I’ve long had an issue with the idea that beliefs can be justified simply by virtue of them fitting into an overall coherent worldview. This can be seen in practice by the number of coherent yet mutually exclusive philosophies, theory-laden political ideologies, and worldviews that surround us. Taken alone, they back themselves up. Held up to the light of reality, they have no foundational...
Tyler Cowen originally distributed this excerpt on Marginal Revolution explaining retention recorded from watching lecture videos at different speeds. I wanted to re-share it here for safe-keeping. “We presented participants with lecture videos at different speeds and tested immediate and delayed (1 week) comprehension. Results revealed minimal costs incurred by increasing video speed from...
Is that object in front of you a book, or is it paper? In most cases, we would accept that the object is both 100% a book, and 100% paper. Yet “paper” and “book” are not synonymous terms. There seems to be something paradoxical happening here. How can an object be fully A and fully B simultaneously? Doesn’t this contradict Aristotle’s “Laws of...
The idea that “counter-culture is a meta-tradition: a tradition of questioning tradition” is an interesting take from a recent Philosophy in Hell Substack post. Rather than members of a counter-culture seeing themselves as entirely outside of societal norms, they may see themselves a necessary ingredient of cultural iteration that goes back millennia, from Classical Cynics like...
Before deciding to tear something down or build something new, understand why it was erected in the first place, or why it hasn’t been built yet. This is the basic premise of Chesterton’s Fence, an interesting heuristic for enforcing second-order thinking (considering not just first-order consequences, but also second- and third-order effects) In its original form, Chesterton’s...
As positive cases soar past 50,000 per day, and almost all legal lockdown restrictions are removed, the UK is embarking on a social experiment that encompasses its entire adult population. This is the chance for us to unearth the moral character of a nation. Does the population have a coherent concept of “Freedom”?Can a population that receives most of its beliefs from the UK’s...
A growing number of people misrepresent Hayek’s philosophy as synonymous with the neo-liberalism we see growing around us. This reading of Hayek is often used to argue against any form of social security or social welfare. In fact, he argued the opposite. Today’s neo-liberalism is the reductio ad absurdum of the far more restrained Hayekian ideas we see in Road to Serfdom. Case in...