A frustrated philosophy student of my acquaintance asks: "Are Philosophers Giving Up On Reason?" and reviews What Philosophers Know by Gary Gutting. (Short version: not much). 

Frustrated's conclusion:

Gutting sets out to show “what philosophers know.” But all that he ends up “showing” is that philosophers have become too afraid of radical skepticism to exercise any skepticism at all, too afraid of having their own false beliefs exposed to expose the false beliefs of others, and too distrustful of their own reason to accept it when it leads them counter to their intuition. 

I don't know the book, but I do think philosophy must do a better job if it wants to hold on to students who care about the state of the world.

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Here's a tasty dollop of web-friendly populism from south of the border. Those Republicans want less government, and they're crowdsourcing it, mass-collaboration style. Here's Scott Aaronson:

the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination.  So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut’s first target—yes, its first target—was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation.  Admittedly, I’ve already tried to save NSF from some wasteful expenditures, in my occasional role as an NSF panel member.  But this is my first chance to join in as a plain US citizen.

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Tom McCarthy being interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on Writers and Company about his new novel C :

When I did my research into emergent radio I was astonished to find, almost word for word, anticipations of the type of debates that were going on around the Internet from the '90s to now. You get wireless activists going "we don't want to be regulated, we don't want a central broadacster, it should remain many-to-many".

Surprising to me. Anyway, I'm off to buy Remainder or C, both of which sound entertaining.

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The hacker ethic, open source, open government, radical transparency and mass collaboration: all these ideas are linked by a belief that the Internet will promote non-hierarchical organization, decentralization, “democratization”, openness and sharing. A  side effect of the WikiLeaks cables is to show that, for all the talk of movements and revolutions, these beliefs are empty of real political content. The cables prompt some tough questions, but the fault lines those questions reveal run perpendicular to digital attitudes, not parallel. When push comes to political shove, open source proponents and so on are found on both sides of the debate. The Internet is a new terrain, but the battles being fought on it are old ones.

For example, Open Government advocates are one group having a tough time reacting to the leaks, and their struggles show that the real issues are not the open source/hacker technological questions of openness, access to data, and transparency, but the old political question of “US foreign policy, for or against?”

“Is WikiLeaks open government?” asks O’Reilly’s Alex Howard, but he doesn’t answer his own question. Tech President’s Nancy Scola writes about “What WikiLeaks Means for ‘Open Government’” and … Continue reading

I know, I'm all sceptical about this web stuff. But Unionbook looks like an interesting initiative. Developed using Ning (a commercial platform) it provides a useful set of social networking tools for union members. You can find it at http://www.unionbook.org.

via cyberunions.org and Max Lombardi

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Match the caption to the video (thanks to Chris Weagel for the middle one).  For the full effect play the videos simultaneously.

Captions

"PM, Toronto mayor say 'thugs' to blame for attacks"

"a bright day for retailers"

"shameful, dangerous and counterproductive"

"The violence prompted police to place Canada's largest city in a virtual state of lockdown"

"the American consumer has adapted to the economic climate over the last couple of years and is possibly spending more wisely as the holiday season begins"

"completely unacceptable"

"When it comes to Black Friday shopping, Hudgens said she most likes “the shopping (and) the savings but mostly the tradition."

"[Black Friday] really serves as a bright reminder that in a capitalist society competition and incentives are key to making the most of a voluntary transaction"

Videos

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Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu wrote a bit for the Wall Street Journal called In the Grip of the New Monopolists. It's about Facebook, Google, eBay, Apple, and Amazon — and a bunch of people say he doesn't know what he's talking about.

George Mason University's Adam Thierer claims that Tim Wu Redefines Monopoly, and accuses Wu of being "hell-bent on redefining the English language". TechDirt's Mike Masnick states confidently that "domination of a market, by itself, does not create a monopoly", and goes on "if we look at the basic definition of a monopoly, you see that it's about having an exclusive situation – being the only seller in the market, or having exclusive control". In BusinessWeek and GigaOm Mathew Ingram picks up the story and declares "none of these examples – with the possible exception of Google and search – meets any kind of serious test of the term monopoly" and that "It's not clear what Wu even means by saying that Apple has a monopoly on "online content delivery."

But Wu is right and they are wrong. Monopoly is an economic term and he is writing in the Wall Street … Continue reading