EFFIn Digitaalinen vallankumous-seminaarin ja Isoveli-palkintojenjaon videot!
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Tieteessä tapahtuu: Näkökulmia Wikipediaan
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Näkyypi ilmestyneen tuo Tieteessä tapahtuu, jossa on miniteema “Wikipedia – monta näkökulmaa avoimeen tietosanakirjaan” kirjoittajina Bo-Christer Björk, Mikko Välimäki, Joonas Lyytinen, Timo Jyrinki, Tere Vadén, Kari A. Hintikka, Juha Honkala ja Teemu Mikkonen. Koko homma löytyy pdf’nnä täältä.
Samassa numerossa on Keijo Paunion ja Risto Santin tyly juttu huippuyliopistohankkeesta. Yksi kohta menee näin:
Mikäli esimerkiksi professoreiden kirjoittamien tieteel-
listen julkaisujen vuotuista määrää pidetään
tärkeänä tehokkuuden ja tason mittarina, niin
kyseiset instituutit kuuluvat suomalaisten yli-
opistojen heikoimpaan luokkaan. Tie huipulle
tulee olemaan hidas ja kivulloinen. Ensin olisi
saavutettava kansainvälinen keskitaso.
Oman pesän likaamista, kenties, mutta hauskaa silti!
93
Monday, October 29, 2007
Getting frantic.
93, and the winter is coming.
So maybe the PKK are reading this?
Meanwhile, PetroChina becomes the secong biggest company on earth, second only to Exxon-Mobil. PetroChina being the company active in –– Darfur.
For Friday
Friday, October 26, 2007
Might as well Jump.
Sounds even better with the microphone buzz. And at least here Wolf is singing, not just triggering.
Vinkkejä kirjamessuille
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Helsingin kirjamessuilla on filosofista tematiikkaa tarjolla yltäkyllin aina urheilun etiikasta kulttuurilehtien historiaan. Pari täsmäpoimintaa:
Perjantaina kello 14 Aleksis Kivi-lavalla julkaistaan EFS ry:n kustantama Mika Hannulan kirja Suomalaisuudesta – erään sukupolven tarina. Kirjassa kysytään mistä puhumme kun puhumme Suomesta ja suomalaisuudesta? Kirja hahmottaa Suomea ja suomalaisuutta monikollisina käsitteinä, kriittisen refleksiivisinä välineinä pohtia keitä me olemme, missä me olemme ja minne olemme kenties menossa.
Sunnuntaina Takauma-lavalla kello 16:00 suomentajat Anna Helle ja Tapani Kilpeläinen keskustelevat Deleuzesta kirjoittajana ja käännettävänä. Haastattelijana on Nuori Voima -lehden päätoimittaja Olli Sinivaara.
Tulevaisuus tulee herkin siivin
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Tiedä nyt sitten mitä perää näissäkin huhuissa on, mutta Washington Post ekana kai kertoi jenkkiläisessä mielenosoituksessa liidelleistä omituisista mekaanisista hyönteisistä.
Näin digitoday lainaa:
Washington DC:ssä kohistaan sudenkorentoroboteista. Useat henkilöt näkivät niitä sodanvastaisessa mielenosoituksessa Lafayette-torilla viime kuussa, kirjoittaa Washington Post.
– Ne näyttivät vähän sudenkorennoilta tai pieniltä helikoptereilta. Mutta ne eivät olleet eläviä ötököitä, kuvailee eräs mielenosoitukseen osallistunut opiskelija.
Vielä kun noi tekno-kärpäset saadaan varustettua kunnon kajareilla, ollaankin Philip K. Dickin maastossa: mainoksia, joita ei pääse pakoon minnekään.
Fodor on Darwinism
Thursday, October 18, 2007
I have been following Jerry Fodor’s writings for almost 20 years now. Started with the stuff on cognitive science and philosophy of language. In fact, a large part of my PhD consisted of arguing against the Chomsky/Fodor model of the mind in general, and the Fodor & Pylyshyn argument against neural networks, in particular. It seemed to me at the time that the idea of a mind as a systematic & coherent system (Language of Thought, LOT) was not only empirically wrong but conceptually ugly. Still does. Everything about evolution & biology & the physical world speaks against the Language of Thought and Symbolic Systems.
I didn’t find Fodor’s philosophy of language & meaning in, e.g., Holism: A Shopper’s Guide much more appealing. If there are atomic inside-out constituents of language, like Fodor et al insist, they are idealisations for analytic purposes going on in the academia, not the stuff of explanations, not to speak of desiderata or benchmarks for philosophical theories of mind or language. Again, the animal origins of language and the everyday context of linguistic competence make atomism pretty hopeless.
My reaction to the style of Fodor’s philosophical prose has been more ambivalent. On one hand, I find some of the jokes, examples and contexts of the discourse off-putting and limited, but on the other hand, the honesty and straightforwardness of the argumentation often feels refreshing.
And now, after all these years, Fodor has written a piece on Darwinism & Adaptationism, Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings, and I find myself enjoying the style and agreeing with every word. Scary.
What Fodor does is point out some difficulties in the standard Darwinian adaptationist story (according to which “phenotypes evolve because fit individuals are selected for the traits that make them fit”). The conceptual problem is with “selected for”: individual animals die & breed for many reasons that have very little to do with the “fit” or “unfit” traits in their phenotype. This makes the explanation of co-extensive traits very difficult. Moreover, it seems that empirically speaking traits have been both preserved and extinguished for reasons other than “natural selection”; the other reasons include free-riding (on co-extensive traits), randomness, channeling (after pigs are somewhat like what they are, wings are excluded because of the evolutionary ‘channel’), endogenous variables like genetic triggers, etc.
So we do not really know a) which traits have been selected for or b) how important (quantitatively or qualitatively) the role of natural selection has been in the history of a given trait.
This is not necessarily a big problem for a working biologist. She just has to find the answers to a) and b). Normal science as ever.
However, for recent post-1850 “evolutionary psychology” or for much of biologically inspired sociology, not to speak of philosophical anthropology the consequences may be devastating. Fodor himself lists some examples of the kind of speculation-masquerading-as-science: “‘We like telling stories because telling stories exercises the imagination and an imagination would have been a good thing for a hunter-gatherer to have.’ ‘We don’t approve of eating grandmother because having her around to baby-sit was useful in the hunter-gatherer ecology.’ ‘We like music because singing together strengthened the bond between the hunters and the gatherers (and/or between the hunter-gatherer grownups and their hunter-gatherer offspring)’. ‘We talk by making noises and not by waving our hands; that’s because hunter-gatherers lived in the savannah and would have had trouble seeing one another in the tall grass.’ ‘We don’t copulate with our siblings because that would decrease the likelihood of interbreeding with foreigners (which would be bad because, all else being equal, heterogeneity is good for the gene pool’).” You can easily, I’m sure, remember more of the same. Pick up any issue of a journal dealing in “popular science” or the “science” pages of a newspaper, and there are bound to be several examples. If LOT was a bit ugly, the standard Darwinist psychology, sociology and anthropology are positively orcish.
Now, if the amount and kinds of phenotypal traits that can be explained by natural selection are, in essence, much less than has been supposed, then it is clear that socio-cultural traits – like the kinds in the examples above – are even harder to account for by adaptation or selection. The claims above and most of their kind are, at best, speculation, and, at worst, bad politics supported by pseudo-science.
It’s great, for once, to have Fodor on the same team!
86
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Did’t have time to notice the 85$/barrel price before it was 86$.
More on peak minerals.
Weil: Juurtuminen
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Kaisa Kukkolan suomentama Simone Weilin Juurtuminen on ilmestynyt.
Kyseessä on Euroopan tulevaisuus sotien jälkeen.
