Latest Musings

We all hold a variety of beliefs about climate change. The Earth is warming; The Earth isn’t warming; The Earth is warming and human activity is the cause; The Earth is warming but human activity isn’t the cause; We are causing the Earth to warm and we have a moral imperative to stop it; We are causing the Earth to warm but we have no obligations to act.

Turkey is amazing country. The people are friendly, the countryside is beautiful, and the prices are great value. Turkey was never high my trouble agenda but that’s only because I was ignorant of just how fantastic this country is. If you have even the remotest of opportunities travel To Turkey, you need to see it with both hands, book your ticket and get over here.

You’re following the maxims laid down by the software gods. You’re keeping your controllers thin and you Don’t Repeat Yourself. But your application grows and you have to add more logic. All of a sudden, your methods are doing a lot more than one thing. It’s time to refactor. But how exactly?

I’ve seen a lot of questions about class methods in Ruby lately. What’s the difference between class and instance methods? When should I use them? And my favourite - are class methods evil? There is a lot of conflicting information out there on the interwebs but luckly there is a simple answer for almost every question about class methods Ruby.

This week I presented presented a paper at #PESACONF2015 hosted at ACU Melbourne, which used computer simulation to argue that we should be very skeptical about infering much about school performance from student results. PESA was great! It was the best catered conference I’ve been to so if you like philosophy & education, get along to the 2016 edition.

Peter Ellerton & I presented another introductory level session on the application of critical reasoning to military scenarios to members of 6RAR at Gallipoli Barracks, Enoggera.

It seems likely that most people believe schooling somehow affects student ability. After all, we as a society invest significant amounts of time and money in various endeavours trying to measure exactly this. Yet these endeavours face an epistemic challenge. Because we can’t measure the causal impact of schools directly, we can’t know this causal impact with certainty. Instead, we infer the causal impact of schools on student ability by way of proxy measures such as student results. If student results improve, then we can infer that some aspect of schooling caused this. Perhaps.

You’ve probably heard that Ruby is an Object Oriented Language. That’s certainly correct but I find it more useful to think about Ruby as a Message Oriented Language as the two are deeply intertwined.

Many people think of Ruby as an Object Oriented Language. It is - and a lovely one at that. But Ruby makes so much more sense if you think of it as a Message Oriented Language. Most of programming in Ruby involves sending messages to objects, and defining how objects should respond to messages. Master this and you’ve almost mastered Ruby.

RailsGirls is fantastic. Starting a few years ago in Finland as a fun and friendly introduction to IT for women, it’s been the catalyst for a number of tech careers. It’s like the best bits of Ruby and open source culture distilled into one (well catered) day and night.

Peter Ellerton & I presented an introductory level session on the application of critical reasoning to military intelligence scenarios to members the defence and intelligence community at Gallipoli Barracks, Enoggera.

Under what conditions can we say that our beliefs are justified? Imagine for a moment that someone you know believes that vaccinations cause autism. You of course, think that this idea is an utter load of bollocks. So who is right? And how do you know? After all, it’s not like this is a matter of pure logic or axiomatic belief. It seems like every reason you might give in support of your position - that the medical studies that claimed as much were fabricated and the paper that reported it was retracted, that no subsequent scientific study has shown any connection between the two what so every - still has to rely on some justified prior belief.

If philosophy is useful, then it would be widely taught in schools.
Philosophy is not widely taught in schools.
Therefore, philosophy isn’t useful.

With 6 months of funding left, I have some concerns about my thesis structure and whether or not my argument will be satisfactory. To condense my thesis to a sentence, it would currently read something like this:

Abject Oriented Programming (Abject-O) is a set of best practices that promotes code reuse and ensures programmers are producing code that can be used in production for a long time. For too long, the beauty of ruby has been sullied by the misguided follies of Gamma & his cronies. Abject rectifies this by finally bringing Abject-O to Ruby in a snapply DSL.

Firstly, lets distinguish between Political Theory and political theories. The former is a field of study into the history of political ideas, as well as the concepts and principles that people use to describe, explain, and evaluate political events and institutions. The latter is a collection of beliefs concerning how individuals, groups, institutions, and society should act and be organised. Political theories are normative. They are action guiding accounts of what we should do and why we should do it. And they are rarely self-standing, but instead rely on a range of earlier or lower order normative beliefs.

Of all attempts to explain what makes political authority legitimate, the most influential in contemporary political philosophy at least, is Rawls’ account of Reasonable Consensus. Attempting to find a balance between the individualism of traditional consent theories and impersonality of instrumentalist justifications, Rawls argued that if the institutions of the state are to be used to coerce its citzens, then those institutions ought be arranged in such a way that they accord with the reasonable views of those citizens.

A century or two ago, a person you never knew, and whose only connection to you was that you currently live within a few thousand kilometres of where they did, said that people shouldn’t wear a hat inside on Sundays. And just because they wrote it down on paper, and some other people at the time thought it was a good idea, then you have a moral obligation today to not wear a hat inside on Sunday.

What can game theory tell us about appropriate responses to climate change? I’m sure game theorists would posit that their discipline is immensely helpful but my natural skepticism of applying theoretical models to predicting complex human behaviour makes me doubt just how much game theory can help.

On key factor of Ruby’s success as a language - apart from its beautiful expressiveness - is it’s package management ecosystem - RubyGems. Just like Ruby, RubyGems is optimised for developer happiness - it makes the packaging and dependency requirements of distributed software a pleasure.

In a previous thought, I tried to argue that ideas can’t be owned because the accessibility to them can’t be controlled once expressed. That argument failed in part because my account of property was insufficiently discriminating. This is an attempt to rectify that.

A necessary condition of property is control. To own something is to control it, or at least the part of it that you own. It is to be free to decide how that thing is used, by whom, and for what purpose. Ownership doesn’t require total control - a pet owner could be said to own a dog without being able to control every aspect of it’s behaviour and thought - but it does involve control of who gets access to the dog. I may claim ownership of the moon, but without being able to control who can access the moon, to actually deny access to those I wish to deny access to, then my claims of ownership are vacuous. Ownership then, is a description of accessibility control.

Imaging the following scenario…

What causal role does liberalism play in social stability? This is clearly an empiric question but one that has profound normative consequences. It’s also one that can be explored theoretically from the arm chair. And while empiric data might be better, there is no guarantee of this owning to possible confounders and difficulty of measuring political concepts like liberty.

Democracy begins with the people; democratic theory simply presupposes them. But democratic theory is silent on who ought be included amongst the people. It can’t, because any democratic process first requires the identification of some determinate group of agents - the demos - in order to act democratically. So how should the demos be defined? It can’t be done democratically because that would require the identification of some prior demos to decide this question, and an infinite regress of who should vote on who should vote ensues. The question of who is logically and temporally prior to the question of how and what.

This talk was based on work-in-progress chapter of my thesis titled “The Limits of Liberalism”. I am greatful to Andres Luco for his hospitality during my visit.

I am greatful to Stephan Hartmann who allowed me to present a some of my early ideas for using computational methods in political philosophy. Below is an abstract of my talk.

Consider the following hypothetical…

Democracy requires a demos but the demos can’t be determined democratically. Non-democratic solutions fail to adequately explain why current political boundaries should be the way they are. The inability to properly account for who the people ought be raises other challenges to democracy’s coherence and claims of legitimacy. This has become know as the Boundary Problem.

I’ll be visiting the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy next month a presenting a Work-in-Progress paper entitled What’s the Problem with the Boundary Problem? It’s my first attempt to use computer modelling and simulation to shed light on a foundational problem in democratic theory.

As the annexation of Crimea unfolds, all parties with some interest in the outcome - the US, the EU, Russian, and Ukrainians themselves - hold very different opinions on the legality and legitimacy of the proposed referendum on Crimea’s possible secession from the Ukraine and union with Russia. Ignoring legal considerations for a moment, I wonder if there is any possibility that any outcome could ever be considered legitimate from a normative standpoint.

Consent theory of authority has a long tradition in political philosophy; and objections to consent theory have a tradition almost as long. The appeal of consent theory is unquestionable: if we accept the fundamental liberal assumption that individual freedom is the default position and impositions to this freedom must be justified, then it seems only natural to think that any obligations we have to obey a political authority must require our consent.

What’s a citation? Essentially, it is nothing more than a pointer to some other work. It tells a reader - human or machine - that this work points to, or references, another. But what do we mean by ‘pointing’? Does a citation point to the location of another work - telling us where we can find it like a library catalogue - or does it point to the contents of the work - a designator of identity like someone’s name?

The term “liberal” is a confusing one. Is a liberal someone who believes in social freedoms - marriage equality for example - someone who believes in the primacy of markets over the means of production, or someone who views universal education and healthcare key requirements of personal liberty? In Australia, conservatives tend to vote Liberal, while in the US liberals would vote for anything but.

Political authority is ability of an agent (or agents) to morally compel another to action in a way that is content independent and preemptive. By content independent, it means that you should act just because you were ordered and irrespective of the content (provided of course, that the content was within the scope of the authority); and by preemptive it means that it overrides other reasons for not acting - it’s not just added to a balance of reasons for or against action ¹.

It’s been said that a writing doctorate thesis is a marathon, not a sprint; that dissertations are abandoned rather than completed. ¹ Well, right now it feels more like an experiment in torturous boredom; a perverse combination of never ending workload and constant input, coinciding with an almost complete absence of productive output.

In trying to flesh out a coherent strategy for the development of a scholarly markdown, one issue I find myself beating my head against a wall on, is the matter of references and citation. There’s much debate on the digital academe interwebs about an appropriate method of citing the works of others when using digital media. Part of the problem stems from the fact that the markdown specification wasn’t designed with scholarly writing in mind.

Contemporary accounts of democracy can be roughly divided into those justified on external grounds and those justified from internal ones. External, or foundationalist justifications, all rely on some pre-democratic notion or principle upon which their account is built such as freedom, equality or autonomy. Internal, or anti-foundationalist justifications, on the other hand, claim that any attempt to justify democracy on something outside its practice is disingenuous because those alleged foundations can only be interpreted through the prism of existing practices [@rorty2006]. We can only, anti-foundationalists claim, compare actual non-ideal practices against other potentially realisable non-ideal practices.

The term ‘Nanny State’ is banded around quite a bit these days. Sometimes its a legitimate complaint, sometimes it’s poorly disguised corporate lobbying, but most of the time it’s confused childish bitching from someone who doesn’t want to clean up their room. Pool fences, plain packaging, gambling pre-commitments. “The government is making me do something but I don’t want to do it.”

I’m currently researching democratic authority which has inevitably lead me to Robert Wolff’s seminal work In Defence of Anarchism. Its a straight forward, concise (80ish pages) argument for rejecting any legitimacy of state authority and is definitely worth the time to read.

I’m very sympathetic to John Burnheim’s work on political theory. A single paragraph in the introduction to Is Democracy Possible? was the basis of my Master’s thesis and the starting point for my PhD. But it’s hard not to conclude that his solution to the problems of modern electoral democracy, demarchy, misses the point completely.

Aristotle had an interesting taxonomy of political forms in his Nicomachean Ethics. In it, he outlines three possible forms of ‘constitutions’ or systems of government: ¹

It’s wrong to inflict avoidable harm upon others. This seems to me like a pretty uncontroversial claim. Sure, there are certain circumstances like self defence, where there might be limited disagreement but even then, one can say that intentionally inflected harm from self-defence-as-a-last-resort isn’t wrong when it is simply unavoidable. Whenever there is a high degree of directness and proximity between our actions and harm to others, then (sociopaths excepted) our moral intuitions seem to keep us in good stead. Call this interactional morality, the direct duties and obligations we hold to other individuals.

In the Morality of Freedom, Joe Raz ¹ argues that linguistic analysis is somehow lacking as a tool for examining concepts in political philosophy. Take freedom for example. He offers us the following cases:

Most people who work on the interwebs probably know that Elasticsearch makes for a pretty awesome search engine. What fewer people realise however is that it also makes a rather swanky persistence datastore. I mean, if you are going to pushing most of your data from MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, or whatever to Elasticsearch for full text searching, then why not get rid of the redundant step, store all your persistent data in one place, and enjoy the transcendent luxury of a schema-less database.

Political cosmopolitanism is an appealing, if largely nebulous idea. At it’s core is the simple premise that we are all citizens of the world, that we all belong to a single moral community - humankind. Its appeal is clear. The concept of a global moral community is a seductive thought for anyone wanting to transcend the parochial concerns of the day to day. It hints to those higher, nobler notions of humanity best invoked in the republican motto of ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’.

I’ll be presenting a 20 minute version of my thesis, “Democracy’s Boundary Problem”, this Wednesday 25 Jul @ 1pm, Miche Building level 5.

Contemporary accounts of democracy can be roughly divided into those justified on external grounds and those justified from internal ones. External, or foundationalist justifications, all rely on some pre-democratic notion or principle upon which their account is built such as freedom, equality or autonomy. Internal, or anti-foundationalist justifications, on the other hand, claim that any attempt to justify democracy on something outside its practice is disingenuous because those alleged foundations can only be interpreted through the prism of existing practices [@rorty2006]. We can only, anti-foundationalists claim, compare actual non-ideal practices against other potentially realisable non-ideal practices.

How does a people decide exactly who should make up the people? The democratic method would be to vote but then who should vote? It can’t be ‘the people’ because who ‘the people’ are is only determined after the vote.

Which of these two statements is more likely?

The Harvard Business Review has shared its latest insights about the secrets of successful people. The maxims include such gems as ‘be specific’ and ‘build your willpower muscle’: I guess that’s the best one could hope for from a PhD in motivational psychology.

I work at the intersection of philosophy and technology. I’m a computational philosopher at the University of Queensland where I teach critical thinking, and an independent software developer and consultant focusing on Ruby and Javascript.