What to learn how to think better?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.