Goodbye to Yesterday...

Your grades are now posted. Bye, 9:00 class!


Enjoy your summer, 10:00 class!


(Sorry, 11:00 class, I forgot to take your picture!)

Final Exam

Just a reminder that the final exam is Wednesday, May 13th in our normal classroom at our normal class time. You will only have 50 minutes to take the test, so be sure to show up on time.

Stubborn = Intellectually Dishonest

Here's a little rant on a favorite topic of mine: intellectual honesty. A simple goal of this class is to get us all to recognize what counts as good evidence and what counts as bad evidence for a claim. I think we're getting better at that. But it's not clear that we're caring about the difference once we figure it out.

Getting us to care is the real goal of this class. We should care about good evidence. We should care about it because it's what gets us closer to the truth. When we judge an argument to be overall good, THE POWER OF LOGIC COMPELS US to believe the conclusion. If we like an arg, but still stubbornly disagree with its conclusion, we are just being irrational.

This means we should be open-minded. We should be willing to let new evidence change our current beliefs. We should be open to the possibility that we might be wrong. This is how Todd Glass puts it:


Here are the first two paragraphs of a great article I read in the Fall on this:

Last week, I jokingly asked a health club acquaintance whether he would change his mind about his choice for president if presented with sufficient facts that contradicted his present beliefs. He responded with utter confidence. "Absolutely not," he said. "No new facts will change my mind because I know that these facts are correct."

I was floored. In his brief rebuttal, he blindly demonstrated overconfidence in his own ideas and the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion. Worse, he seemed unaware of how irrational his response might appear to others. It's clear, I thought, that carefully constructed arguments and presentation of irrefutable evidence will not change this man's mind.

Ironically, having extreme confidence in oneself is often a sign of ignorance. In many cases, such stubborn certainty is unwarranted.

Give Up

Because we ran out of time, we skipped over a section in class on giving to charity. It's an important issue, though, so I thought I'd give you some links on it, anyway.

• Free Charity! The Hunger Site. Just clicking there donates food! Also, try the word game at FreeRice.
• Affordable Charities! $10 Club, Microcredit, & Oxfam.
• Research on Effective Charities! Want to know which charities aren't squandering their donations? Check out Charity Navigator or GiveWell.
• Peter Singer's been promoting his new book a lot lately. He's pointed out the biases that keep us from giving, and called out professors for not teaching about poverty.
  
• NPR's Fresh Air ran a radio interview with someone who argues that a lot of current aid does more harm than good. (Donate to his organization here.)
• Here's a great article on the concerns about giving aid to African nations. I recommend reading the last section.
• Why would we give away the money we earn? (This article even references Thomas Nagel's anti-I'M-SPECIAL-ism.)
  

Finally, here's Peter Singer's recent Colbert Report interview .

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Peter Singer
colbertnation.com
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