This blog has had various series in which I worried a topic to death and possibly beyond. For easy reference, I list them here.
This page is unfinished
The political correctness series
I became interested in the history of the term of insult “political correctness” and decided to trace its evolution into a culture war staple. It’s an interesting example of the ratcheting up of rhetoric until it takes on a life of its own.
The “How not to be a sucker” series
The previous series ended up with my reading Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), which is a deeply dishonest book. But it’s interesting because how easily it bamboozled people by its veneer of traditional popular scholarship. I lay out the tricks it plays.
The critical rationalism series
I’ve long been somewhat of a fan of philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, who attempted to define what it meant to be a rational scientist and a rational scientific method. I believed his attempt failed but his precepts for rational behavior was still a good guideline for what encourages scientists and science-admiring people to make big career bets.
But as I wrote the series, I discovered that “critical rationalism” (a tradition founded by Karl Popper and, arguably, continued by Lakatos) is actually a weak methodology, in the sense that it did not prevent its own proponents from confidently saying things that are not true. I wondered what characteristics of the methodology facilitated such human frailty.
The C.S. Peirce series
C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) was an American scientist, experimentalist, logician, philosopher, and all around polymath who Bertrand Russell described in 1959 as “he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever.”
However, his writings are hard to understand, not only because they’re written in an old-fashioned meandering style that doesn’t fit our age, and not only because he was fond of allusions we don’t get, but because (speaking as a former editor) he had a poor sense for how to structure arguments.
So I decided to make “cover versions” of his writings that would be more accessible today.