Joshua Fost

Chickens

jwfost — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:49:48 +0000

“I dream of a world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.” — Catherine Beckett

The Age of Truthiness

jwfost — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:51:39 +0000

There has been an interesting convergence recently of two worlds that rarely intersect: political journalism and classroom pedagogy. In the first category, New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane asked on his blog a few weeks ago whether it ought to be journalists’ responsibility to identify what they suspect to be outright lies voiced by political figures–whether they should be, in his words, "truth vigilantes." In the latter category, my colleague Peter Boghossian has asked whether it ought to be a teacher’s responsibility to correct fallacious, i.e. faith-based, reasoning voiced by students.

The fascinating part is that both Brisbane’s and Boghossian’s contributions have generated hubbub, but largely in opposite directions. Hordes of commentators pounced on Brisbane as being doltish for wondering, even for a nanosecond, whether perhaps, possibly, journalists should report the objective truth. For example, Clay Shirky at The Guardian:

[Brisbane] is evidently so steeped in newsroom culture that he does not understand – literally, does not understand, as we know from his subsequent clarifications – that this is not a hard question at all, considered from the readers’ perspective. Readers do not care about the epistemological differences between lies and weasel words; we want newspapers to limit the ability of politicians to make dubious assertions without penalty. Judging from the reactions to his post, most of us never understood that this wasn’t the newspapers’ self-conceived mission in the first place.

In Boghossian’s case, although many students have rushed to his defense, many teachers, especially those self-identified as secular liberals, have attacked. One common opinion in that latter camp is that a professor’s responsibility is to preserve epistemological neutrality, in part because there is a power gap and teachers need to take pains to avoid oppressing their students. Also, on the opposition view, a teacher’s coming out on just one side of the “how do we know what we know” question contravenes widespread expectations, and indeed institutional mandates, of tolerance of diverse religious views. In that case, it seems that educators must betray absolutely no favor when it comes to different "ways of knowing"–something James Fallows of The Atlantic identified, in reference to Brisbane, as the false equivalence problem.

I find very interesting the parallels and anti-parallels between these situations: reader-journalist, on the one hand, student-teacher on the other. What role for the messenger? With respect to truth-telling, journalistic ambivalence is widely seen as an atavism: the raison-d’etre of the messenger is to guide readers to the best available understanding of reality. When it comes to a teacher’s role in the classroom, however, it would appear that no such consensus has been reached.

The forest

jwfost — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:56:06 +0000

Film award

jwfost — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:15:55 +0000

Science is a vaccine took the Grand Prize for Best Short Film at the Portland Humanist Film Festival yesterday. Huzzah!

Harris’s publishing challenge

jwfost — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:34:47 +0000

Sam Harris has a blog post today outlining very lucidly the problems facing writers and publishers in the online age. He solicits ideas for a fix. Here’s one based on equal parts intuition and experience.

Like Harris, I probably wouldn’t pay much (or anything) for a book if I knew I could get, for free, a shorter essay or TED talk that contained most of the same information. As a matter of fact I still haven’t bought “The Moral Landscape,” because I saw the book talk in real life and feel like I got the idea. The talk was free, but here’s the thing: I might have been willing to pay.

Now: Would I pay anything to attend a live ONLINE lecture? You know, I just might. Especially if the video stream were accessorized with live, and I hope at least somewhat interesting tweets from other audience members, if I could submit questions for possible address by the speaker, if the video quality and presentation were good. Add some “PopUp Video” style annotations, perhaps pre-scripted for accuracy and convenience, and there might just be enough value added there to make it worth paying for.

Any takers?

Gov. Christie response

jwfost — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 22:11:15 +0000

Last week, New Jersey governor Chris Christie addressed questions from the press about his recent appointment of Sohail Mohammed to the state bench. Mr. Mohammed is a Muslim, and apparently there has been some popular criticism of the appointment decision:

Had I been in Christie’s place, I might have said something like this:

“Yes. It’s absolutely true that Mr. Mohammed’s intellect and judgment are called into serious question by virtue of the fact that he is a Muslim. Absolutely, we should be worried. The same is true for any other judge who is a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or any other religion. The cognitive abilities of all religious people are seriously compromised by their commitments to dogmatic faith. Unfortunately, the state of New Jersey is not lucky enough to have a large enough number of atheists to staff all the jobs where an ability to reason is necessary. So we’ll have to take what we can get. What I can tell you, after knowing Mr. Mohammed personally for nine years, is that he is no more compromised by his religion than any run-of-the-mill Protestant or Catholic. I’m sure he’ll do as good a job as anyone else we’re likely to be able to find.”

Bokononist philosophy

jwfost — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:57:18 +0000

“Beware the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.” – The Books of Bokonon (a.k.a. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut)

If you love something

jwfost — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 00:31:15 +0000

If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, then it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, it never was.

If you set your cat free and it doesn’t come back, then you have misunderstood cats.

Roger Trigg

jwfost — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:36:23 +0000

In discussing his new study on Cognition, Religion, and Theology, Oxford author Roger Trigg said of religious belief (according to CNN), "If you’ve got something so deep-rooted in human nature, thwarting it is in some sense not enabling humans to fulfill their basic interests."

Absolutely right. I would add that the instinct to bash rocks into the faces of people we dislike is also deep-rooted. People in cultures from all over the world, from time immemorial, have used violence to express their frustrations. This universality suggests–and I’m sure Professor Trigg would agree with me here–that thwarting such instincts with restrictions like moral instruction, laws, and criminal prosecution is a hindrance to our fulfillment of a basic need.

This sentiment has a history on Oxford’s little island:

Safe in the hand of one disposing Pow’r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
(excerpt from Essay on Man, by Alexander Pope)

Perhaps this is asking too much of a Templeton scholar, but Herr Trigg, please say something smarter next time.

Intel lecture

jwfost — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:48:05 +0000

If you’re in the Portland area, come see my lecture this week, sponsored by Intel and also advertised by the Center for Inquiry. The talk is free and open to the public.

Title: The Scientific Worldview: Where the Beautiful meets the Practical.
When: Wed-20-April, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Where: Intel Corp, 2111 Northeast 25th Avenue Hillsboro, OR. JFCC auditorium.
Summary: There are two main benefits of science. The first, and for many people the only benefit, is technology in all its forms. By better understanding the world, we become better able to manipulate it to produce food and shelter, products, medicines, etc. The other benefit of science, more rarefied, is the aesthetic and even spiritual thrill of understanding the intricate structures and patterns of the world. In this talk, we’ll explore the intersection of these types of benefits and try to arrive at an evolutionary perspective on the role of their convergence on human behavior.
Details: http://www.meetup.com/cfi-portland/events/17142887/