Another great book In my last post, I talked about Kate Manne’s book Down Girl. What got me into that book first, however, is another great book. It’s a great book on stress management written by a pair of twin sisters. I listened to it on Audible, of course. The authors performed the Audible recording —…
Down Girl: a summary and a gentle nudge
This post is my brief summary of Kate Manne’s book Down Girl: the logic of misogyny and a gentle nudge for you all to go read it. In this post, I will primarily focus on what I take to be the core of Manne’s view. If you’d like to see her arguments and real-world case analyses,…
Course Idea: Historical Method in Philosophy and Science
I think a lot about how and why philosophers of science do historical research. I am working on a series of papers about the relationship between the hows and whys of a particular kind of philosopher of science–those who want (something like) a theory of scientific methodology so as to guide to contemporary practice. However, this…
A case against talents
I went to a career workshop recently. The theme was that we should identify our strengths through some paid questionnaire service and structure our careers around them in some way (we didn’t get to the career part). In general, I’m not a big fan of this sort of career testing because I don’t think the…
Is data special?
This post is inspired by a twitter thread on whether you should trust a summary statistic (mean/ standard deviation/ Pearson’s correlation coefficient) without seeing a plot. Most people voted “no”, which seems to be motivated by a sentiment that accepting summary statistics without seeing the plot is trusting too much. See the full thread below.…
Multi-Disciplinary Mindset and Cross-Disciplinary Claiming
I’ve been doing a bad job posting regularly. Part of this is due, I think, to expecting too much of my blog posts, so to counteract this I will be writing only short posts for a while (<300 words). I’ve been reading a lot about interdisciplinarity recently, which has forced me to think more carefully…
What make the PhD process easier/harder for me
I’ve recently encountered a lot of disciplines/areas of research that I didn’t think existed before but, after thinking about it, I’d think “of course someone needs to figure that out”. It’s an interesting experience — and a sobering one, regarding what we take for granted. In any case, one such area I discovered today is…
“the fundamental lexical hypothesis”, universal personality traits, and umami
The universal trait hypothesis Like many other psychology students, I was taught that “the various human traits and characters can be captured by five basic traits: conscientiousness, extroversion, emotional stability, openness-to-experience, agreeableness.” As someone who is not, by nature, very reflective, I never questioned what “can be captured” meant or how this caption was done.…
19th Century Kant Commentary
This week, I’ve been digging into the history of Kant commentary, and I’ve been struck by one thing: I can’t find much in the philosophy of science literature on the more “naturalist” commentators on Kant in the 19th Century. There’s plenty on the major schools of neo-Kantianism (Marburg and Southwest), but I can only find…
Is intelligence a quantity?
This post is inspired by this book, which I’m currently in the process of reading: What is a quantity? Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, defines two kinds of quantity: multitude and magnitude. A multitude is a collection of discrete objects that can be counted. A magnitude is more interesting. The Aristotelian quote says “A quantity is a…