So they get our freedom of speech, conscience, and association, along with our money and our moral support, and, in return, we get a tweet from their half-ousted Prime Minister. Sounds like the Deal of the Century. Actually, sounds like the deal of the last century, too.

Another head-scratcher from Jason Brennan’s BHL piece on meta-philosophy (timestamp: 10:16 am, February 12, 2020):

Second, what people believe tends to depend a great deal on who their advisors were. People who go to Harvard tend to come out Kantians of some sort. People who go to Arizona tend to come out Gaussian contractualists or Schmidtzean pluralists. Now, some of this is due to selection–the Kantians are more likely to apply to Harvard than, say, consequentialist ANU. Part of it, though, is that when you attend a program with people who defend X, you encounter much better arguments for X and weaker arguments for other positions. But this seems to a rather unreliable mechanism for changing your beliefs. A Guassian contractualist like Kevin would have ended up believing something else had he gone to a different program. Is it just lucky for him he attended Arizona and not Harvard? Is it just lucky for him that he had Gaus as an advisor instead of Christiano, Schmidtz, Wall, Pincione, or someone else?

Isn’t this the kind of claim that requires bona fide empirical support? I don’t see any here. I just see Brennan recording his quasi-empirical impressions of a handful of institutions, followed by a gigantic epistemic generalization about the whole profession. Forget selection versus treatment effects. A treatment effect presupposes an effect. Not obvious there is one. Continue reading →

From a recent contribution by Jason Brennan to the ongoing polemic between Michael Huemer and Kevin Vallier on the history of philosophy (as posted at BHL at 2:45 pm, February 11, 2020):

Context: Michael Huemer claims that the “great” philosophers are usually bad thinkers. They defend implausible ideas with bad arguments.

Vallier responds that the great philosophers are like architects. Their great achievement is that they build coherent systems of thought.

I’m not much convinced by Vallier’s response in part because, when I studied the history of philosophy or read papers in the field, it seems that the “greats” often have incoherent systems. A large number of published papers on the greats, and good number of the classes, take the form of “Great Thinkers says X here and Y here, but X and Y are seemingly incompatible. Let me try to figure out a way to spin X and Y to render then coherent.”

Don’t really see how the intended conclusion follows.

Continue reading →

Louis Jacobson, Politifact, January 4, 2018:

In a statement on Jan. 3, 2018, announcing his decision to disband the commission, Trump said, “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry. Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action.”

PolitiFact is separately checking a different assertion by Trump, that “mostly Democrat states refused to hand over data” to the commission. In this fact-check, we’re looking at whether Trump is correct that there is “substantial evidence of voter fraud.”

This is hardly the first time Trump has made an assertion of this sort. He has repeatedly claimed the existence of massive voter fraud and election rigging, which we’ve debunked again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

Trump has not yet produced any evidence that supports these claims, and the White House did not respond to another request for this article.

Continue reading →

I love the Democratic Party. I love it with the ardent zeal of an apostate Republican. But some days I wonder.

Many of my friends and comrades are Bernie Sibs dearly in love with the ideals of “democratic socialism.” There used to be a time when you weren’t allowed to use the word “socialism” in American discourse. Now, the neo-liberal corporate sellout media is cashing in on it. And if you’re not a democratic socialist–you don’t want free tuition, free health care, free subway rides, free everything, etc.–well, then from a Bernie standpoint it’s pretty obvious that you stand with the plutocratic 99%. And trashing Hillary Clinton–something I’m only too happy to do–doesn’t give you any points with this crowd. As far as they’re concerned, it’s either dirigisme or oligarchy. Continue reading →