Scijentizam u politici, moralu i filozofiji

[Аврам Гојић]

fantasticno! interesantno!s tim sto se, bar mi se cini, vidi da dokaz ne bi funkcionisao bez vec ontoloski potvrdjenog pozitivnog svojstva koje taj kvalitet pozitivnog stice na nesaznatljiv i numinozan nacin, i onda se vracamo na veru umesto logike, ili veru u srcu logike.voleo bih da imam obuku iz formalne logike, pogotovo modalne, pa da vidimo belaja kada umesto "pozitivnog svojstva" uvedemo apofaticko objasnjene Boga kao "onog koji nije" (nije covek, nije ziv, nije mrtav, nije kamen, nije voda, nije svemir...nije nista ((Ain)), סוף, ili primordijalno ne-svojstvo Boga koje je u Zoharu opisano kao "onaj koji je bio sam, bezoblican i bez srodnosti sa ijednom stvari")ne moze se Bog naucno dokazati ni opovrgnuti. Verujes ili ne.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Marko M. Dabovic

[Lord Protector]

Odnos vere i nauke, prilikom čitanja zaboraviti svaku korektnost ovog vremena.Kraj devetnaestog veka. Beč.Dvadesetogodišnjak, Jevrejin, sa zanosom, piše:Oto-Vajninger-Nauka i kultura_1.pdfOto-Vajninger-Nauka i kultura_2.pdf

Edited October 26, 2012 by slow

[Lord Protector]

Oto-Vajninger-Nauka i kultura_3.pdfOto-Vajninger-Nauka i kultura_4.pdf

[Agni]

meni to stoji u glavi sve vreme, praktični upit - "a šta ako je za boga i ovo* moralno?".odgovor je bio uglavnom - "a, ne, bog tako ne radi", što otvara whole new can of worms, i iskače van prvobitne konstrukcije.* - bilo kakva svakodnevna glupost ili trivijalija.

Ih, da su samo svakodnevne gluposti i trivijalije cinjene u bozije ime; sta cemo sa progonima nevernika i jeretika, osvajanjem paganskih zemalja, ratovima, mucenjima, sakacenjem i ostalim svakodnevnim zlocinima za koje pocinioci veruju da ih bog zapoveda? Kako bi tvoj prijatelj dokazao da se tu ne radi o sprovodenju u delo moralnih imperativa koje je bog zacrtao? Vasa je dao odgovor:dokaz ne bi funkcionisao bez vec ontoloski potvrdjenog pozitivnog svojstva koje taj kvalitet pozitivnog stice na nesaznatljiv i numinozan nacin, i onda se vracamo na veru umesto logike, ili veru u srcu logike.Ako dokaz pociva na pretpostavci da je bog dobar, a do toga dolazi na nesaznatljiv nacin i zahtevajuci veru, onda je tu zapravo bog suvisan, jer mi na isti takav nacin mozemo ustanoviti da je, naprimer, lose ubijati iz koristoljublja (dakle verujuci bez dokaza). I zaista, ogromna vecina ljudi veruje da to jeste lose, pri cemu to cini nezavisno od vere u boga i njegovu dobrotu.

[Indy]

There's a sucker born every minute, you just happened to be coming along at the right time, you know...

[Prospero]

cenim da se kvalifikuje za topic:

Jason Richwine Resigns From Heritage Foundation After Dissertation ControversyThe Huffington Post | By Luke Johnson Posted: 05/10/2013 4:18 pm EDT | Updated: 05/10/2013 5:46 pm EDTJason Richwine resigned Friday from the Heritage Foundation (Photo from The Heritage Foundation)Jason Richwine, the co-author of a Heritage Foundation report on immigration who came under fire this week for arguing in his Harvard dissertation that Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. have substantially lower IQs than whites, resigned Friday."Jason Richwine let us know he’s decided to resign from his position. He’s no longer employed by Heritage," spokesman Daniel Woltornist said in an email to HuffPost. "It is our long-standing policy not to discuss internal personnel matters."The news was first reported by Slate's Dave Weigel.The report put the cost of immigration reform at a whopping $6.3 trillion. Though Heritage's 2007 report was one of the reasons an earlier immigration bill failed, the 2013 report was widely mocked, even by Republicans the foundation hoped would support it.Harvard accepted Richwine's 2009 dissertation for a doctorate in public policy. In it, he spoke of the "growing Hispanic underclass.""Superior performance on basic economic indicators is to be expected from later generations, who go to American schools, learn English, and become better acquainted with the culture," he wrote. "Despite built-in advantages, too many Hispanic natives are not adhering to standards of behavior that separate middle and working class neighborhoods from the barrio.""There can be little dispute that post 1965-immigration has brought a larger and increasingly visible Hispanic underclass to the United States, yet the underlying reasons for its existence cannot be understood without considering IQ," he wrote.He argued that these individuals were more likely to accept government benefits. "When given the choice between a paycheck from a low-paying job and a welfare check, most intelligent people would realize that the welfare check offers them no potential for advancement. Low-IQ people do not internalize that fact nearly as well," he wrote.Heritage sought to distance itself from the dissertation, saying it did not reflect the group's positions.

+ jedna od reakcija

24 Harvard Student Groups: Graduating Jason Richwine ‘Debases All Of Our Degrees’By Ian Millhiser on May 13, 2013 at 4:13 pmIn response to the news that Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government bestowed a doctrate upon disgraced former Heritage staffer Jason Richwine, 24 student groups at the elite university released a strongly worded letter condemning the decision to approve Richwine’s dissertation:

We are deeply concerned with the academic integrity and the reputation of Harvard Kennedy School and the University as a whole. It has been recently made public by the Washington Post and the New York Times that

in 2009 the Kennedy School accepted a dissertation written by Jason Richwine which claims that “Immigrants living in the US today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives” (Richwine Dissertation, 26). Richwine goes on to state that “the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against” (Richwine Dissertation, 66) and argues for an immigration policy based on IQ. Central to his claim is the idea that certain groups are genetically predisposed to be more intelligent than others.

In his troubling worldview Asians are generally at the top, with whites in the middle, Hispanics follow, and African Americans at the bottom (Richwine Dissetation, 74). To justify his assertions he cites largely discredited sources such as J. Philippe Rushton whose work enshrines the idea that there are geneticallyrooted differences in cognitive ability between racial groups.We condemn in unequivocal terms these racist claims as unfit for Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard University as a whole.

Granting permission for such a dissertation to be published debases all of our degrees and hurts the University’s reputation.

In his own statement on the Richwine incident, Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood defended the academic process’ ability to weed out bad ideas, and noted that “the views and conclusions of any graduate of this school are theirs alone, and do not represent the views of Harvard or the Kennedy School.” The statement also notes that Richwine’s dissertation was “reviewed by a committee of scholars” and it does not question the school’s decision to accept it.

+ pokušaji odbrane

The Heretic at HeritageBy Patrick J. Buchanan • May 13, 2013, 11:22 PMvia AEIJason Richwine, the young conservative scholar who co-authored the Heritage Foundation report on the long-term costs of the amnesty bill backed by the “Gang of Eight,” is gone from Heritage. He was purged after the Washington Post unearthed his doctoral dissertation at the JFK School of Government. Richwine’s thesis: IQ tests fairly measure mental ability. The average IQ of immigrants is well below that of white Americans. This difference in IQ is likely to persist through several generations.And the potential consequences of this?“A lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.” Richwine defended his 166-page thesis before Harvard’s George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser and Christopher Jencks, who once edited The New Republic. But while his thesis was acceptable at Harvard—it earned Richwine a Ph.D.—it has scandalized the Potomac priesthood.Our elites appear unanimous: Richwine’s view that intelligence is not equally distributed among ethnic and racial groups, and is partly inherited, is rankest heresy. Yet no one seems to want to prove him wrong.Consider Richwine’s contention that differences in mental ability exist and seem to persist among racial and ethnic groups.In the Wall Street Journal last month, Warren Kozak noted that 28,000 students in America’s citadel of diversity, New York City, took the eighth-grade exam to enter Stuyvesant, the Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, the city’s most elite high schools. Students are admitted solely on their entrance test scores.Of the 830 students who will be entering Stuyvesant as freshmen this fall, 1 percent are black, 3 percent are Hispanic, 21 percent are white—and 75 percent are Asian.Now, blacks and Hispanics far outnumber Asians in New York. But at Stuyvesant, Asians will outnumber blacks and Hispanics together 19-to-1.Is this the result of racially biased tests at Stuyvesant?At Berkeley, crown jewel of the California university system, Hispanics, 40 percent of California’s population and an even larger share of California’s young, are 12 percent of the freshman class. Asians, outnumbered almost 3-to-1 by Hispanics in California, have almost four times as many slots as Hispanics in the freshman class.Another example of racial bias?The 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, which measures the academic ability of 15-year-olds worldwide, found the U.S.A. falling to 17th in reading, 23rd in science, 31st in math.Yet, Spain aside, not one Hispanic nation, from which a plurality of our immigrants come, was among the top 40 in reading, science or math.But these folks are going to come here and make us No. 1 again? :0.6: Is there greater “underclass behavior” among Hispanics? The crime rate among Hispanics is about three times that of white Americans, while the Asian crime rate is about a third that of whites.Among white folks, the recent illegitimacy rate was 28 percent; among Hispanics, 53 percent. According to one study a few years back, Hispanics were 19 times as likely as whites to join gangs. What about Richwine’s point regarding “social trust”?Six years ago, in “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century,” Robert Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone,” wrote that after 30,000 interviews he found that ethnic and racial diversity can be devastating to communities and destructive of community values.In racially mixed communities, Putnam wrote, not only do people not trust strangers, they do not even trust their own kind.“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ’hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle … (to) withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”With the immigration bill granting amnesty to 12 million illegals, an open door to their dependents and a million new immigrants each year, almost all from the Third World, America in 2040 is going to look like Los Angeles today. Yet, it was in L.A. that Putnam found social capital at its most depleted and exhausted.If Richwine is right, America in 2040 will be a country with whites and Asians dominating the professions, and 100 million Hispanics concentrated in semiskilled work and manual labor.The issues Richwine raises go to the question of whether we shall survive as one nation and one people.If our huge bloc of Hispanics, already America’s largest minority at 53 million, is fed by constant new immigration, but fails for a couple of generations to reach the middle-class status that Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians and Poles attained after two generations, what becomes of our “indivisible” nation?Rather than face this question, better to purge and silence the Harvard extremist who dared to raise it.

[Turnbull]

Podrška sa vrha:

Charles Murray @charlesmurrayThank God I was working for Chris DeMuth and AEI, not Jim DeMint and Heritage, when The Bell Curve was published. Integrity. Loyalty. Balls.

10:22 PM - 10 May 2013

[Indy]

Nisam bas siguran kakva je veza tzv scijentizma sa Heritage Foundation, ali o njima treba da se pise svakako. (Mislim na Heritage).

[Turnbull]

"Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture"A Defense of the Humanities

On May 19, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier spoke at the commencement ceremony of Brandeis University, addressing the graduates as "fellow humanists." Here is a text of his talk.

H

Was there ever been a moment in American life when the humanities were cherished less, and has there ever been a moment in American life when the humanities were needed more? I am genuinely honored to be addressing you this morning, because in recent years I have come to regard a commitment to the humanities as nothing less than an act of intellectual defiance, of cultural dissidence. For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness -- and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep. There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.In the digital universe, knowledge is reduced to the status of information. Who will any longer remember that knowledge is to information as art is to kitsch-–that information is the most inferior kind of knowledge, because it is the most external? A great Jewish thinker of the early Middle Ages wondered why God, if He wanted us to know the truth about everything, did not simply tell us the truth about everything. His wise answer was that if we were merely told what we need to know, we would not, strictly speaking, know it. Knowledge can be acquired only over time and only by method. And the devices that we carry like addicts in our hands are disfiguring our mental lives also in other ways: for example, they generate a hitherto unimaginable number of numbers, numbers about everything under the sun, and so they are transforming us into a culture of data, into a cult of data, in which no human activity and no human expression is immune to quantification, in which happiness is a fit subject for economists, in which the ordeals of the human heart are inappropriately translated into mathematical expressions, leaving us with new illusions of clarity and new illusions of control. Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic,Owing to its preference for totalistic explanation, scientism transforms science into an ideology, which is of course a betrayal of the experimental and empirical spirit. There is no perplexity of human emotion or human behavior that these days is not accounted for genetically or in the cocksure terms of evolutionary biology. It is true that the selfish gene has lately been replaced by the altruistic gene, which is lovelier, but it is still the gene that tyrannically rules. Liberal scientism should be no more philosophically attractive to us than conservative scientism, insofar as it, too, arrogantly reduces all the realms that we inhabit to a single realm, and tempts us into the belief that the epistemological eschaton has finally arrived, and at last we know what we need to know to manipulate human affairs wisely. This belief is invariably false and occasionally disastrous. We are becoming ignorant of ignorance.

S

So there is no task more urgent in American intellectual life at this hour than to offer some resistance to the twin imperialisms of science and technology, and to recover the old distinction — once bitterly contested, then generally accepted, now almost completely forgotten – between the study of nature and the study of man. As Bernard Williams once remarked, “’humanity’ is a name not merely for a species but also for a quality." You who have elected to devote yourselves to the study of literature and languages and art and music and philosophy and religion and history — you are the stewards of that quality. You are the resistance. You have had the effrontery to choose interpretation over calculation, and to recognize that calculation cannot provide an accurate picture, or a profound picture, or a whole picture, of self-interpreting beings such as ourselves; and I commend you for it.Do not believe the rumors of the obsolescence of your path. If Proust was a neuroscientist, then you have no urgent need of neuroscience, because you have Proust. If Jane Austen was a game theorist, then you have no reason to defect to game theory, because you have Austen. There is no greater bulwark against the twittering acceleration of American consciousness than the encounter with a work of art, and the experience of a text or an image. You are the representatives, the saving remnants, of that encounter and that experience, and of the serious study of that encounter and that experience – which is to say, you are the counterculture. Perhaps culture is now the counterculture.So keep your heads. Do not waver. Be very proud. Use the new technologies for the old purposes. Do not be rattled by numbers, which will never be the springs of wisdom. In upholding the humanities, you uphold the honor of a civilization that was founded upon the quest for the true and the good and the beautiful. For as long as we are thinking and feeling creatures, creatures who love and imagine and suffer and die, the humanities will never be dispensable. From this day forward, then, act as if you are indispensable to your society, because – whether it knows it or not – you are.Congratulations.

Edited May 29, 2013 by Syme

[DarkAttraktor]

lele, kako je neprijatno citati ovo medjusobno sasoljanje muda. tip sa vested interestom u nesto objasnjava svojim peerovima kako je zapravo do jaja sto oni imaju vested interest u to nesto cime se bave. sa sve ostale zabole stojko za to i ne bi dali ni pet para za to sve da im ovaj objasnjava do prekosutra zasto je to bitno. kao na sajmu starih zanata, kad se skupe skleroticni kujundzija i poluslepi hitroprelja i kazu jedan drugom "eee, ovi mladi - njih stari zanati nista ne zanimaju, a oni su u stvari jako korisni", geez.mislim, cela namera iza ovog obracanja je feebleminded i samo je svedocanstvo potpunoj nesnadjenosti 1 nekada vrlo bitnog segmenta drustva u novim okolnostima i nemogucnosti artikulisanja bilo kakve politike. u ovom trenutku su neophodni manje autisticni stavovi ako treba da se uspostavi 1 siroka i vrlo neprincipijelna koalicija protiv tehnopatriotskog konsenzusa.

[Turnbull]

lele, kako je neprijatno citati ovo medjusobno sasoljanje muda. tip sa vested interestom u nesto objasnjava svojim peerovima kako je zapravo do jaja sto oni imaju vested interest u to nesto cime se bave. sa sve ostale zabole stojko za to i ne bi dali ni pet para za to sve da im ovaj objasnjava do prekosutra zasto je to bitno. kao na sajmu starih zanata, kad se skupe skleroticni kujundzija i poluslepi hitroprelja i kazu jedan drugom "eee, ovi mladi - njih stari zanati nista ne zanimaju, a oni su u stvari jako korisni", geez.mislim, cela namera iza ovog obracanja je feebleminded i samo je svedocanstvo potpunoj nesnadjenosti 1 nekada vrlo bitnog segmenta drustva u novim okolnostima i nemogucnosti artikulisanja bilo kakve politike. u ovom trenutku su neophodni manje autisticni stavovi ako treba da se uspostavi 1 siroka i vrlo neprincipijelna koalicija protiv tehnopatriotskog konsenzusa.

Pa jeste, lepo si to uhvatio. Motivational speech za ljude koji će posle završenog faksa biti srećni ako se uglave u neki advertising ili već nešto tako. Ma vi ste najbolji, samo nastavtite, to je super.

Mada mi se svideo ovaj deo za Đejn Ostin, pa sam zato i okačio :)