I’ve caved and created a category for these inevitable posts.
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success
As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. “There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”
I would very much like to read some political philosophy on this; how important is accountability? It seems to inevitably get in the way of things, but surely we need some.
Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331”
I think that the xkcd method may no longer be good enough.
Nigel Warburton, virtual philosopher | TPM
Toby Ord, someone from my college, is apparently in conflict between whether our moral responsibility for our trillions of potential descendents overrides our responsibilities for people starving in the third world today. This is what you get for being a utilitarian!
Pinker: Science is Not Your Enemy
There are quite a lot of problems with this article, even though it’s probably right to say that philosophy should pay more attention to results coming out of psychology etc. Particularly worrying is the claim that a bunch of liberal, democratic values flow automatically out of science—and the unstated assumption that we shouldn’t question these values because they arise in those who do enough science. Here’s a response (which I haven’t read).
Psychiatrists: the Drug Pushers | Will Self in the Guardian
Lessons of the Snowden Revelations | CounterPunch
Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong | The Chronicle
The Decline and Fall of the English Major | The New York Times
This is another article lessening my faith in the media. One thing I notice is that now I’ve graduated university the people who write the blog that this one is criticising are no longer so far away: I know someone who was just one year above me at university who now writes for the Telegraph. The fact that they were previously older and more educated than me led me to doubt that they could really be as terrible as people say they can be; I thought I wasn’t in a position to know. Increasingly I feel I can.
The Use and Abuse of Civil Forfeiture | The New Yorker
Does Great Literature Make Us Better? | The New York Times
Mr Currie argues that there is no evidence that great literature makes us morally better; in order to recommend reading and studying it for this purpose, scientific studies are required to show that it changes people for the better. He makes a good point that the common belief that it’s really great for your soul to read Anna Karenina and friends is not very well defended. However it’s not clear what such a scientific study could consist in. Lots of philosophers, following Aristotle, have argued that direct comparisons between individuals as to their moral status is literally impossible (rather than just very hard) except in obvious, crude cases. Without attempting to get into that here, a simpler point is that literature shapes society so much that you can’t get out of its clutches in order to make dispassinoate evaluations.
Philosophy isn’t dead yet | the Guardian
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go | The Chronicle
grim grim grim
Chomsky: Corporations and the Richest Americans Viscerally Oppose Common Good
[The capitalists require that] people must come to believe that suffering and deprivation result from the failure of individuals, not the reigning socioeconomic system. There are huge industries devoted to this task.
Teach for America Apostates: a Primer of Alumni Resistance
On Anthony Cody’s blog, he describes TFA as part of a “neoliberal hyper-accountability movement.”
The Real War on Reality | The New York Times
Why does France insist school pupils master philosophy? | BBC News
Challenging material! I could not say much for most of those questions and I have just done a degree in it.
Surviving a year in a Korean school | The Jeju Weekly
My month in Korea last year sets me up well for dealing with a lot of cultural differences in the work environment that many expat teachers find very hard to begin with. For example, in the above article, I’ve already got tips 1, 2, 6 and 8 of 8 under my belt. Of course we were in a non-standard working environment, so there’ll still be plenty of things to get used to, but I’m much less afraid of those than I think I would be had I not had that month.
Andi Albrecht’s Emacs Configuration
This is a very cool way of properly documenting your Emacs init file. No need to split it into multiple files (as I do) when you’ve got this.
This summer I’ve been DMing a Pathfinder campaign for five friends. It’s about three years since I last did any tabletop roleplaying and though in the past we had fun, this summer I’ve seen a huge difference that is presumably just a result of the group getting older and also having got to know each other better. The sessions have been very enjoyable and we’ve decided to attempt to continue the campaign over the Internet once I go to Korea and three players go (back) to university. We’re hopeful this will work well because so many people now play DnD this way, so though it won’t be as good as meeting up around a table, it surely can’t be that much worse. We might find it impossible to schedule in sessions but I’m hopeful at this point that we’ll be able to.
Recently I realised that one thing that my organisational setup couldn’t really handle was reminders to do things after a certain amount of time from now has elapsed. For example, taking something out of the oven, or getting away from the computer. So I wrote a script for this (which took me until just about the time the first thing I wanted to countdown to was due…). My current version is below; I’ve commented out one line to disable my code for pulling appointments from Emacs.
