Category: Philosophy

Bullshit Is Worse Than a Lie

(p. A17) Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.

The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.

Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

. . .

For all this sang-froid, Professor Frankfurt was heartfelt in his philosophical pursuits. Throughout his career, he was drawn to lines of inquiry — about freedom, love, selfhood and purpose — that he said appealed to him not only as an academic but also “as a human being trying to cope in a modestly systematic manner with the ordinary difficulties of a thoughtful life.”

For the full obituary, see:

James Ryerson. “Harry G. Frankfurt, a Philosopher Eager to Cut the Bull, Dies at 94.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 18, 2023): A17.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 17, 2023, and has the title “Harry G. Frankfurt, Philosopher With a Surprise Best Seller, Dies at 94.”)

Frankfurt’s best-known book is:

Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Scientists Had Political Motives for Dismissing Wuhan Lab-Based Covid Origin

(p. A17) On March 17, 2020, the journal Nature Medicine published a paper by five scientists, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that dismissed “any type of laboratory based scenario” for the origin of the pandemic. It was cited by thousands of news outlets to claim that the virus emerged naturally. But Slack messages and emails subpoenaed and released by the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic suggest that some of the authors didn’t believe their own conclusions. Before, during and even after the publication of their paper, they worried privately that Covid-19 was caused by a laboratory escape, perhaps even of a genetically engineered virus.

. . .

On April 16, a month after publication, Mr. Andersen wrote that “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved” and “we also can’t fully rule out engineering”—i.e., that the virus not only was released from the lab but had been genetically manipulated there. He worried about the Wuhan lab’s research on live SARS-like viruses from bats at low biosafety levels: “it’s definitely concerning work, no question about it.”

So why did they publish a paper denying that laboratory origin was plausible? The answer may lie in their messages. In early February 2020, Mr. Rambaut wrote: “Given the s— show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content to ascribing it to natural processes.”

Mr. Andersen replied: “I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science—but it’s impossible not to.”

. . .

To adjust the conclusions in a scientific paper for political reasons isn’t part of the scientific process. The world was misled with serious consequences.

For the full commentary, see:

Matt Ridley and Alina Chan. “The Covid Lab-Leak Deception.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, July 27, 2023): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 26, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Scientist Latta Knows, but Cannot Prove, That Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Is Not Extinct

I respect and admire Dr. Latta for having the courage to affirm what he saw with his own two eyes. Other scientists should not be so quick to ‘give him the bird’ (so to speak ;).

(p. A19) If there’s new hope, it’s blurry. What’s certain: The roller coaster tale of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a majestic bird whose presumed extinction has been punctuated by a series of contested rediscoveries, is going strong.

The latest twist is a peer-reviewed study Thursday [May 18, 2023] in the journal Ecology and Evolution presenting sighting reports, audio recordings, trail camera images and drone video. Collected over the last decade in a Louisiana swamp forest, the precise location omitted for the birds’ protection, the authors write that the evidence suggests the “intermittent but repeated presence” of birds that look and behave like ivory-billed woodpeckers.

But are they?

“It’s this cumulative evidence from our multiyear search that leaves us very confident that this iconic species exists, and it persists in Louisiana and probably other places as well,” said Steven C. Latta, one of the study’s authors and director of conservation and field research at the National Aviary, a nonprofit bird zoo in Pittsburgh that helps lead a program that searches for the species.

But Dr. Latta acknowledges that no single piece of evidence is definitive, and the study is carefully tempered with words like “putative” and “possible.”

. . .

. . . Dr. Latta, the study co-author, insisted that he had seen one clearly with his own eyes. He was in the field in 2019 to set up recording units, and he figures he spooked the bird. As it flew up and away, he got a close, unimpeded view of its signature markings.

“I couldn’t sleep for, like, three days,” Dr. Latta said. “It was because I had this opportunity and I felt this responsibility to establish for the rest of the world, or at least the conservation world, that this bird actually does exist.”

For the full story, see:

Catrin Einhorn. “Experts Strive to Prove ‘This Bird Actually Does Exist’.” The New York Times (Friday, May 19, 2023): A19.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added. The online version of the article says that the print version appears on p. 21. My national edition of the print version appeared on p. 19.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated May 18, 2023, and has the title “A Vanished Bird Might Live On, or Not. The Video Is Grainy.”)

The peer-reviewed paper, co-authored by Latta and mentioned above, is:

Latta, Steven C., Mark A. Michaels, Thomas C. Michot, Peggy L. Shrum, Patricia Johnson, Jay Tischendorf, Michael Weeks, John Trochet, Don Scheifler, and Bob Ford. “Multiple Lines of Evidence Suggest the Persistence of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Campephilus Principalis) in Louisiana.” Ecology and Evolution 13, no. 5 (2023): e10017 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.10017.

An Hawaiian Wants Land She Can Own and Control, Even if Not in Hawaii

(p. 1) When Pauline Kauinani Souza was a child in Hawaii, she spent early mornings watering her grandfather’s watermelons and papaya trees.

Her family lived frugally, eating homemade bread and heating water over a fire for bathing. But the no-frills life came with the ultimate perk: living near the beach and drifting off to sleep at night to the sound of waves gently crashing on the shore.

Now, at 80, Ms. Souza lives in Las Vegas, a desert city of neon reinvention far from the ocean and her ancestral home. It is not paradise, but it is full of Native Hawaiians like her who have flocked there in recent years for the endless entertainment, reasonable cost of living and something few people can find in Hawaii: a house they can afford.

“I own it outright,” she said proudly of her two-bedroom, ranch-style home in Las Vegas. “In Hawaii, there aren’t many people who can say that.”

Increasingly, Las Vegas is drawing Hawaiians who came to visit and decided to stay, convinced that an affordable faux version of the islands is better than an endless struggle to make ends meet in the real thing.

Between 2011 and 2021, the population of Native Hawaiians and (p. 19) other Pacific Islanders in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, grew by about 40 percent, for a total of nearly 22,000 people. That was the greatest number of newcomers in that demographic in any county outside Hawaii, according to population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. In that same period, the total population of Clark County grew by about 17 percent.

For many, the draw is real estate: Houses in the Las Vegas area have a median listing price of about $460,000, compared with about $800,000 in Honolulu, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data.

Americans migrating for cheaper housing is not unusual, as seen most dramatically in the decades-long shift from the Northeast to the Sunbelt. But this migration from the impossibly lush natural landscape of the islands to the brash desert of Las Vegas is a particularly vivid glimpse of how the search for housing remakes the country in sometimes surprising ways.

. . .

In 2022, Hawaii had the highest cost of living out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to data from the Council for Community and Economic Research. The state imports the vast majority of its food, making everyday groceries especially expensive. And strict regulations on building have contributed to housing shortages and prices out of reach for many.

For the full story, see:

Eliza Fawcett and Hana Asano. “Priced Out of Paradise’ But Hawaiians Thrive in Desert.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, May 21, 2023): 1 & 19.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 20, 2023, and has the title “There’s No Ocean in Sight. But Many Hawaiians Make Las Vegas Their Home.” The online version says that the print version has the title “Desert Provides A New Paradise For Hawaiians” but my national print version has the title “They’re ‘Priced Out of Paradise’ But Hawaiians Thrive in Desert.”)

“France’s Most Famous Public Intellectual” Fears That if Putin Conquers Ukraine Western Civilization “Might Collapse”

(p. C1) In his new documentary film “Slava Ukraini,” Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most famous public intellectual, dodges Russian sniper fire in Ukraine, nonchalantly wearing a khaki bulletproof vest over a chic bespoke suit.

He climbs onto a Ukrainian naval vessel in Odessa that is sweeping the Black Sea for Russian mines, his mane of graying hair blowing gently in the wind. And he surveys blown-out apartment blocks in Kyiv, descends into trenches with Ukrainian soldiers in Sloviansk and comforts a mother whose young son is so traumatized by war, he has stopped speaking.

It can be easy to dismiss Lévy — and plenty do — as a 74-year-old reckless war tourist, an heir to a timber fortune playing action hero as Russian missiles rain down on Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol. But instead of spending the last 12 months in his art-filled home on Paris’s right bank or enjoying retirement at his 18th-century palace in Marrakesh, Lévy has been braving Russian military assaults, vertigo and what (p. C5) he calls his natural tendency for melancholy to make his Ukraine film.

It was, he said, a necessary cri de coeur to support Ukraine in a conflict he views as nothing less than a battle for the future of Europe, global liberalism and Western civilization.

“In Ukraine, I had the feeling for the first time that the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren, might collapse,” he said during an interview at the Carlyle Hotel in New York earlier this month, . . .

For the full story, see:

Dan Bilefsky. “A Philosopher Chooses Action.” The New York Times (Wednesday, March 1, 2023): C1 & C5.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 28, 2023, and has the title “A Polarizing French Philosopher Chooses War Zones Over Salons.”)


“The Reliability of Science Is Based” on Free Speech

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s argument should be pondered by global warming and Covid scientists who want to censor and cancel those with whom they disagree. They should also read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

(p. C5) Science is a process that builds upon existing theories and knowledge by continuously revising them. Every aspect of scientific knowledge can be questioned, including the general rules of thinking that appear to be most certain.

. . .

Consider a folk healer’s herbal medicine. Can we say this treatment is “scientific”? Yes, if it is proven to be effective, even if we have no idea why it works. In fact, several common medications used today have their origin in folk treatments, and we are still not sure how they work. This does not imply that folk treatments are generally effective. To the contrary, most of them are not. What distinguishes scientific medicine from nonscientific medicine is the readiness to seriously test a treatment and to be ready to change our minds if something is shown not to work.

Exaggerating a bit, one could say that the core of modern medicine is not much more than the accurate testing of treatments. A homeopathic doctor is not interested in rigorously testing his remedies: He continues to administer the same remedy even if a statistical analysis shows that the remedy is ineffective. He prefers to stick to his theory. A research doctor in a modern hospital, on the contrary, must be ready to change his theory if a more effective way of understanding illness, or treating it, becomes available.

. . .

What makes modern science uniquely powerful is its refusal to believe that it already possesses ultimate truth. The reliability of science is based not on certainty but on a radical lack of certainty. As John Stuart Mill wrote in “On Liberty” in 1859, “The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”

. . .

There is no secure method for avoiding error. Our point of departure is always just the ramshackle, error-filled totality of what we think we know. But uncertainty does not make knowledge worthless. If our theory is contradicted by experiment, this remains a real fact, solid as rock, even if we don’t yet know with clarity where our mistake lies. The fact that the assumptions in our reasoning can be mistaken doesn’t change the fact that scientific reasoning is our best cognitive tool.

For the full essay, see:

Carlo Rovelli. “The Best Reason to Trust Science.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 11, 2023): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date March 9, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Rovelli’s essay quoted above is based on his book:

Rovelli, Carlo. Anaximander and the Birth of Science. New York: Riverhead Books, 2023 (2011).

Mill’s wonderful defense of freedom, mentioned above, is:

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays, Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008 (1859).

A Form of Environmentalism that Seeks Human Extinction

(p. A20) PORTLAND, Ore. — For someone who wants his own species to go extinct, Les Knight is a remarkably happy-go-lucky human.

. . .

Mr. Knight, 75, is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, which is less a movement than a loose consortium of people who believe that the best thing humans can do to help the Earth is to stop having children.

. . .

While the United States saw an increase in births during the coronavirus pandemic, reversing the country’s declining birthrate, a 2020 poll found that one in four Americans who had not had children cited climate change as a reason.

For the full story, see:

Cara Buckley. “Movement That Insists Best Thing for Us to Do Is to Slowly Go Extinct.” The New York Times (Friday, November 25, 2022): A20.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 29, 2022, and has the title “Earth Now Has 8 Billion Humans. This Man Wishes There Were None.”)

FTX Fraudster Bankman-Fried Made $40 Million in Midterm Political Donations Which Mostly “Went to Democrats and Liberal-Leaning Groups”

(p. A1) FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried oversaw one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, a top federal prosecutor said in charging that the former chief executive stole billions of dollars from the crypto exchange’s customers while misleading investors and lenders.

. . .

(p. A6) Mr. Bankman-Fried is also accused of defrauding the Federal Election Commission starting in 2020 by conspiring with others to make illegal contributions to candidates and political committees in the names of other people.

He and his associates contributed more than $70 million to election campaigns in recent years, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. He personally made $40 million in donations ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, most of which went to Democrats and liberal-leaning groups.

For the full story, see:

Corinne Ramey, James Fanelli, Dave Michaels, Alexander Saeedy and Vicky Ge Huang. “FTX Founder Is Charged With Fraud.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 14, 2022): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 13, 2022, and has the title “FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Charged With Criminal Fraud, Conspiracy.”)

Workers Who Feel They Matter Are More Satisfied with Their Lives and Are “Less Likely to Quit”

(p. C5) So how do you know if your employees and co-workers feel that they matter? In a 2021 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers developed a scale to measure mattering in the workplace. In online surveys involving nearly 1,800 full-time employees at a variety of companies, participants were asked to rate on a 5-point scale how much they agreed with statements such as “My work contributes to my organization’s success” and “The quality of my work makes a real impact on my organization.” Other statements had to do with feeling valued and recognized: “My organization praises my work publicly” and “My work has made me popular at my workplace.”

Participants were also asked about job satisfaction, recent raises or promotions, and whether they intended to leave their job. What the researchers found was that mattering isn’t only good for employee well-being, it’s also good for a company’s bottom line. Employee turnover is costly and disruptive, and “when employees feel like they matter to their organization, they are more satisfied with their jobs and life, more likely to occupy leadership positions, more likely to be rewarded and promoted and less likely to quit.”

. . .

Research by Dr. Prilleltensky and colleagues shows that being treated fairly increases workers’ sense of mattering, . . .

For the full commentary, see:

Jennifer Breheny Wallace. “The Power of Mattering at Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 1, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

Philosopher Argues That Human Flourishing Has Grown With “Access to Fossil Fuels”

(p. C13) The brilliance of Alex Epstein’s recent “Fossil Future” is that he writes not as a scientific expert but as a philosopher.

. . .

What is the best course of action to improve human flourishing? His answer is clear and unapologetic: more plentiful, reliable, abundant access to fossil fuels. The climate-disaster-related death rate, he points out, is 98% lower today than it was just a century ago—largely owing to innovations powered by fossil fuels. The right way to handle climate change isn’t to reverse it but to master its effects—a thesis that is as provocative as it is intuitive.

For the full review, see:

Vivek Ramaswamy. “12 Months of Reading; Vivek Ramaswamy.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 10, 2021): C13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 8, 2022, and has the title “Who Read What in 2022: Thinkers and Tastemakers.”)

The book praised by Vivek Ramaswamy is:

Epstein, Alex. Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas–Not Less. New York: Portfolio, 2022..

“Woke” Bankman-Fried’s FTX Played “Dumb Game” of Virtue Signaling

(p. A17) There was a time when people engaged in doing good addressed problems that, so to speak, you could get your arms around, such as improving school performance, providing potable water or preventing malaria. But at some point, the impulse to do good transformed into a combination of moral tendentiousness and grandiosity.

. . .

. . ., inside the Bankman-Fried fairy tale rests a smaller tipping point, which suggests his generation senses that their preachy elders may have led them down a moral garden path.

In an exchange with Mr. Bankman-Fried, a writer for Vox asserts, “You were really good at talking about ethics.” He replied that “I had to be” because of “this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

He is describing what has come to be known in our time as virtue signaling, . . .

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel Henninger. “WONDER LAND; The Moral Vanity of FTX.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 1, 2022): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 30, 2022, and has the title “WONDER LAND; The Moral Vanity of Sam Bankman-Fried.”)