Critical Review Seminar, apology
Ok, this is one and a half of the things I told myself I'd do.
First,
Q: What is this Critical Review thing I keep talking about? (For those who haven't picked it up from context)
A: I'm not sure. My understanding is that the Critical Review is a classical liberal/libertarian political journal (not to be confused with Brown's student-written course review guide...) funded by a shady Texas millionaire and edited by a man named Jeffrey Friedman (incidentally a Brown grad in History and Philosophy...)
Jeffrey/The Critical Review is hosting a seminar this weekend where some word-of-mouth-selected college student are invited to do a lot of reading and listen to some arguments that are supposed to totally change our world view.
Basically, from what I understand from polishcyclist, it's libertarianism with some new twists.
I leave tomorrow and get back Monday night. I haven't done most of the reading yet, so I guess I'll have to start picking out the important bits.
Second:
I really regret not stepping in on the rent control thing, cause it looks like all sorts of shit flew. Here's my reaction to things in a nutshell:
I'm FOR: empirical evidence; economic and other theory, recognized as theory; friendliness; arguments that take into account secondary and long-term effects; arguments that try to take into account total social cost; arguments that acknowledge distinction between human need and fulfilled market demand; sincere intellectual curiosity; requests for clarification; good faith (as in, the assumption that others are in it); admissions of fallibility.
I'm AGAINST: fallacious inference; fallacious logic; etiquette; claims of mathematical certainty with respect to social phenomena; sweeping but unclear condemnations of ubiquitous systems of social organization; name-calling; use of ideologically charged buzzwords; snarkiness; pompousness; paragraph breaks; unqualified utilitarianism; arguments based on the virtue or intentions of the arguer; spelling and punctuation errors; attempting to compare qualitative and quantitative claims with each other; anecdotal evidence not explicit declared as such; claims of expertise.
I'm still kind of undecided about gentrification. I've got some questions I need to ask.
Oh, and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's those damn communities! Please, can we finally stop them from cropping up everywhere! For christsakes! Why can't the world just live in hermitic peace live God meant us to?
Anyway, it was nice that you four got to...meet...each other. In case first impressions weren't so shiny, I can vouch to each of you that the other three are alright folks. Friends of mine, in fact.
Anyway, I plan to return to those arguments later and try to poke some holes that I think need to be poked and fill some that I think need to be filled. I'm sorry I haven't gotten the chance already, but I'm been distracted by those crazy post-structuralists!
They want me to believe that truth is contained in language. I.e., something is only true if people in the linguistic community agree that it is true. God dammit! Pragmatempiricalogisticonfirmacognitocious!
Anyway, I have to read things and prepare for tomorrow and go to a meeting about clean election public financing and convince friends to make Alternity characters so that they can indulge my guilty dork-pleasure. So goodbye for a few days
I'll leave it up to you to figure out whether or how much I was kidding about communities.
First,
Q: What is this Critical Review thing I keep talking about? (For those who haven't picked it up from context)
A: I'm not sure. My understanding is that the Critical Review is a classical liberal/libertarian political journal (not to be confused with Brown's student-written course review guide...) funded by a shady Texas millionaire and edited by a man named Jeffrey Friedman (incidentally a Brown grad in History and Philosophy...)
Jeffrey/The Critical Review is hosting a seminar this weekend where some word-of-mouth-selected college student are invited to do a lot of reading and listen to some arguments that are supposed to totally change our world view.
Basically, from what I understand from polishcyclist, it's libertarianism with some new twists.
I leave tomorrow and get back Monday night. I haven't done most of the reading yet, so I guess I'll have to start picking out the important bits.
Second:
I really regret not stepping in on the rent control thing, cause it looks like all sorts of shit flew. Here's my reaction to things in a nutshell:
I'm FOR: empirical evidence; economic and other theory, recognized as theory; friendliness; arguments that take into account secondary and long-term effects; arguments that try to take into account total social cost; arguments that acknowledge distinction between human need and fulfilled market demand; sincere intellectual curiosity; requests for clarification; good faith (as in, the assumption that others are in it); admissions of fallibility.
I'm AGAINST: fallacious inference; fallacious logic; etiquette; claims of mathematical certainty with respect to social phenomena; sweeping but unclear condemnations of ubiquitous systems of social organization; name-calling; use of ideologically charged buzzwords; snarkiness; pompousness; paragraph breaks; unqualified utilitarianism; arguments based on the virtue or intentions of the arguer; spelling and punctuation errors; attempting to compare qualitative and quantitative claims with each other; anecdotal evidence not explicit declared as such; claims of expertise.
I'm still kind of undecided about gentrification. I've got some questions I need to ask.
Oh, and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's those damn communities! Please, can we finally stop them from cropping up everywhere! For christsakes! Why can't the world just live in hermitic peace live God meant us to?
Anyway, it was nice that you four got to...meet...each other. In case first impressions weren't so shiny, I can vouch to each of you that the other three are alright folks. Friends of mine, in fact.
Anyway, I plan to return to those arguments later and try to poke some holes that I think need to be poked and fill some that I think need to be filled. I'm sorry I haven't gotten the chance already, but I'm been distracted by those crazy post-structuralists!
They want me to believe that truth is contained in language. I.e., something is only true if people in the linguistic community agree that it is true. God dammit! Pragmatempiricalogisticonfirmacognitocious!
Anyway, I have to read things and prepare for tomorrow and go to a meeting about clean election public financing and convince friends to make Alternity characters so that they can indulge my guilty dork-pleasure. So goodbye for a few days
I'll leave it up to you to figure out whether or how much I was kidding about communities.