Tag: Link

From Plausible to Denial

The internet is rife with lists; if I had a top ten list for every top ten list I’ve seen posted about this that and the other I’d have to have a top ten of the top ten of the top ten… You can see where I might be going with this.

One of my favourite kind of lists is the ‘Everyone should know…’ variety, and Conspiracy Theorists have these in spades. This one is kind of great; it starts off with historical instances of people conspiring and slowly gets into fantasy land, hoping that the reader will not be astute enough to realise that some of the claims being made are rather speculative in nature.

I should point out, it starts off with some overstated cases, but that’s, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, peanuts to where it ends up going. Thoughts and feelings in the comments; the cupboard, if you will excuse the analogy, is looking a bit bare and needs re-stocking.

01/11/2010

Linkage? Link-ability?

So, I was informed yesterday that I’m now in a list of the Top 50 Philosophy Blogs, which sounds pretty exciting and pretty scam-alicious all at the same time, right?

Maybe not.

I’ve had a look through the list of Philosophy blogs and quite a few are ones I know of (respect, even); some are even written by tenured (and thus ‘legitimate’) philosophers. So, overall, a list that isn’t just a random collection of sites but something that looks researched and, dare I say it, designed based on some fundamental and philosophical principle.

The site hosting the list is run by one Kelly Sonora, who is actually the pseudonym of someone else entirely. Details here for those interested in what might be going on. Long story short; this seems to be a legit list of interesting Philosophy blogs (although whilst it is gratifying to be listed in a Top 50 listing I’m not entirely sure that my academic peers would agree; still, you never know) and it’s possible you may learn something interesting from perusing it.

Thanks Kelly.

Tally.

02/10/2009

Not my own work

There are problems with the natural selection-economic markets analogy, of course. To begin with, it is not clear what markets maximize, if anything. Natural selection maximizes local fitness (of a particular population in response to a specific set of environmental circumstances). Free markets may maximize trade volume, for instance; or perhaps they minimize prices; or they augment per capita income, but it is hard to see why exactly any of these things would be necessarily good, since according to several studies published over the last few years they are all only loosely correlated with quality of life, or with other important priorities, like justice, equality, or environmental preservation.

This is just a section from a posting on Rationally Speaking on Dr. Michael Shermer’s ‘The Mind of the Market.’ It’s worth a gander.

06/14/2008