II, 2-4

The last three weeks of school - aside from the aforementioned stupidity of that one Evo Psych episode of my Cultural Psychology class - have gone quite well. I'll try to be better about keeping up with the updates, but here's a little class by class take:

Hist and Phil of Sci Seminar - good stuff. We covered Brad's article on stake-dependent belief systems (within rational choice theory). This is, loosely, the question of whether our degrees of belief change as the stakes of holding a belief change. It turns out to be exceedingly hard to tease out, as a degree of belief and a willingness to act on said belief are nearly indistinguishable. Talked quite a bit about Dutch Books; cool stuff. We also read the intro chapter to Michael Ruse's Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, a widely distributed sort of desk reference for biology teachers. Most of our discussion focused on the difficulties of compiling and targeting such works. And last week we talked about two papers, one by Jane and one by Matt, on biology as an engineering tool and the recent "monstering" history of the so-called invasive plant species tamarask.

Phil of Science - also quite the excellent course. We continued to talk about explanation, focusing on Hempel's model that I mentioned here earlier, and Salmon's effort at statistical explanation. We next covered Kitcher(sp?)'s attempt to formulate a way to choose between explanatory systems (it was essentially an attempt to limit it to the explanatory system with the fewest premises and most consistent argument forms while maintaining a stringent requirement for the types of allowable arguments. Covered some of Carnap's explanation of the symmetry of explanation and prediction, and more recently read about Popper's purported solution to the problem of induction and Nancy Cartwright's (not the voice of Bart) differentiation of theoretical explanation and causal explanation. Whew. Heady stuff, and we're blowing through it really fast, but it's been great so far. Andrew and Rick are doing a great job.

Cultural Pscyh - I've already given this course more bytes than its worth, but other than the travesty of the last class, we've read about how to define culture, how excessively studying college sophomores may have biased psych findings for the last umpteen years, different parameters by which to characterize a given culture, how disease prevalence and personality types may be correlated, and how job parameters can affect cognition. I enjoy this class on an anthropological basis and on the basis of repeatedly trying to figure out how otherwise intelligent people could justify obvious categorical conflations and general ill-assumptions, but I 1, had a terrible time in the most recent class, 2, find the seminar to be like trying to sit in on a clique (the professor has a harem of underlings who all bat eyelashes at his every word), and 3, find the rest of the people in the class to be either afraid of speaking or ill-equipped to do the reading and have original comments to make. Wow, I am captain positive attitude - really, I just get sick of the lack of rigor and lack of introspection that I mentioned earlier - it's like it hasn't even occurred to people that chronic conditions are not necessarily just the addition of acute ones. Bah - I hope this picks up, or gives me more insight than that psychology lacks the rigor of other sciences / philosophy, because I kinda already knew that - I suppose it is interesting to see what counts as empirical evidence and how theoretical connections are made in various disciplines, so I will try to improve my attitude for the coming weeks.

Miscellaneous - Helped Jason finish a grant a couple of weeks ago that hopefully will get some much-needed cash. The omnipresent topic at ASU these days is the budget cuts that are happening across the state - public education is taking a giant hit, and some the impacts have included collapsed departments, eliminated programs of study and mandatory furloughs for all university employees. For a professor, a furlough is tantamount to a pay cut, since it's not like they can say, "Oh, it's Tuesday? I suppose I will not write, do research or prepare lectures as today is a furlough day." So there's a lot of negative energy about.

Darwinfest has been raging lately - sorta a half celebration of his birthday / publication of Origins, half anti-creationist/ID campaign. Lotsa stuff going on campus - lectures, films, a Darwin look-alike contest, adopting beagles, you name it. Michael Ruse gave an entertaining lecture on the history of Darwin about a week ago, and Randy Olson came to campus and screened his films Flight of the Dodos (about evolution) and Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. SO fun times, and things have been busy.

I had two entertaining interactions with the aforementioned professors. Michael Ruse attended a Bioethics club meeting and shilled for his new book on the interface of science and religion. He is, um, an interesting guy - I don't think it's unfair to characterize him as an egotistical dude who could give a crap what you think of him (who also slips in a too frequent to be accidental stream of sexism taboot). So the meeting was charged, to say the least, but mainly I just couldn't believe what the other club people were saying. Scratch that, in order to not believe it I would have had to understood it - I have never heard more rambling, bizarre comments in my life. I at one point turned to Johnny and asked him if I had had a stroke, because it certainly seemed like my Werneicke's area was shot. Just babbled nonsense, weird assertions, incoherent, poorly thought out arguments and sentences - a total nightmare. Add on top of this the wackiness of Ruse, and you've got twilight-zoney times. A sample quote, and I'm pretty sure this is verbatim:

"That really reminds me of when the lioness doesn't eat the antelope because she's already ate - and that kinda leads directly to Newton's theory of gravity."

Eh? Exactly. Maybe I was tired and / or someone had put LSD in my coffee, but that was easily the weirdest two hours I've spent at ASU - between Ruse's crotchety old man sexist antics and the babble coming from the undergrads, I had a borderline spiritual experience.

The Olson experience was much more exciting - we talked a bit about my paper on science communication and the power of mainstream pop media to frame how people think of science. I shared my thoughts on people building science-knowledge basis on shows like ER and Eli Stone, and he agreed that I was onto something with the weird media regard for realism. Cool guy, and nice of him to take a few minutes to talk to me - I don't know if I entirely agree with his grass roots "we need to sexify science" line that he delivered at his lecture, but I was glad to get to chat with him a bit. (For the record, his movies were lauded by media like Variety and lambasted by Nature and Science - he, too, seems to be sacrificing some rigor to sell his product).

That's probably enough for one post - I haven't been doing near as much of my own research as I would like, so I need to jump on that horse sooner rather than later. In the meantime, hope everyone is having a good time and that the recession dies before I have to go job-hunting, because man are there some miserable-seeming profs about these days.