Shut your whore mouth!

The reason one needs philosophy to deal with these questions is that the discussions are never really about the issue at hand, but about the nature of truth, knowledge, objectivity, etc. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is mainly a book about how math can be universally true when experiential knowledge isn't. Something similar could be said for Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, though he's willing to throw away the special status of some knowledge to argue for the truth of empiricism as a methodology.

I don't care much for philosophers like Kierkegaard and Sartre; I view philosophy as more like a field continuous with science than a guide to living in the world. That said, I consider "ethics" and "political philosophy" as legitimate areas of philosophical inquiry, just not ones that I find personally compelling. And the kind of stuff normal people think are the subject of ethics and political philosophy is rarely what philosophers think. See, e.g., Rawl's Theory of Justice, the table of contents of which are pasted below. I find this stuff interesting and would like to discuss it, but as a former PhD student at a top philosophy program, I know how deep one needs to go, and the background knowledge one needs to assume, to have an actually have a substantive argument. (Incidentally, I saw through google stalking that a former girlfriend, who is really, really smart, finally has job as a professor at a solid research university after taking 10 years or so to get through grad school and finish her PhD, basically the same as 2nd grade to 12th grade.)

Part One. Theory
Chapter I. Justice as Fairness
1. The Role of Justice
2. The Subject of Justice
3. The Main Idea of the Theory of Justice
4. The Original Position and Justification
5. Classical Utilitarianism
6. Some Related Contrasts
7. Intuitionism
8. The Priority Problem
9. Some Remarks about Moral Theory
Chapter II. The Principles of Justice
10. Institutions and Formal Justice
11. Two Principles of Justice
12. Interpretations of the Second Principle
13. Democratic Equality and the Difference Principle
14. Fair Equality of Opportunity and Pure Procedural Justice
15. Primary Social Goods as the Basis of Expectations
16. Relevant Social Positions
17. The Tendency to Equality
18. Principles for Individuals: The Principle of Fairness
19. Principles for Individuals: The Natural Duties
Chapter III. The Original Position
20. The Nature of the Argument for Conceptions of Justice
21. The Presentation of Alternatives
22. The Circumstances of Justice
23. The Formal Constraints of the Concept of Right
24. The Veil of Ignorance
25. The Rationality of the Parties
26. The Reasoning Leading to the Two Principles of Justice
27. The Reasoning Leading to the Principle of Average Utility
28. Some Difficulties with the Average Principle
29. Some Main Grounds for the Two Principles of Justice
30. Classical Utilitarianism, Impartiality, and Benevolence
Part Two. Institutions
Chapter IV. Equal Liberty
31. The Four-Stage Sequence
32. The Concept of Liberty
33. Equal Liberty of Conscience
34. Toleration and the Common Interest
35. Toleration of the Intolerant
36. Political Justice and the Constitution
37. Limitations on the Principle of Participation
38. The Rule of Law
39. The Priority of Liberty Defined
40. The Kantian Interpretation of Justice as Fairness
Chapter V. Distributive Shares
41. The Concept of Justice in Political Economy
42. Some Remarks about Economic Systems
43. Background Institutions for Distributive Justice
44. The Problem of Justice between Generations
45. Time Preference
46. Further Cases of Priority
47. The Precepts of Justice
48. Legitimate Expectations and Moral Desert
49. Comparison with Mixed Conceptions
50. The Principle of Perfection
Chapter VI. Duty and Obligation
51. The Arguments for the Principles of Natural Duty
52. The Arguments for the Principle of Fairness
53. The Duty to Comply with an Unjust Law
54. The Status of Majority Rule
55. The Definition of Civil Disobedience
56. The Definition of Conscientious Refusal
57. The Justification of Civil Disobedience
58. The Justification of Conscientious Refusal
59. The Role of Civil Disobedience
Part Three. Ends
Chapter VII. Goodness and Rationality
60. The Need for a Theory of the Good
61. The Definition of Good for Simpler Cases
62. A Note on Meaning
63. The Definition of Good for Plans of Life
64. Deliberative Rationality
65. The Aristotelian Principle
66. The Definition of Good Applied to Persons
67. Self-Respect, Excellences, and Shame
68. Several Contrasts between the Right and the Good
Chapter VIII. The Sense of Justice
69. The Concept of a Well-Ordered Society
70. The Morality of Authority
71. The Morality of Association
72. The Morality of Principles
73. Features of the Moral Sentiments
74. The Connection between Moral and Natural Attitudes
75. The Principles of Moral Psychology
76. The Problem of Relative Stability
77. The Basis of Equality
Chapter IX. The Good of Justice
78. Autonomy and Objectivity
79. The Idea of Social Union
80. The Problem of Envy
81. Envy and Equality
82. The Grounds for the Priority of Liberty
83. Happiness and Dominant Ends
84. Hedonism as a Method of Choice
85. The Unity of the Self
86. The Good of the Sense of Justice
87. Concluding Remarks on Justification

(600 pages total)

Bob,

Permanent occupation? The Ruskies are out of Germany, but we still have 35k troops there. Ok, I know at some point they were there mostly for other reasons. But, I'd hesistate to give us too much credit for intentionally solving their problem. I think what we really did for them and Japan was give them space to be non-militaristic. The objective wasn't really to create societies that embraced peace, especially when they ended up protesting our militance, but that's what happens when you don't live with the perpetual drum beat.

A better explanation of the Harris/Klein spat. I didn't realize the email exchange was almost a year ago and Harris kept the emails as, in his mind, blackmail to attempt to prevent Klein from publishing anything about Harris.

https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/c..._ezra/dweo8ll/

You mean the small businesses that the large brick and mortar stores put out of business because of their buying power?

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/sta...27168729751552

Most upvoted comment shows that Harris fans are not exactly slappies: "How dense can Sam be to think a discussion with Ezra is "boring" and "unproductive," yet he has a multi-city tour with Peterson?!"

https://twitter.com/mpigliucci/statu...30280693567490

It's kind of shocking how much the reddit members are taking him to task for this. I mean it's almost unanimously agreed by his own fans that Sam ****ed up.

I figured that his subreddit would be filled with cultists and apologists but it's almost the complete opposite.

https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/979032888271429645

That Harris/Chomsky interchange is truly amazing, the best thing I have read this week. Does Sam Harris suffer from some sort of brain damage? That **** isn't normal.

In before Amazon is granted a utility patent on slave labor.

Classic goofy Marco ha ha ha never lets a lack of knowledge stop him from taking a strong position and speaking his mind on an issue. God love him, that good 'ole boy.

https://twitter.com/darth/status/979035193578110977

Sam has gone the route most other public intellectuals do: they think they are an expert on everything because they're an expert on something.

Even crazier is that the mother****er is still refusing to let this go. He posted an article that supposedly supports Murray's racial science claims. For a guy who claims not to be interested in it, he seems very invested in defending Murray. I'm actually becoming pretty disgusted by it.

And a lot of people grant them that universal expertise.

The Halo Effect

Heh, yeah, doesn't a good night's sleep usually help people make better decisions the next day?

Yesterday:



Today:

That's a funny way to not be interested in racial differences.

A hot take from Vox is the last thing anyone should take seriously. It's Hannity-left

Scientific research that predicts outcomes and is replicated through countless experiments is something that should be taken seriously. IQ testing isn't "dodgy". The statement is absolutely absurd.

Both Murray and Harris explain that the results from IQ testing and race are a crystal clear demonstration to not be racist. To be clear, Murray's work and stance (which Harris agrees with) is that prejudging someones IQ based on race is idiotic and counterproductive. If you can't figure that out, well slow down with the assumption that you're more clever than the actual expert and get back to learning

The idea of race being a social construct is also a strange claim. Race is based on evolution. I'm not sure if you believe the theory of evolution is also "dodgy". How we categorize and determine race can be a social construct but the concept of race itself is evolution. Peoples skin color is obviously related to sunlight in the environment they have evolved in, that's not a social construct.

Thanks, interesting read, I'm curious on the details of how this works. From the article:

Why did Toys R Us (or other retail companies in this position) sell off to begin with? For what purpose did their new owners add all this debt? How do private equity companies come away from this in the black after buying a company and running it into the ground?

If this is a matter of evolutionary science then I move it be relocated to SMP.

SMP or /dev/null

I think they were a public company.

They borrow the money to buy the company then transfer all the debt to the company. Then they service the debt for a little while and spend the rest on dividends to themselves

Limited liability baby!

I tanked the SAT, a fact I have always blamed on the test weirdly being administered in an Abercrombie and Fitch outlet.

1. The owners of Toys R Us sold out because they were offered lots of money by the private equity group.

2. The private equity group arranged the debt to pay most of the purchase price so their equity investors would have to put up less capital.

3. The private equity companies probably lost a huge amount of money. Their equity investment (which was smaller than the debt piece, but still more than a billion dollars) gets zeroed out in bankruptcy.

EDIT: The claim that Toys R Us is a fundamentally fine business deserves some skepticism. For one, it's a B&M retailer. (The vulture metaphor is illuminating here... Vultures don't swoop out of the sky and eat healthy prey, they eat things that are dead and dying.) For two, the whole concept of the bankruptcy system is that if a business has too much debt, the courts let it go bankrupt, write off a bunch of the debt (and burdensome contracts) and come out as a new business. The trade is that the business is then owned by the creditors and not the former shareholders. For the company to move into liquidation (basically selling all its stuff and giving the money to creditors) means that either the system broke down or the creditors concluded that they could get more money from the business by selling it for parts than by writing off the debts and keeping the business running.