Isn't all of this evident for someone who pays attention on X? I don't think I saw an original argument or insight here.
As for Chauvin and Floyd, that claim looks like Gell-Mann amnesia to me. It's not clear to me that Chauvin made any difference: Floyd had a lethal dose of fentanyl in his system and we don't have the counterfactual - he could easily have died in the back of the police car.
I found Huemer through Caplan, and now read much more Huemer than Caplan. Both, like all human beings, have their flaws, but are also great. Huemer rarely misses, and that's hard to find for someone who produces as much output as he does.
"The IPCC projects that an excess 250,000 people will die annually worldwide." I hope that Michael goes on to point out all the lives that are SAVED by warming and by more CO2. If not, that's a serious lack. Overall, it looks highly likely that warming & more CO2 will save lives.
Among Michael Huemer's books I've read are the four you mention. He's my favorite living philosopher. I'm surprised at Tyler Cowen's response to"Progressive Myths." I agree with you about the book. I had previously fallen for a few of those myths.
Which ones? Just curious, as reading the chapter titles and Bryan's review, I can't see anything that would have been persuasive from the start. I think of a lot of that stuff as things people pick up if they don't really follow the news rather than stuff they are committed to. That's actually why it doesn't seem interesting to me, though maybe it ties it all together in an interesting and insightful way.
Sean, I’d have to see the list again to remember which ones I once believed; it’s been quite a while. My comment was directed to Caplan; it wasn't intended to open a long discussion thread…but thanks for the curiosity.
Thanks for the reading recommendation Bryan. Fortunately Huemer and the rest of the world face immense competition from other authors. There is currently a deluge of recommended reading. Knowing who to read next is now more important than ever. Unfortunately Huemer's posts regarding Trump over the past few months make me somewhat untrustworthy of him. Caplan on the other hand didn't make any mistakes blogging about Trump during the election. One point Bryan. I still trust Bryan Caplan and will continue to read his work, but I'm skeptical of some of his reading recommendations. Huemer has fallen a notch or two in my pile of things to read next. Sorry for the poor review, but I'm just here to tell the truth. Shall I get into your recommendation to read Hanania or should I save that for another time?
What do you find problematic with Huemer's arguments against Trump? You can be skeptical about Trump doing something significant against democracy again, but there's a strong case proving he made a significant effort to stay in power in the last election even when he lost.
He was being unbalanced because that was a reasonable position to take. He was trying to be objective, not neutral just like for this book. Trump really is uniquely bad
Some of Huemer's comments verged into the propaganda region. I ought to go find a direct quote, but I am too lazy.
I am thinking of a vague claim that would pass the “objective” fact checkers but clearly attempts to connote more than it literally says. Discussing Trump, H said something like a court had held him liable for sexual assault. So far as I know, Trump has not been convicted or even tried or officially charged with sexual assault. If I had carefully followed the details of the case (I assume it is the porn star thing?), I would know exactly what Huemer is talking about. As it is I do not. Someone paying less attention could easily believe that the accusation is that Trump was convicted of something. If it really is worth mentioning, it seems like it is worth mentioning in a clearer way. If what Trump has actually done is bad enough, exaggerating it or vaguely mis-specifying it to sound worse just sacrifices credibility. If it is not, well, that makes matters worse. I no longer know who to believe when Trump is discussed. His enemies all exaggerate, his allies all minimize, and everyone else is justifiably confused.
That said, Huemer is well worth reading, and one of the top living libertarian philosophers. For me, there is no higher praise for a philosopher. This just illustrates that even the best make mistakes.
The problem is that by the time you get around to debunking the current set of myths, "progressives" have moved on already to lapping up a whole new load of nonsense.
To qualify as the "best book on wokeness," it really ought to spell out the irrational ideological presumptions underpinning how "progressives" and allied collectivist intellectual traditions manufacture their myths, and what sort of psychological and intellectual weaknesses such myths exploit. It then should move on to outlining the intellectual history of "progressive" and related movements to explain how we got to today's wokeness.
*Progressive Myths* sounds like a book that I would very much enjoy. I was so intrigued by the description of this book that I decided to have a look at *Ethical Intuitionism* or, at least the preview on Amazon, as the psychology of morality is one of my specialties. Unfortunately, I was terribly disappointed by Huemer's dismissal of non-cognitivism, which I find the most persuasive meta-ethical position. What is Huemer's main argument that moral statements that are indicative, truth-apt propositions rather than non-truth-apt emotional interjections or imperatives? He says that moral pronouncements represent moral truths because ordinary people have strong, intuitive feelings that their beliefs are moral truths. I'm sorry, but people have strong feelings about many things being true that are not. Ordinary people's strong intuitions about physics, evolution, probabilities, and many more phenomena are way off base. The same is true for intuitions about many psychological phenomena, including morality. Huemer claims that we should accept ordinary intuitions as valid unless we have an explanation for why they would be invalid. Well, I do. I think the invalid intuition that moral truths exist makes people more persuasive in their moral argumentation. Claiming that you should do X because "X is good" is a moral truth is probably more persuasive than claiming that you should do X because "X feels good to me" or "I order you to do X." We know that self-deception helps to make people more convincing, hence the self-deceived belief that one is in possession of moral truth.
Non-cognitivism suffers from a notorious objection called the Frege-Geach problem that he endorses. It’s a compelling objection, and non-cognitivism isn’t this super obvious position that you’re implying it is. He also doesn’t think moral claims are strong intuitively feelings, just strong intuitions like any other a priori intuition. The book goes into more detail.
I am a psychologist, not a philosopher, so perhaps I shouldn’t be getting involved in philosophical arguments. As a psychologist, I am more interested in language pragmatics than semantics. My working assumption is that language in general, and particularly moral language, evolved as a tool used by human beings to influence each others’ behaviors. While it is possible for someone to utter a purely descriptive proposition without an associated explicit or tacit agenda for influencing another person’s behavior, I think such utterances are extremely rare, existing perhaps only in the realm of philosophy and science. Even in those cases, once the philosopher or scientist tries to convince others of the truth of the proposition, pragmatics come into play. So, yes, Frege-Geach identifies a rarified case in which moral statements are treated as if they are propositions in conditional contexts. For me that is totally irrelevant to the way that moral emotions and language evolved through natural selection as a way to regulate and coordinate behavior in our species.
Is there something different about the evolution of factual claims? In that case at least, although language can certainly be used factually to manipulate others, it seems that factual claims can be true or false (but not both or neither) and that i(in those cases) it might be true that knowing the truth might be more useful than believing what is false. Hence we can argue about factual claims when there is a fact of the matter, and show evidence, etc., and it is not purely a power struggle. Why would this be different in the case of moral claims?
Depending on the purpose of making a factual claim, it may or may not serve the same function as making a moral claim. If there is an implicit "should" to a factual claim, it functions just like a moral claim. For example, "It is 0 degrees outside" can imply "You should put on your winter coat if you go outside."
My expectation is that Tyler will be correct. This book is likely just preaching to the choir. How many progressives will pick up a book that challenges their world view? I'm not saying that conservatives, libertarians, populists, or anyone else would but this book probably won't reach it's intended audience. Maybe it can make non-progressives better debaters.
I'm going to challenge my left-leaning family members to read this book in exchange for reading one of their choosing. I think they will be more receptive to this style of book than an explicitly right-wing takedown of progressive ideology.
I suspect your left-leaning family members will be as unwilling to give this book a fair reading as I was The Bible, when my newly-converted Baptist friend tried to get me to read the damn thing. Even if I had read it, it would have been with a jaundiced eye, constantly looking for things to pick holes with. Still, good luck anyway.
I actually just read a review by Arnold Kling of Progressive Myths and though he was positive, he found two things to gripe about which are non-trivial. One is that Huemer attributes today’s focus on social justice to the leaders of the Rights Movement being unwilling to give up the fight, despite having won it decades ago. Kling thinks it more likely that social justice warriors see the race gap in life outcomes and conclude our society must still be racist. These two views are not the same and the latter strikes me as being more likely.
The second thing Kling points out is that Huemer doesn’t address the black-white IQ gap, which someone like Nathan Cofnas would probably claim is at the bottom of all our disagreements with progressive liberals.
For someone who is probably not as well read as many of your subscribers I found this essay quite as worthwhile and enlightening as I did the comments.
To take an example, "believe women" DOES mean "look into it." In the Kavanaugh hearing a woman accused him of groping her many years ago. Without knowing anything else, one would expect the woman to remember the experience more than the man. And the man had more reason to lie than the woman. But these are ultimately only reasons for the Senate Panel to "look into it." but instead they just "believed the man."
Sex differences in criminal offending actually don't explain sex differences in being fatally shot by police. If you look at racial gaps in being fatally shot by police, these are explained almost perfectly by racial gaps in arrest rates. However, men are only arrested three times as often as women (4x for violent crimes and 10x for homicide), but are killed by police 20 times as often as women!
Now, to be fair to police, it's entirely possible that this is explained by, e.g., men being more likely to act in a way that justifies shooting but doesn't show up in the available data. One clue is that men actually do kill police officers 20 times as often as women.
But it is interesting that the left threw a giant, enormously destructive temper tantrum over racial gaps that can easily be explained by differences in criminal offending while totally ignoring the gender gap that can't.
I love this book but I agree with Tyler. Reasonable minds will be the only ones who read this book. Some opponents may, but only to use it piecemeal against Huemer. The sheeple will continue to go along to get along. The hive mind is for most incurious people their stasis. This book will however arm the few minds who do still ask questions about reality and who always demand answers and evidence to explain it. Just another great book that will be used a hundred or more years from now to show that we simply ignored the facts and denied reason and turned a blind eye as our civilization fell into chaos and ruin.
“I am not the sort of writer who likes to *imply* his point.” A priceless sentence!
I don't know, this is coming awfully close to veneration.
Isn't all of this evident for someone who pays attention on X? I don't think I saw an original argument or insight here.
As for Chauvin and Floyd, that claim looks like Gell-Mann amnesia to me. It's not clear to me that Chauvin made any difference: Floyd had a lethal dose of fentanyl in his system and we don't have the counterfactual - he could easily have died in the back of the police car.
a lethal dose for a first time user or a lethal dose for an active user?
because i'm pretty sure this wasn't floyds first rodeo.
Read the original autopsy.
I have read that Chauvin (accidentally, culpably) asphyxiated Floyd by preventing him from expanding his lungs. Might have been George Will, or ...
I'm not convinced Floyd would have died from his OD, BUT he might have.
I found Huemer through Caplan, and now read much more Huemer than Caplan. Both, like all human beings, have their flaws, but are also great. Huemer rarely misses, and that's hard to find for someone who produces as much output as he does.
"The IPCC projects that an excess 250,000 people will die annually worldwide." I hope that Michael goes on to point out all the lives that are SAVED by warming and by more CO2. If not, that's a serious lack. Overall, it looks highly likely that warming & more CO2 will save lives.
AFAIK he discusses David Friedman’s work on this and agrees that evidence that global warming is bad isn’t really that strong
Among Michael Huemer's books I've read are the four you mention. He's my favorite living philosopher. I'm surprised at Tyler Cowen's response to"Progressive Myths." I agree with you about the book. I had previously fallen for a few of those myths.
Which ones? Just curious, as reading the chapter titles and Bryan's review, I can't see anything that would have been persuasive from the start. I think of a lot of that stuff as things people pick up if they don't really follow the news rather than stuff they are committed to. That's actually why it doesn't seem interesting to me, though maybe it ties it all together in an interesting and insightful way.
Sean, I’d have to see the list again to remember which ones I once believed; it’s been quite a while. My comment was directed to Caplan; it wasn't intended to open a long discussion thread…but thanks for the curiosity.
Thanks for the reading recommendation Bryan. Fortunately Huemer and the rest of the world face immense competition from other authors. There is currently a deluge of recommended reading. Knowing who to read next is now more important than ever. Unfortunately Huemer's posts regarding Trump over the past few months make me somewhat untrustworthy of him. Caplan on the other hand didn't make any mistakes blogging about Trump during the election. One point Bryan. I still trust Bryan Caplan and will continue to read his work, but I'm skeptical of some of his reading recommendations. Huemer has fallen a notch or two in my pile of things to read next. Sorry for the poor review, but I'm just here to tell the truth. Shall I get into your recommendation to read Hanania or should I save that for another time?
What do you find problematic with Huemer's arguments against Trump? You can be skeptical about Trump doing something significant against democracy again, but there's a strong case proving he made a significant effort to stay in power in the last election even when he lost.
The magnitude, scope and threat of the alleged attempted coup doesn’t manifest feelings of significant concern in me or a majority of voters.
Okay, so what? The point is that it should. An authoritarian trying to forcibly stay in power is really bad.
"The point is that it should. An authoritarian trying to forcibly stay in power is really bad."
"Should" according to an ideal. But reality causes us to ask, "Ask compared to what?"
I feel the same way. Huemer's insufficiently balanced anti-Trump stuff was off-putting.
He was being unbalanced because that was a reasonable position to take. He was trying to be objective, not neutral just like for this book. Trump really is uniquely bad
Some of Huemer's comments verged into the propaganda region. I ought to go find a direct quote, but I am too lazy.
I am thinking of a vague claim that would pass the “objective” fact checkers but clearly attempts to connote more than it literally says. Discussing Trump, H said something like a court had held him liable for sexual assault. So far as I know, Trump has not been convicted or even tried or officially charged with sexual assault. If I had carefully followed the details of the case (I assume it is the porn star thing?), I would know exactly what Huemer is talking about. As it is I do not. Someone paying less attention could easily believe that the accusation is that Trump was convicted of something. If it really is worth mentioning, it seems like it is worth mentioning in a clearer way. If what Trump has actually done is bad enough, exaggerating it or vaguely mis-specifying it to sound worse just sacrifices credibility. If it is not, well, that makes matters worse. I no longer know who to believe when Trump is discussed. His enemies all exaggerate, his allies all minimize, and everyone else is justifiably confused.
That said, Huemer is well worth reading, and one of the top living libertarian philosophers. For me, there is no higher praise for a philosopher. This just illustrates that even the best make mistakes.
The problem is that by the time you get around to debunking the current set of myths, "progressives" have moved on already to lapping up a whole new load of nonsense.
To qualify as the "best book on wokeness," it really ought to spell out the irrational ideological presumptions underpinning how "progressives" and allied collectivist intellectual traditions manufacture their myths, and what sort of psychological and intellectual weaknesses such myths exploit. It then should move on to outlining the intellectual history of "progressive" and related movements to explain how we got to today's wokeness.
*Progressive Myths* sounds like a book that I would very much enjoy. I was so intrigued by the description of this book that I decided to have a look at *Ethical Intuitionism* or, at least the preview on Amazon, as the psychology of morality is one of my specialties. Unfortunately, I was terribly disappointed by Huemer's dismissal of non-cognitivism, which I find the most persuasive meta-ethical position. What is Huemer's main argument that moral statements that are indicative, truth-apt propositions rather than non-truth-apt emotional interjections or imperatives? He says that moral pronouncements represent moral truths because ordinary people have strong, intuitive feelings that their beliefs are moral truths. I'm sorry, but people have strong feelings about many things being true that are not. Ordinary people's strong intuitions about physics, evolution, probabilities, and many more phenomena are way off base. The same is true for intuitions about many psychological phenomena, including morality. Huemer claims that we should accept ordinary intuitions as valid unless we have an explanation for why they would be invalid. Well, I do. I think the invalid intuition that moral truths exist makes people more persuasive in their moral argumentation. Claiming that you should do X because "X is good" is a moral truth is probably more persuasive than claiming that you should do X because "X feels good to me" or "I order you to do X." We know that self-deception helps to make people more convincing, hence the self-deceived belief that one is in possession of moral truth.
Non-cognitivism suffers from a notorious objection called the Frege-Geach problem that he endorses. It’s a compelling objection, and non-cognitivism isn’t this super obvious position that you’re implying it is. He also doesn’t think moral claims are strong intuitively feelings, just strong intuitions like any other a priori intuition. The book goes into more detail.
I am a psychologist, not a philosopher, so perhaps I shouldn’t be getting involved in philosophical arguments. As a psychologist, I am more interested in language pragmatics than semantics. My working assumption is that language in general, and particularly moral language, evolved as a tool used by human beings to influence each others’ behaviors. While it is possible for someone to utter a purely descriptive proposition without an associated explicit or tacit agenda for influencing another person’s behavior, I think such utterances are extremely rare, existing perhaps only in the realm of philosophy and science. Even in those cases, once the philosopher or scientist tries to convince others of the truth of the proposition, pragmatics come into play. So, yes, Frege-Geach identifies a rarified case in which moral statements are treated as if they are propositions in conditional contexts. For me that is totally irrelevant to the way that moral emotions and language evolved through natural selection as a way to regulate and coordinate behavior in our species.
Is there something different about the evolution of factual claims? In that case at least, although language can certainly be used factually to manipulate others, it seems that factual claims can be true or false (but not both or neither) and that i(in those cases) it might be true that knowing the truth might be more useful than believing what is false. Hence we can argue about factual claims when there is a fact of the matter, and show evidence, etc., and it is not purely a power struggle. Why would this be different in the case of moral claims?
Depending on the purpose of making a factual claim, it may or may not serve the same function as making a moral claim. If there is an implicit "should" to a factual claim, it functions just like a moral claim. For example, "It is 0 degrees outside" can imply "You should put on your winter coat if you go outside."
Find an illegal copy and read Chapter 2. There he devoted about 30 pages to non-cognitivist alternatives.
My expectation is that Tyler will be correct. This book is likely just preaching to the choir. How many progressives will pick up a book that challenges their world view? I'm not saying that conservatives, libertarians, populists, or anyone else would but this book probably won't reach it's intended audience. Maybe it can make non-progressives better debaters.
I'm going to challenge my left-leaning family members to read this book in exchange for reading one of their choosing. I think they will be more receptive to this style of book than an explicitly right-wing takedown of progressive ideology.
I suspect your left-leaning family members will be as unwilling to give this book a fair reading as I was The Bible, when my newly-converted Baptist friend tried to get me to read the damn thing. Even if I had read it, it would have been with a jaundiced eye, constantly looking for things to pick holes with. Still, good luck anyway.
I actually just read a review by Arnold Kling of Progressive Myths and though he was positive, he found two things to gripe about which are non-trivial. One is that Huemer attributes today’s focus on social justice to the leaders of the Rights Movement being unwilling to give up the fight, despite having won it decades ago. Kling thinks it more likely that social justice warriors see the race gap in life outcomes and conclude our society must still be racist. These two views are not the same and the latter strikes me as being more likely.
The second thing Kling points out is that Huemer doesn’t address the black-white IQ gap, which someone like Nathan Cofnas would probably claim is at the bottom of all our disagreements with progressive liberals.
For someone who is probably not as well read as many of your subscribers I found this essay quite as worthwhile and enlightening as I did the comments.
THAT good, huh? That would've been before MY comments, so you can take that last part back, if you like.
To take an example, "believe women" DOES mean "look into it." In the Kavanaugh hearing a woman accused him of groping her many years ago. Without knowing anything else, one would expect the woman to remember the experience more than the man. And the man had more reason to lie than the woman. But these are ultimately only reasons for the Senate Panel to "look into it." but instead they just "believed the man."
Sex differences in criminal offending actually don't explain sex differences in being fatally shot by police. If you look at racial gaps in being fatally shot by police, these are explained almost perfectly by racial gaps in arrest rates. However, men are only arrested three times as often as women (4x for violent crimes and 10x for homicide), but are killed by police 20 times as often as women!
Now, to be fair to police, it's entirely possible that this is explained by, e.g., men being more likely to act in a way that justifies shooting but doesn't show up in the available data. One clue is that men actually do kill police officers 20 times as often as women.
But it is interesting that the left threw a giant, enormously destructive temper tantrum over racial gaps that can easily be explained by differences in criminal offending while totally ignoring the gender gap that can't.
"Huemer’s Knowledge, Reality, and Value is the best introduction to philosophy."
I gotta disagree; I side with "Philosophy: a complete introduction" by Sharon Kaye.
I love this book but I agree with Tyler. Reasonable minds will be the only ones who read this book. Some opponents may, but only to use it piecemeal against Huemer. The sheeple will continue to go along to get along. The hive mind is for most incurious people their stasis. This book will however arm the few minds who do still ask questions about reality and who always demand answers and evidence to explain it. Just another great book that will be used a hundred or more years from now to show that we simply ignored the facts and denied reason and turned a blind eye as our civilization fell into chaos and ruin.
I havnt read diangelos book ”white fragility”, but based on some second hand readons on her she seems to have symptoms of cptsd
and also be doing the opposite of healthy therapy practices.