No. I'm an idiot: I didn't realize I now need a passport to go to Canada until a colleague informed me last week. There's no way I could get one in time. I was really looking forward to it: I have a paper arguing that Smith, pace received opinion, was not an ethical subjectivist; that, influenced by Hume but not persuaded, he put the old wine of a traditonal non-subjectivist ethics in a Humean sentimentalist bottle.
Samson: I should have been more careful here. In the paper, I use " subjectivist," perhaps solecistically, to mean either expressivist theories, or theories that make ethical truths just truths about what we approve. So I put Hume on the Euthypro side of the debate with Socrates.
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Yes, indeed. Speaking of Hobbes, Gene, I was thinking about you when I wrote this:
ReplyDeletehttp://econospeak.blogspot.com/2014/06/thomas-hobbes-call-your-office.html
Kevin, are you in Montreal this weekend?
ReplyDeleteNo. I'm an idiot: I didn't realize I now need a passport to go to Canada until a colleague informed me last week. There's no way I could get one in time. I was really looking forward to it: I have a paper arguing that Smith, pace received opinion, was not an ethical subjectivist; that, influenced by Hume but not persuaded, he put the old wine of a traditonal non-subjectivist ethics in a Humean sentimentalist bottle.
ReplyDeleteMy friend heard two people talking on the subway:
Delete1: You need a passport to go to Canada?!
2: Yes, they treat it as if it's a separate country.
David Hume was an ethical subjectivist? I think he was a meta-ethical non-cognitivist, but I don't know how this might imply subjectivism.
DeleteSamson: I should have been more careful here. In the paper, I use " subjectivist," perhaps solecistically, to mean either expressivist theories, or theories that make ethical truths just truths about what we approve. So I put Hume on the Euthypro side of the debate with Socrates.
ReplyDelete