Yet again, people are asking why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? I have a different answer than you’ll find at that link. It’s because so many smart people are idiots about psychology. I deal with a lot of atheists, and one of the many flaws in that group that have been coming to the fore lately is the obliviousness they have to their own motivations.

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Sometimes it seems that way. The latest example comes from the College of Saint Rose, where the president, Carolyn Stefanco, has won an award. What great accomplishment deserved recognition?

Stefanco, the president of Saint Rose, received the award two months after announcing the elimination of 23 faculty positions — many of them tenured — and 12 academic programs. She pitched the cuts, part of an attempt to fix a $9 million deficit, as a way to save money while investing in the college’s more popular programs.

Oh. “Popular” programs. I’m in one of those! Good thing I don’t have to worry about biology being shuttered, and it’s that other side of campus that’s more at risk. Who needs foreign languages, for instance? Or in another trend I see a lot of, let’s bugger philosophy. What a joke major! Don’t you know the purpose of college is to get a high paying job, to cite a recent exchange.

The award was for being a “disruptor”. It comes from…business. Of course.

“Disrupter,” a word native to start-up culture, typically describes someone who balks at conventional wisdom and comes out ahead. A disrupter discovers newer, better ways to run businesses and manipulate industries.
“To flourish in business these days is to make disruption and change work for you and your business,” Mike Hendricks, editor-in-chief of the Review, wrote when the paper announced the winners. “You have to recognize the need and opportunity for change and risk the status quo.”

We do need better ways to support higher education — I think faculty would welcome innovators who could shake up the status quo, because we’re getting worried. The problem is that a university is not a business, and our goal isn’t to make money — it’s to teach and learn. Coming in and disrupting education to make more money kind of ignores the whole function of the institution. It would be as if a business hired me, an academic, to “disrupt” their status quo, and I declared that I was going to “disrupt” that whole crap about profits and economics and instead redefine their purpose to be all about giving their expertise to the community. I don’t think it would go over well with the stockholders.

Unfortunately, the people who’ve been handed the reins of our universities are too often sitting their with a stockholder mentality.

Unsurprisingly, the faculty had a no-confidence vote on Stefanco. Also unsurprisingly, the board of trustees affirmed their confidence in her.

Simon Newman, the university president who said This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies…put a Glock to their heads, has resigned.

This is what happens when you hire somebody to run a university who has no competency to do so.

Mr. Newman has almost 30 years of experience working as an executive with a strong background in private equity, strategy consulting, and operations. He is the former managing director of the private equity fund JP Capital Partners, as well as president and CEO of Cornerstone Management Group, founded in 1997.

During his career he has started or co-founded four different businesses, completed more than $33 billion in transactions, and raised more than $3 billion in equity funding for ventures and bids he originated. He has led several business turnarounds and delivered more than $200 million in profit improvements.

There’s nothing in that list of accomplishments to suggest that he was at all appropriately prepared to run an educational institution. But some people see dollar signs and figure that’s what a university is all about, so they bring in the money man.

Next up for eviction: Bruce Harreld.

During the Dec. 9 meeting of the UI Staff Council, Harreld said that any instructor who goes into a class without having completed a lesson plan “should be shot.”

The business world must be a really tough place if they routinely deal with difficulties with summary executions.

No more disruptions. I’m going to go sit in solitary and finish this article I’m supposed to write (hey, Simon, it’ll be done by this afternoon!) and then I have to get the answer keys for all the homework I assigned in genetics done and posted.

So go away, internet, and stop bothering me.

Bill Nye apparently thinks that philosophy is that meandering babble you do when you’re stoned out of your mind. It’s rather impressive, actually, that he can sit there giving advice about philosophy to a philosophy student and get everything about philosophy completely wrong.

Transcript – Mike: Hey Bill. Mike here. I’m a philosophy major in college right now and I’m looking for your opinion on a subject. Some of the scientists like Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson have brushed it off as a meaningless topic. I’m just wondering about your thoughts on the subject.

Bill Nye: Mike, Mike. This is a great question. I’m not sure that Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins, two guys I’m very well acquainted with have declared philosophy as irrelevant and blowing it off in you term. I think that they’re just concerned that it doesn’t always give an answer that’s surprising. It doesn’t always lead you someplace that is inconsistent with common sense. And it gets back – it often, often gets back to this question. What is the nature of consciousness? Can we know that we know? Are we aware that we are aware? Are we not aware that we are aware? Is reality real or is reality not real and we are all living on a ping pong ball as part of a giant interplanetary ping pong game and we cannot sense it. These are interesting questions. But the idea that reality is not real or what you sense and feel is not authentic is something I’m very skeptical of. I mean I think that your senses, the reality that you interact with with light, heat, sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing, absolutely hearing. These are real things.

And to make a philosophical argument that they may not be real because you can’t prove – like for example you can’t prove that the sun will come up tomorrow. Not really, right. You can’t prove it until it happens. But I’m pretty confident it will happen. That’s part of my reality. The sun will come up tomorrow. And so philosophy is important for a while but it’s also I get were Neil and Richard might be coming from but where you start arguing in a circle where I think therefore I am. What if you don’t think about it? Do you not exist anymore? You probably still exist even if you’re not thinking about existence. And so, you know, this gets into the old thing if you drop a hammer on your foot is it real or is it just your imagination? You can run that test, you know, a couple of times and I hope you come to agree that it’s probably real. It’s a cool question. It’s important I think for a lot of people to be aware of philosophy but just keep in mind if you’re spending all this money on college this also may be where Neil and Richard are coming from. A philosophy degree may not lead you to on a career path. It might but it may not. And keep in mind humans made up philosophy too. Humans discovered or invented the process of science. Humans invented language. Humans invented philosophy. So keep that in mind that when you go to seek an absolute truth you’re a human seeking the truth. So there’s going to be limits. But there’s also going to be things beyond which it doesn’t matter. Drop a hammer on your foot and see if you don’t notice it.

Some advice to engineers: when you’re asked about something totally outside your field, in a discipline you’ve never studied and have only misconceptions about, the correct answer is to say “I don’t know.”

Actually, that’s pretty good advice for all of us.

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I knew it wouldn’t take long. A philosopher responds.

It’s perfect for me: got a little downtime, sure, I’ll go dig a tunnel for 20 minutes, or build a fort, or whatever, and playing on a public server is even better, because if I don’t have the time or skill to assault an end fortress, someone else does and I can trade for the useful loot. Fun and casual and creative are exactly what I want in a game.

I am mentioning this because Mojang is releasing their special, long-in-the-coming 1.9 update on Monday, and the server I play on, Sitosis, is going to spawn a brand new, empty, untouched world shortly thereafter, and they’re asking all their former users to check back in (new users are also welcome). There’ll be a rush to stake out new territories in exotic biomes next week!

One hint: you probably don’t want to settle anywhere near me. Apparently, I have a reputation for defending my territory by breeding so many cows and chickens and pigs — for my genetics experiments, don’t you know — that only the best computers can cope with their owners approaching the milling mobs in my base. I also tend to be a bit lax about lighting things up to thwart evil spawn, so my place might be crawling with undead and creepers and giant spiders. The way I like it.

Adam Baldwin, the conservative “actor” who was apparently just being himself in his role in Firefly, has announced yesterday that he is leaving Twitter in protest over their announcement of a Trust and Safety Council to reduce online harassment (I’ll believe they are going to do that, when they actually do that). Unfortunately, after deleting all of his past tweets — but leaving his account open and enabled — he then proceeded to tell us in 17 tweets on Twitter (so far) that he’s going to stop making tweets on the Twitter.

Tell me, O Veterans of the Internet, how often have you seen that happen? It’s classic troll behavior. “Your board/forum/blog sucks! I’m leaving!” Then they keep coming back, sometimes under a new pseudonym, or 40 new pseudonyms (hi, Reap!). It’s so awful that they can’t bear to abandon it.

He’s not really leaving. If he were leaving he’d close his account and stop babbling. But then, hypocrisy never seems to bother right-wing jerks.