from a profound failure of our educational system to teach the habits of connection, most of which boil down to thinking of others before speaking to them? So let’s put kids together and teach them how to talk, to hear and be heard, to resolve differences and forge consensus without flameouts, rupture, vituperation. This solution is hardly new. Invented by educators and philosophers in ancient Greece, the discipline of rhetoric — originally defined as the study of persuasion and now more commonly known as the art of public speaking — remained the cornerstone of education until the 1700s. … (New York Times)
Can happiness be taught? Staring into the mirror, on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you’ll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins’s prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon’s best-seller list is “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio). At this point, your conscience rebels. By buying a book on Amazon, you tell yourself, you will be directly funding a new angora lining for Jeff Bezos’s monogrammed slippers in the master bedroom of his private yacht—not the main one but the backup vessel currently moored off Patmos. Quivering with righteousness, you close your laptop and stride to your nearest bookstore, only to bump into a dilemma: whereabouts in the store, exactly, can “Build the Life You Want” be found? … (New Yorker)
Rose petals and peacock brains: what it took to be an ‘Emperor of Rome.’ If social media is to be believed, men can’t stop thinking about the Roman Empire, particularly its “alpha male” elements. Anyone similarly obsessed would do well to pick up a copy of “Emperor of Rome,” an erudite and entertaining new book by the redoubtable classics scholar and feminist Mary Beard. Beard, whose previous books include “SPQR” and “The Fires of Vesuvius,” points to the conspicuous role played by women in the histories of the emperors that were handed down through the ages. Most enduring has been “the stereotype of the scheming woman,” who (supposedly) manipulated powerful men into doing her bidding (or else poisoned them when they didn’t). Beard, citing more recent examples of women who have been condemned for their husbands’ behavior, remarks that it is still fashionable to “blame the wife.” “Emperor of Rome” begins with Julius Caesar, a hinge figure between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and ends nearly three centuries later with Alexander Severus, whose death in 235 A.D. was followed by civil wars and short reigns. Alexander was succeeded by Maximinus Thrax, who was illiterate — or perhaps he was only said to be illiterate, Beard writes, raising the possibility that the claim “may well be a tendentious slur.” … (New York Times)
I was happy to read your article in SI about Cicero and the Demarcation Problem.I'm tracking down some of Damien Fernandez-Beanato's works now. I use all of you as sources for editing wikipedia. Cicero's critique is now in the Astrology page.
I wonder if you are aware of Canadian philosopher Paul Thagard?
He has developed a somewhat similar matrix to the one you mention comes from Cicero/Fernandez-Beanato. This is how I described it on Thagard's Wikipedia page: His matrix is "a collection of psychological, historical and logical characteristics, against which a discipline could be compared and categorized as either science or pseudoscience." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Thagard
Re: Your article about fake news. Quite a few years ago, I started to consider Honesty (i.e. the commitment to Reality) as one of the cardinal virtues. Not always easy, but it works most of the time. I came out of fundamentalism when I discovered that most everything in this echo chamber was smoke and mirrors.