Rust Belt Philosophy

Whenever people express pessimism about what science can or will accomplish, I find that going and finding out about some ongoing science helps me to retain my optimism. It is, after all, only too easy to settle for large news organizations (or tiny philosophy blogs!) that cover science only sporadically and in broad strokes. Rather than waiting for the cultural zeitgeist to report back to me about the limits of science, I take it to be much more productive to check to see whether scientists themselves are running out of things to study or ways to study them. Every single time I've tried this, the result has been the same: no, science is not nearing its limits, but while you're here, might we interest you in a little bit of learning?

Before a couple weeks ago, for instance, I had no idea that there was such a thing as dust studies. But there is!

"We don't hear too much about natural dust, the kind that the winds loft from deserts and dry lakebeds into the air and carries for hundreds of kilometers, crossing oceans and continents, but we should...Scientists believe that dust has profound and somewhat mysterious influences on atmospheric chemistry, solar heat exchange and nutrient supply to the oceans and rain forests. What those influences are, exactly, is the subject of much study and is still somewhat mysterious--the story of dust shows just how complex our natural world is, and how difficult it is to understand it."

I like this example because it serves as a reminder that new knowledge doesn't have to come from some esoteric idea or from outlandish experimental equipment. Dust may be insignificant in day-to-day life, but, being part of the physical universe and in particular part of our experience on this planet, it's just as much a part of Earth's various mechanisms as, say, water is. Though it'll probably be difficult to track, model, and eventually predict the effects of dust on other parts of the biosphere (and vice versa), there's no reason to think that we can't do it or that the results won't be illuminating. (A better understanding of dust might, for example, help us to understand why there are clouds.)

Having that kind of respect for science - that is, knowing that it can spin gold out of, well, dust - also helps me stop myself from reacting reflexively to stories that are more personal to me, like this one:

"Koko the gorilla is world-famous for her ability to communicate with humans using phrases in American Sign Language, and for her gentle play with pet cats. Now, a new study on Koko's play with wind instruments shows that she skillfully controls how she breathes.

That's a knockout conclusion because scientists have thought that humans alone, out of all the primates, can gain skillful, voluntary control over the act of breathing...This [supplies] an embodied, ecological perspective on skill emergence. Through it, we come to see that it's not only skills like language and tool-making that flourish via shared social practice, but also actions like skilled breathing that might at first be attributed wholly to biology."

As I'm sure you all know by now, there are lots of people who think that humanity is the only species that merits humane treatment. Usually these people claim that we deserve to be treated well in virtue of our capabilities, which are said to be unique. Even I am sometimes tempted to slide towards this view - say, by pedantically arguing that skilled breath control with an instrument is not tantamount to music. But if I take a step back and cool down for a moment - say, because I respect science enough not to just throw it out the window - I'll realize that the art/not-art distinction isn't one that science can address directly. Whatever animus I feel towards art-related scientific data, therefore, comes not from the science itself but from a bias (reliable or otherwise) of my own. That sort of realization turns out to be even more useful when the scientific story pertains directly to humans, as this one does:

"[S]cientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in the brain's temporal lobe -- the seat of the auditory system -- as a person listens to normal conversation. Based on this correlation between sound and brain activity, they then were able to predict the words the person had heard solely from the temporal lobe activity.

'This research is based on sounds a person actually hears, but to use it for reconstructing imagined conversations, these principles would have to apply to someone's internal verbalizations,' cautioned first author Brian N. Pasley, a post-doctoral researcher in the center. 'There is some evidence that hearing the sound and imagining the sound activate similar areas of the brain. If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking.'"

One of the most persistent accusations leveled against science is that it will never help us to really understand us, no matter how much insight it gives us into the nature and behavior of things like rocks or dust or electrons. Yet here we are, slowly learning how we work. I mean, yes - the science-fictional possibilities are very fun to think about, but what's even more exciting is the possibility that we might some day stop regarding ourselves as magical mystery creatures whose very existence is a repudiation of science and allows us to stand outside human reason.

There are, of course, limits to what science will discover. Our time and energy are limited, and at any rate there may well be things we simply could not know even with infinite resources at our disposal. (This is true even in purer fields like math and logic, for which it may be intuitive to think that perfect knowledge is achievable.) But those limits give us no reason to despair that science is just on the verge of letting us down forever, or, worse, that it has always been letting us down and can only do so. Not everyone has to get excited about science like geeks do, just like not everyone has to get excited about policy like politicians do, but the very last thing any of us should do is give up on the idea of learning more about the way our world works.

Oh, this is working out almost perfectly! Not only do I get to be right about everything I've been saying about Aaron Powell's bizarro-world skepticism, I get to be right over an elongated series of posts! What can I say? Sometimes life is good.

1. "The ways that SOPA was a bad piece of legislation— it would’ve been ineffective at its stated goal, it would’ve been costly and harmful, and whatever benefits it created would’ve flowed almost exclusively to a small interest group— weren’t unique to SOPA. In fact, they’re more the rule than the exception when it comes to lawmaking in Washington.
2. Given this, it’s prudent to be generally skeptical about future claims by lawmakers that their new pieces of legislation will do what they say, how they say, and at little or no cost.
3. The result of that skepticism will be less support (by some degree, perhaps by a rather large degree) for new laws and regulations.
4. Less support means fewer new laws and regulations, which means a government smaller and less meddlesome than it might otherwise have been.
5. A smaller, less meddlesome government is a more libertarian government, so those who embrace this skepticism are moving in a libertarian direction."

"I could, of course, begin listing all sorts of other bad laws. But I don’t really have to. Anyone sufficiently interested can open the paper and see article after article about laws 'bad' in precisely the way I claimed SOPA was."

Everyone should be well familiar with this argument. A few years back, PZ Myers called it the courtier's reply, and it works just as poorly in political philosophy as it does in religious philosophy; contrary to his absolutely bizarre assertion, Powell does "really have to" provide evidence for his claim, at least if he wants anyone to believe him. Moreover, he doesn't seem to understand that his task is not merely to list bad laws but rather to compare the number (and badness) of bad laws to the number (and goodness) of good laws. It is, after all, entirely possible for big (read: non-libertarian) government to do lots of bad/stupid things but still to be worth it, in the same way that hospitals fuck things up quite a lot* but are still a vastly better option than trying to do DIY surgery at home. SOPA, for instance, was certainly a terrible idea for a law (though it was never a terrible law), but net neutrality would be a great law. In the absence of some kind of actual data about the overall badness of intrusive governance, Powell is just playing scare tactics with this one.

Better still, Powell himself now admits that his conclusion is limited in scope even at its best. "Basically," he says (with my emphasis), "if we have good reasons to think government generally does a bad job at certain kinds of things, then we’re less likely to want government to do more of those things in the future." Again, if he wants to support a libertarianism that's substantially different from liberalism or conservativism (or socialism, or whatever), Powell needs to establish just what it is that the government does badly. His conclusion, after all, is that a libertarian government is one that is smaller than it might otherwise have been; if it turns out that conservatives or liberals (or socialists, or whoever) are right about which things the government generally does well, Powell's so-called skeptical libertarianism is just going to collapse into conventional liberalism or conservatism (or whatever).

Nor is this merely an academic point to make. One of the major flaws of libertarian thinking, at least in my experience, is precisely that it fails to talk coherently and intelligently about which kinds of things the government is bad at doing. (A related flaw is that libertarians typically presume that "good at doing X" means "doing X as a libertarian would," but I suspect we'll get to that later, so we'll leave it aside for now.) Powell demonstrates as much when he says that

"legislation designed to create certain end states in the marketplace (no piracy, health insurance for everyone, no more recessions) assumes that a small group of people (lawmakers plus the bureaucrats tasked with carrying out their commands) know enough about the details of social and economic interactions, both now and as they change in the future, to be able to effectively guide them.

[However,] this simply isn’t possible."

What, exactly, is the kind of thing that we're talking about here? It's certainly not clear to me, and Powell does very little to make it clear. Perhaps we're talking about "creat[ing] certain end states in the marketplace" - but then this argument is, as I had predicted in post 1 of this series, an argument for anarchy. After all, even laws against things like murder and child prostitution and slavery can be characterized as being "designed to create certain end states in the marketplace," so if Powell really thinks that it's impossible for the government to be good at this kind of thing then he should be against even those laws that are foundational and uncontroversial. But if it's not impossible, or if the kind of thing isn't market manipulation, then just what is he saying? That the government is bad at doing some economic stuff sometimes, maybe? Not only is that mealy-mouthed nonsense, it's not something that we could possibly measure - i.e., that could possibly have a place in an inductive argument. "The government did some stuff badly some time, and it's generally bad at doing kind of thing, therefore libertarianism" is not exactly compelling.

Powell spends (wastes, really) the rest of his post on my absolute favorite argument, the "This cannot work ever because it cannot work in certain limited circumstances" argument. The way this argument goes is that an individual lists all of the changeable circumstances that are responsible for some thing's failure and then conclude that the thing can therefore never work under any circumstances at all. Most of us probably aren't familiar with the argument in those terms, but I'm positive that we hear it all the time. For example, when's the last time you heard someone complain that they just can't lose weight and then go on to say that they've tried everything except exercise? That's a textbook case of somebody complaining that a goal (weight loss) is impossible under any circumstances due to circumstances that are, in fact, changeable (their persistent choice not to exercise). The problem with this should be obvious: by saying "it can never happen because of these things, which we could change if we wanted," the person is basically telling you the way to make it happen.

Take Powell's argument that government solutions cannot work because they're too big in size and scope. Even if this is the case - which, again, anti-slavery laws! - all it tells us is that some government programs should be smaller in size and/or scope. D'you know what that position is called? If you guessed "libertarianism," you're wrong - it's "federalism," and there's nothing about federalism that says that governments should be as non-intrusive as possible. Or take his argument that government programs fail over the long term because nobody checks to see if they're working. Y'know how to fix that one? Check to see if they're working. Other countries manage this just fine, so we know that it can be done. Far from proving to us that libertarianism is the only feasible option, then, Powell's concluding arguments show us precisely the opposite by demonstrating how government programs can work. It's a pretty long walk for a contradiction, I grant you, but some people just love to make things more complicated than they really need to be.

So we'll still have to see what Powell says in his third and (I think) final post in the series, but so far I honestly think he's done more to hurt his case than to help it. Even if we grant him everything he has said so far, the proper conclusion is not that governments generally do a bad job at certain things. Rather, it's that governments generally do a bad job under certain circumstances, and that's no more an argument for libertarianism than Taco Bell is an argument for starving to death.

*Really, they do, at least here in the US. It's actually a little scary.

Aaaaaand your stupid question of the day is - drum-roll, please! - "Does the Internet have a soul?"

"The question occurred to me as I spent an hour browsing the Web, and on inspection, it seemed to me not entirely nutty. Technology is changing the way we think about all kinds of theological concepts, such as community, prayer, ritual and worship. Why should it not expand our definition of 'soul'?"

Lisa Miller unfortunately does not explain just how "[t]echnology is changing the way we think about all kinds of theological concepts," but she sure does seem optimistic about the idea that the 'net could be said "in some sense" to have a soul:

"[T]he Internet seems to have a life of its own. It’s always 'on'; it’s awake when I sleep. It is populated — increasingly, explosively — by other humans, who entrust to it their hopes and fears, their griefs and joys, their baby pictures and eulogies. On the Internet, people 'bare their souls.' And the Internet is also, in some sense, immortal: When I’m dead, the technology probably will persist, and its future will forever contain traces of me, as well as bits and pieces of the generations that come after me."

This sort of reasoning can only remind me of that nonsense we saw two years ago about how sometimes "the literal reading [of a thing] points to...a metaphor." There are literal readings and there are metaphorical readings, but there are not combination literal-metaphorical readings or metaphors in the absence of some literal thing that the metaphor is a metaphor for or any such garbage. Here, however, it sure looks like Miller is saying that the internet really does have a soul because it could metaphorically be said to have a soul "in [some] perspective" or other. This is all just rounding up, and it really doesn't work: the internet doesn't "have a life of its own"; it isn't immortal; it is in no way "a place where the world's souls, living and dead, gather to share their essential selves and join their sacred individuality together."* Considering the fuss that was (rightfully) kicked up over Clinton's "depends on your definition of 'is'" defense, it's incredible to me that anybody takes this shit seriously.

Nonetheless, I think there's something worthwhile to be learned from her amateurish mistakes. In philosophy, we typically are taught to look for necessary and sufficient conditions for some thing to be the case. So, for example, we might try to find out what a chair is (i.e., which conditions are necessary and sufficient for the existence of a chair), find a list of, I dunno, 18 conditions, and then just try to check them off every time we want to know whether something is a chair or not. ("Is it a solid object? Check. Can you sit on it? Check. Is it artificially made? Whoops - nope, guess it can't be a chair." That sort of thing.) Whether or not this is a smart approach, one of the things that is often overlooked is that it actually opens the door to so-called fuzzy logic. See, normally we think of things as being either (e.g.) a chair or not-a-chair, but there seems to be no particular reason why we shouldn't instead think of things as being more or less chair-y. So we might instead say that chairs are very (though probably not perfectly) chair-y, stools are quite chair-y, tables are sort of chair-y, and then goose livers are not very chair-y at all (though probably not perfectly or entirely not-chair-y). Although she almost certainly didn't mean to, Miller seems to have used something like fuzzy logic in her argument. The internet, she says, is immortal-ish because it will exist after I die; it's alive-ish because it's active; it's noosphere-ish because people interact on it; and so on. Understood using fuzzy logic, this is perfectly fine, if a bit silly. What we can't do with fuzzy logic, however, is exactly the thing that Miller tries to do, i.e., turn "is chair-y" into "is a chair." I think it should be fairly obvious that the internet does not have a soul - I mean, for one thing, even humans don't have souls. But it would be perfectly legitimate to talk about the ways in which the internet is soul-ish. Again, it would be rather silly, but at least it'd be legit. So the lesson here isn't that thinking in shades of gray is a stupid exercise. Rather, we should learn that it's stupid to confuse every shade of gray for black, especially in a conversation that couldn't possibly go anywhere in the best possible scenario.

*Also: this idea is not necessarily as reassuring as it may sound, if indeed it sounds reassuring at all.

Though the arguments against same-sex marriage are pathetic through and through, the pathological nature of the "traditional" marriage movement are anything but funny. Take this rather worrying statement from Howard Kainz as an example:

"A little logic will show why the public, massively using contraception, is becoming more and more accepting of gay marriage, and laws permitting it—thus completely redefining the concept of marriage, which has from time immemorial been heterosexual and family-oriented. For if intentionally non-procreative sex is permissible for married couples, on the basis of their love and commitment, with or without an intention of eventually raising children, there is no reason to prohibit such liaisons for gay couples."

The pushback against equality was never undertaken by moderates. People who stridently oppose same-sex marriage are the same ones who oppose same-sex civil unions, the same ones who oppose adoption, the same ones who don't even want LGBT people to be teachers, and, as you can see, the same ones who don't think that any of us should even be allowed to use condoms.

In all likelihood this is going to be a non-issue within a few generations, but the only way to make sure that that happens is to keep in mind now that these people are pretty much bonkers and can't be allowed to influence public thought, hold positions of power, and so on. If even they are now admitting, as Kainz admits, that "the love of gay couples, and the strength of their mutual commitment, may be more intense than in the case of heterosexual couples" but they would rather outlaw contraception than endorse same-sex marriage, it would be downright negligent for the rest of us to even pretend that they're sane.

For maybe 12-18 months now it's been my position that we Americans shouldn't even take people seriously if they argue the "traditional marriage" line. That argument has been so mercilessly and exhaustively debunked that continuing to treat it somberly could only succeed in confusing bystanders into believing that the bigots still had a case. Well, I figure it's only fair for me to support that kind of claim, so today I'll spend a couple of posts doing just that.

To start, here's Matthew Gerken:

"[G]ay marriage will 'curtail opportunities for deep and emotionally fulfilling friendships between members of the same sex' [because] once the taboo [against homosexuality] has been removed, interpretive chaos erupts. Have strong feelings for a male friend? You might be gay! Sam and Frodo? Clearly gay. Abraham Lincoln slept in the same bed as another man!? Must have been a homo."

Yes, really: that's how bad things are for the bigots these days. They can't argue about same-sex intercourse being bad because that makes them look like monsters, they can't talk about the "nature" of marriage because nobody's buying it anymore, and they can't even attack same-sex parenting because all the empirical evidence is against them. So what's left? Gays will ruin our totally, totally straight friendships! Y'know, the ones where we have strong feelings for our male friends and sleep with them!

Not only is this absurd in theory, it's plainly false in reality. There has simply not been a mass (or even a miniature) dissolution of male friendships as same-sex relationships have become more and more open and accepted, and although social norms have changed there's no indication whatsoever that they've changed for the worse. These people were always just making shit up, but now they aren't even able to hide it.

Pivoting off the last post, let's now take a minute to try to account for the way humans actually are when talking about rationality and justification of beliefs, and to see which sorts of consequences may follow. For inspiration, I'll use Zack Beauchamp.

"[E]ven if belief in God isn't necessary to make sense of the world, it could still be that we have some good reasons to believe in him besides scientific or logical proofs. A feeling of revelation or personal experience of a deity, perhaps."

Rationality conceived thusly, Beauchamp thinks, would challenge the skeptical view that "I'm not believing in God until you can give me a good reason rooted in standards I accept that I should." This is probably an idiotic misstatement of what atheists actually think,* but Beauchamp is at least right insofar as he attributes to atheists the idea that "even if you feel powerfully that you've experienced God, that's not actually a good reason to believe in him," so that's where we'll start.

The contrast here, as you can see, is between "scientific or logical proofs" and "feel[ings]." Given that I've just said that unremitting reason-based logic won't work as a standard of human rationality, and given that science is the poster child for the skeptical regress,** does this mean that I must have rescinded my general prohibition against using "I-feel-as-though-X" as evidence in favor of X? Not hardly.

For one, I'm not saying that reason-based logic has no place in normative human rationality at all. This is, after all, still a blog that centers on logic and the proper use thereof, and I'm not about to throw that out the window. Indeed, I'm more than happy using reason-based logic as the centerpiece of what it means to make a rational decision or come to a belief rationally. And though there are times when we have no realistic alternative but to depart from "scientific or logical proofs," in Beauchamp's strangely naive phrasing, there are also limits on which sorts of circumstances count as extenuating.

When deciding whether the world is real, for example, almost all of us have no choice but to believe - even if only tentatively or provisionally - that it is. Denying the reality of reality is the standard end-game of the skeptical regress, and if you're stuck with "scientific or logical proofs" you're going to be in big trouble. All of our experience, data, and thought happens in this world and relates to this world, so if the entire world gets taken away then we're really left with nothing to go on. So it definitely is irrational to believe that we're in the real world, even for a fudged definition of "real" - but only if "scientific or logical proofs" are the only things that are allowed to contribute to rationality. On the other hand, should we allow for beliefs to be rational when the alternative is not just absurd but literally inconceivable, i.e., a total non-starter both in terms of reflection and action, we'll find that our belief in the reality of the world is just fine. But, of course, we can't just give ourselves an exception every time we want one. This particular exception works because it has literally no costs. If our world isn't real, we're going to be wrong about everything anyway, so there's nothing to lose. (Alternatively, you could look at this as an instance of "ought implies can": if reality is radically different than anything we know, we'd never be able to know that and so we can't be expected to know it.) (Also, for the record, I think this would be a fun thing to talk about in the comments.) Making a similar exemption for feelings is not quite as cost-free. We have a great deal to lose, both as individuals and at larger levels of aggregation, if we allow feelings to take priority over things like logic and science.

Presumably a lot of religious believers would butt in at this point and insist that they do really have something to lose if they don't take their religious feelings seriously. Jen Fulwiler, as we saw, lost her sense of meaning and purpose when she denied the existence of God, and surely those things are things we would not want to lose. This argument is confused, I think, in two main ways, the first and most obvious of which is that it makes no sense to embrace one irrational idea because of another one. The Fulwiler class of religious believer is one whose displeasure is tied to bad ideas about how emotions (should) work, what counts as meaningful, and so on. So long as we're talking about rationality, it makes a lot more sense to work on getting those people to reject their other, related irrational beliefs rather than letting them simply slide back into the irrational constellation of beliefs with which they're most comfortable. But the second confusion is that every normative system that bears on belief must in fact be a system that measures rationality. This is simply not so. Any given rational belief need not be beautiful, academic, moral(!), or approved in any other particular way. So even if we would ultimately want to say that some person should hold some belief that seems irrational - say, because rationality is subordinate to morality - that doesn't automatically make the belief rational. And, again, it's not at all clear that the belief in God is actually such a belief: suspension of disbelief can suffice in almost all cases, and it's not as though belief in God is morally unproblematic. (Incidentally, both of these confusions are explained in more detail here.)

Even if there is some person somewhere for whom belief in God really would be morally required, however, that makes for an entirely different sort of "reason" than the sort seen in discussions of rationality, and Beauchamp's failure to understand this is the real punchline of this whole post. If a religious person were to support their belief in God on moral grounds, it would have to be the case that (roughly) believing in God makes them a better person. (Or if they're like Fulwiler, they'd just be happier, and so on.) But if this is the case, then religious people have to admit that it's equally acceptable for atheists to disbelieve in the case that atheism makes them better (or happier, or whatever). More specifically, religious people would have to allow for this even if they think that atheism is irrational and wrong. That the feelings-vs.-science conflict exists at all, then, is little more than a sign of hypocrisy and special pleading on the part of believers. Their initial position was that questions of religion were primarily questions of truth and falsehood and so primarily subject to rational adjudication. Now, however, they're turning more and more to the view that religious questions are primarily personal questions - only they also want to say that it's still primarily a rational matter (mostly, I think, so they can say that atheists are still wrong). This is flagrant bullshit, and Beauchamp should be embarrassed to give it any credence. We know that religion could be a merely personal matter for us in the same way that it apparently is for, say, Australians. But that religion would have to be a very different sort of religion than the stuff we have here in the states, which is not limited to people's personal lives but affects politics, science, education, and other such endeavors at an institutional level.

If religious believers want to set aside questions of rationality and be allowed to believe in their gods in the same sort of way in which I believe in the San Antonio Spurs, they have to realize that they're talking about sacrificing rationality (and thus, in all likelihood, truth) so as to obtain some other kind of good. That's okay - again, I do it - but it's not the sort of thing that one can do lightly because one must still retain at least some grip on rationality in order to know that the trade-off is worth it (or is working as a trade-off in the first place). But if religious believers can't bring themselves to shut up about God when we start talking about abortion or evolution, they'd better be prepared to justify themselves rationally the way that we atheists do, cause there ain't no world in which reality will change to suit the beliefs that just so happen to make you happy.

*It's probably closer to, "I'm not believing in God until you can give me a good reason rooted in standards you accept that I should."
**See: problem of induction, the.

Over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, a fellow philosopher has recently run afoul of my rule that one should prefer asking questions philosophically over asking philosophical questions. The ordinary gentleman in question, who goes only by the name Murali, was challenged by (presumably libertarian) commenters to dispute the notion that "harm [to oneself] is the only legitimate criteria by which [one has] any standing whatsoever to care" about what another person does. In response, Murali first talked about the need "to stop the sceptical regress" and then launched into a borderline-incomprehensible lecture on deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning, finally concluding with the banality "that if we do find ourselves facing a contradiction, or holding an ad-hoc principle, we know that we are wrong or fail to adequately justify our beliefs." If that seems to you to not really answer the question - which, recall, was whether or not harm to oneself was the only legitimate reason to restrict another's freedom - that's because it doesn't. At all. In fact, it doesn't even really come close, and every classically philosophical step that Murali took moved him farther away from the point.

In part this is because Murali wrongly thought that he already knew in great detail what his interlocutors were asking. Questions that talk about "legitimate criteria" certainly sound like skeptical-regress types of questions, but there's no clear indication that Murali's libertarian opponent cared at all about the possibility of skeptical regress or its implications for political philosophy. It may have been far more fruitful to have first figured out what sort of legitimacy was thought to be at stake; if it isn't rational legitimacy, then the skeptical regress sort of ceases to matter. Similarly, trying to work out this person's notions of standing and caring would probably have been m ore productive than giving him or her an overview of common epistemological methodologies. Indeed, even the skeptical regress itself could use a little bit of fine-tuning in this way. What counts as "adequate" justification for belief, for instance?

These questions are important even if they don't seem philosophical or don't closely track classical philosophical debates, because they go to ensure that the intended conversation (in this case, the one about libertarianism) isn't a total waste of time. If, for example, the libertarian commentator was really talking about rationally justifying an instance of caring - that is, justifying an emotional response to a situation - it would be a fool's errand to even start the intended conversation. Emotional responses are at best minimally subject to rational evaluation, so it doesn't make sense to argue either for or against their rational justification. In terms of the skeptical regress, if Murali's idea of rational adequacy doesn't somehow take context into account, it's very hard to see why we should use it. As I painfully demonstrated in my overlong conversation with Emanuel Rutten, using a concept of rationality that is modeled after a god is idiotic when we're talking about human beings. What this means for Murali is that his skeptical regress shouldn't (implicitly or otherwise) hold us to a standard that only an omniscient, perfectly rational entity could possibly meet, i.e., one that takes no account of context; as I said a few days later, "we should have no hesitation when it comes to dismissing philosophy that operates in a scientific realm of its own fantastical definition." And, in fact, it very much seems to be the case that this is precisely what Murali did. In his article, he says confidently that, when we encounter a policy disagreement,

"presumably, the ensuing conversation is aimed at finding out who is right or wrong, or maybe showing why you are right and the other person is wrong (if there is a distinction to be made between the two ends). Productive conversations therefore contain arguments which feature reasons."

"[A]s human beings, we want to believe, you know, the things that we already believe. And so when you hear some information that contradicts your pre-existing views, unfortunately, what we tend to do is think of why we believed those things in the first place.

And, you know, so when, you know, we get these corrections, we tend to say I'm right, and I'm going to stick with my view. And the thing that my research, which is with Jason Reifler at Georgia State University, found is that in some cases, that corrective information can actually make the problem worse."

For a short while a couple of years back, a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals decided they'd all get together and try to figure out what wisdom was and why we should have more of it. (If you're wondering how they could have known that we should have more of it without knowing what it was, all I can say is: that's why they were pseudo-intellectuals.) A representative sample of their thinking, and my response to their thinking, looks something like this:

"'I remember Hall's chapter on Patience,' [Jessica Crispin] says, 'and maybe a chapter he should have included: Faith. Because wisdom isn't a bolt out of the blue. It's the low hum of the hive. And the hive? It's buzzing.' Not to be dense, but what the fuck does that even mean? What is 'the hive,' and what does it mean that it's 'buzzing'? Furthermore, what does a buzzing hive have to do with faith or patience? How does 'the low hum' contrast with 'a bolt out of the blue' - and, once more, what's the relationship between blue bolts and faith or patience?"

...but if we want to learn, lead, or do some other positive thing that begins with lea-,* we're going to have to be more attentive to the real world than we are to the convenient world of easy answers that is wisdom - a world that, as you could easily have guessed, contains the world of virtue:

• If you are kind to the cruel, you will be cruel to the kind.
• A forced kindness deserves no thanks.
• He who has received a kindness forgets it; he who has been injured remembers it.
• Kindness begets kindness.

*Laziness powers, activate!

Normally I wouldn't be so hasty as to say that an entire state is terrible. Florida, however, is terrible, and if I didn't have relatives there I would never, ever go. But relatives are what I have there, so that's where I go, from time to time.

Before we get there, though, there are a few Pittsburgh airport scenes I hadn't noticed/photographed before, starting with this somewhat awkward advertisement:

I dunno about you, but this sure makes it look like you can learn bondage in the Boy Scouts. Which, y'know, I've got nothing against bondage per se, but tying up boys? Not as much.


This seems like an equally stupid idea. If you have something which you wish to be accessible only to authorized individuals, why would you put that thing in a place where there's a chance that many people would pass by it in an uncontrolled and unmonitored way?

Anyway, though, if you come to Pittsburgh via plane, be sure to look out the window of the airplane tram and see if you can notice this neat mural:


(It's not that blurry in real life.)

Once on the airplane, I decided I would read the SkyMall magazine until I found something so dumb that I couldn't keep reading, then photograph that thing and report back to all of you about it. And, well, here's your winner:


Yes, apparently you, too, can look like an alien from a shitty 1950s science fiction movie. Only 19.95 plus shipping and handling and your pride!

Also, to give you a sense of why I'm so virulently anti-Florida, I photographed this:


Granted, Palm Beach is not Orlando or Miami, but holy shit - the "top picks" are a dead white guy's mansion that they're calling a museum, a chocolate factory belonging to someone other than Willy Wonka, and two things you can do in basically any other city? Woo hoo. And Orlando and Miami aren't exactly thrilling, either: the one is just Disney, which is a soul-sucking pit, and the other is 80% nightclubs and 20% LeBron James's ego.

But the flight wasn't all bad. For one, I did rediscover the nice effect that the sun can have on bodies of water:





And likewise for clouds:







So that was nice. And, admittedly, Florida has some things that Pennsylvania lacks, like creepy trees.



But it's just so fucking flat.


This really drives me crazy. I just never feel like I'm getting anywhere without hills.

Near as I can tell, Florida also has more wildlife - though, of course, that's not necessarily a good thing. Hawks and geckos and such are all well and good...



...but in Pittsburgh we don't ever have to worry about alligators or pythons or any of that shit.

As for the actual content of my trip, there wasn't much to speak of. Like I said, mostly it consisted of visiting with relatives. We did, however, get to visit Butterfly World, which, as the name indicates, has lots and lots of butterflies.


It's not entirely clear to me what qualifies something as a butterfly farm. I mean, yeah, they raise butterflies there, but they don't use or sell the butterflies or butterfly products in any way. It isn't, in other words, like a cattle farm, from which you can get milk or cheese or beef, or an alpaca farm, which presumably allows you to sell something alpaca-related. Instead, they just had butterflies. Lots and lots of butterflies.







And, as promised, they did "fly overhead and all around [me]." This was not quite as relaxing or magical as they may have intended, though: butterflies are pretty small, and I'm pretty big, and I really had no desire to squash, dismember, or otherwise mutilate the many butterflies that surrounded me at all times.

All in all, though, Butterfly World was quite nice. Not as good as Phipps Conservatory, but about as nice as, let's say, the National Aviary.





A little bit of science:


Also speaking of science, it turns out that butterflies really love rotten bananas.


Yummmm. Rotten bananas.






Parakeets always look like they're trying to eat each other.



Zombieeee parrrrrrrrots.








Aaaaaaand then there's this:


This was easily the sketchiest trip I'd ever taken. Going to Vegas would just be redundant now, right?

Alas, I've now stalled so long that I no longer have anything else to talk about, so I must come to the real reason why I hate Florida. Y'see, Florida is just filled with gated communities, because that's where all the old people go when they get wimpy. They usually have blandly nautical names, like so:



Inoffensive, romantic in an unintelligent way...y'know, standard American consumer bait. When you're in Florida, you see these damn things everywhere. And that's not so bad in and of itself, ultimately. Like anything else, you eventually just start to tune them out. But then I saw this one year and I just lost it:


I mean, are you shitting me?! A gated community called "Walden Pond"??? The entire fucking idea of Walden Pond is that it's the place you go to get away from people and society! It's one thing to invoke some generic, amorphous beach scene and have that be the "idea" around which your gated community is formed (really, the temporary high that your gated community aims to sell people on), but this - at least for me - was really beyond the pale.

And that, dear readers, is just about that. I've got some more photos, but they're pretty miscellaneous, so I'm just gonna dump 'em all out and use captions as needed. Here goes!

Ostensibly for hurricanes, but probably actually for zombies

Hope nobody paid too much for this...

Any ideas why this sewer grate was chained to the wall?

Ah - home sweet home!