While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”

The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views.

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue.

Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned of lawsuits from students enrolled in Holocaust history courses who believe the Holocaust never happened.

Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, who believe teaching birth control is a sin or even by Shands medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added.

“This is a horrible step,” he said. “Universities will have to hire lawyers so our curricula can be decided by judges in courtrooms. Professors might have to pay court costs — even if they win — from their own pockets. This is not an innocent piece of legislation.”

The staff analysis also warned the bill may shift responsibility for determining whether a student’s freedom has been infringed from the faculty to the courts.

But Baxley brushed off Gelber’s concerns. “Freedom is a dangerous thing, and you might be exposed to things you don’t want to hear,” he said. “Being a businessman, I found out you can be sued for anything. Besides, if students are being persecuted and ridiculed for their beliefs, I think they should be given standing to sue.”

During the committee hearing, Baxley cast opposition to his bill as “leftists” struggling against “mainstream society.”

“The critics ridicule me for daring to stand up for students and faculty,” he said, adding that he was called a McCarthyist.

Baxley compared the state’s universities to children, saying the legislature should not give them money without providing “guidance” to their behavior.

“Professors are accountable for what they say or do,” he said. “They’re accountable to the rest of us in society … All of a sudden the faculty think they can do what they want and shut us out. Why is it so unheard of to say the professor shouldn’t be a dictator and control that room as their totalitarian niche?” [more]

The reticent and relentlessly abstract logician Kurt Gödel might seem an unlikely candidate for popular appreciation. But that's what Rebecca Goldstein aims for in her new book Incompleteness, an account of Gödel's most famous theorem, which was announced 75 years ago this October. Goldstein calls Gödel's incompleteness theorem "the third leg, together with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Einstein's relativity, of that tripod of theoretical cataclysms that have been felt to force disturbances deep down in the foundations of the 'exact sciences.' "

The Original Computer Geek by Clive Thomson (reviewing Dark Hero Of The Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman)

To be a truly famous scientist, you need to have a hit single. Einstein had E = mc2. Newton had the apple and gravity. Even the lesser rock-star scientists have one shining achievement for which they're known -- such as Niels Bohr's theory of the atom.

But there's another kind of scientist who never breaks through, usually because while his discovery is revolutionary it's also maddeningly hard to summarize in a simple sentence or two. He never produces a catchy hit single. He's more like a back-room influencer: his work inspires dozens of other innovators who absorb the idea, produce more easily comprehensible innovations and become more famous than their mentor could have dreamed. Find an influencer, and you'll find a deeply bitter man.

Norbert Wiener -- the inventor of ''cybernetics'' -- is precisely this type of scientist. Odds are that you are only dimly aware of cybernetics, if at all. (A friend asked me, ''Isn't that like Dianetics?'') ''Dark Hero of the Information Age,'' by the journalists Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, intends to correct this, but their book struggles with the circular tautologies of fame: it must continually plead the case of why the guy ought to have been better known.

(via applecidercheesefudge)

If you are so inclined, check out the difference between the old student page with the new (old faculty page with the new) and let me know what you think.

How does it measure-up?

The first philosophical post opened with the following question: is analytic philosophy stealth conservatism? Lydia McGrew notes that some radical egalitarian “continental” philosophers argue that “objective truth, logical rigor, and clarity” are tools of conservatism. McGrew concludes with two more questions: “Do you think your liberal analytic colleagues will become conservative as time goes by or, in some important sense, are really conservative at heart?” There is nothing substantial or carefully reasoned in this post; rather it mostly contains provocative and leading questions. Nothing is necessarily wrong with this; however, the subtext (though she places it mostly in the mouths of the maligned post-moderns) is that the radical egalitarianism is essentially liberal, while logical rigor is essentially conservative. Jonathan Weinberg commented on this identification of the left with its most extreme elements and asked, “if we can't count on our philosophers to make these distinctions, who can we count on?” Indeed.

Next, Rob Koons tried to outline the philosophical heritage of modern conservatism. He opens with a jab: “anti-conservatism consists largely of what George Orwell so aptly described as ‘the sort of nonsense only an intellectual could be believe [sic].’” This prompted me to ask him for his “careful, powerful, philosophical defense” of this statement, to which he encouraged me to “lighten up!” My request was earnest, and I would like to see an argument for this old canard, though I should note that it was not the main point of his essay.

Regarding Koons’ main point—he understands Aristotle to be the great-grandfather of philosophical conservatism, in contrast to anti-conservatism:

Aristotelians seek first to understand human life as it really exists and to anchor their aspirations and normative standards in that reality, in constrast [sic] to the anti-conservative, who compares reality to purely imaginary ideal.

In a related post, while trying to identify the spectrum of conservative views, Koons claims the following:

For conservatives, the idea of a value or good that is utterly unrealized, that exists only in the imagination or intuition of the reformer, is a contradiction in terms. A conservative is moved to defend and protect things that are, which includes assisting things in their inherent tendency to realize their full potential. This realization of potential must, for the conservative, be understood in its Aristotelian sense. A thing (including a human being or society) does not realize its potential when some alien or external form is imposed upon it by the reformer or revolutionary, but when it is free to become in fact what its defining essence (which is always, at least to some extent, actualized in reality) demands ….. Now we must turn to the crux of the matter: what exactly is it that the conservative seeks to conserve? Conservatives offer two answers: humanity (Russell Kirk) and reality (Richard M. Weaver). Clearly, Weaver’s answer is the more comprehensive and most satisfying. However, since we are human beings, that part of reality with which we are most concerned is humanity. Moreover, the greatest threat to non-human reality is the dehumanization of mankind itself. Conservatives seek to conserve humanity.

In reply, I wrote:

… Aristotelian metaphysics has been purged from the sciences for good reason: telos and essences are suspect and do little legitimate work. Consider essences in species concepts (fixed forms) vs. modern biological understanding of species, or Aristotle’s explanation for falling bodies. Similarly, the use of essences and teleological talk in political discourse is questionable. After all, it has been used in the past to justify many wrongs (slavery, the subjugation of women).

You say that the essence of conservatism is to conserve humanity; no doubt you have a picture of what the essence of humanity is that needs to be preserved. What is and how it is justified is very important.

John has correctly zeroed in on the crucial issue: has science rendered Aristotle's metaphysics obsolete? This is, I think, the fundamental issue dividing conservatives and others. Not surprisingly, I think the reports of the demise of essence and telos are somewhat exaggerated.

Unfortunately, he did not provide any arguments, so I asked for them:

What do consider the telos/essence of human's as opposed to other animals and women as opposed to men? How may we justify such claims without committing the naturalistic, or some other, fallacy? Even if nature “assigns” us some function, why should we follow?

I am genuinely curious.

These were just a few exchanges, but they are pretty representative—the contentious claims have been merely asserted and not well argued. When argued for, they too often consist of straw-manning (see Scruton’s ridiculously simplistic review of Singer) or appeal to contentious evidence (see Burton’s lament about the Difference Principle dragging-down bright kids). Also, there are racist and social Darwinist tones to some of the posts and comments.

The history of some of the authors is disquieting (as vitriolicly noted by P.Z. Myers). Edward Feser has put forth dubious Horowitz-style arguments on the excrible Tech Central Station:

Whatever bland official statement of purpose might appear in the introduction to a modern university's college catalog, its true raison d'etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture, to "do dirt" on the faith of his fathers, on his country, and on what most human beings have historically understood to be the imperatives of decency. It is, in short, to propagate Leftism.

Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature.

It is important to note that these affiliations don’t invalidate their arguments, but it does shed light on their possible agendas.

There is danger in complacency, and it would be a great service to progressives to have a high quality source for conservative arguments to sharpen their wits on. While Right Reason is closer to this ideal than The Conservative Philosopher, it has not yet delivered on its promised “powerful, philosophical defense” of conservatism.

• (Currently Reading) The Character of Physical Law, Richard Feynman *****
• (Currently Reading) Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman ****
• (Re-read) Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life, Warren Ellis *****
• The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity, Amir Aczel ****
• The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown **
• I'm a Stranger Here Myself, Bill Bryson ***
• (Re-read) Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street, Warren Ellis *****
• Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, Robert Wright ****
• Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor Category, Dave Eggers, et al ed. ****
• The Final Solution, Michael Chabon ****
• The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco *****
• Wonderboys, Michael Chabon ****
• (Re-read) Watchmen, Alan Moore *****
• The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3), Neal Stephenson *****

Learning, Simplicity, Truth, and Misinformation, Kevin Kelly

This manuscript comes closest to my current thinking about method and draws some systematic contrasts between learning theory and more standard approaches in statistics and information theory. It is my most frank paper, perhaps to a fault. It is written for a volume on the philosophy of information and was presented at the First International Workshop on the Philosophy of Information. It will eventually be the chapter on Information and Learning. I argue that standard statistical and information theoretical attempts to explain Ockham's razor fall short of the mark. It also presents my most recent ideas about how to explain it. At the end, I recommend dropping the word "information" from all discussions of learning and induction.

We have been discussing this issue since we met last fall. I am convinced that his positive account of Ockham's razor is the only decent justification around. It also happens to be my thesis topic.

Many more interesting papers on similar topics can be found here.

A few of these have been around for a while, but they deserve some airing.

• As featured on Nova's Science NOW: Arthur Ganson and his enchanting machines.
• Mixing Memory posts on neuroaesthetic in The Cognitive Science of Art Principles I-III and IV-X.
• The Grey Album by DJ Dangermouse is a hip-trip Beatles/Jay Z mix well worth the download time.
• Print your own cryptological scourge with the Paper Enigma Machine.

We ought to say to campuses, it’s over…We should say to state legislatures, why are you making us pay for this? Boards of regents are artificial constructs of state law. Tenure is an artificial social construct. Tenure did not exist before the twentieth century, and we had free speech before then. You could introduce a bill that says, proof that you’re anti-American is grounds for dismissal. [More]

While we’re at it we might as well resurrect HUAC. (via Leiter Reports)
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