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Is it the thought that counts?
There was a jolly fire in the fireplace. The snow was falling outside the windows, to the delight of children and despair of transport planners. Aristotle sipped on the mulled wine, watching while Kant meticulously wrapped another jar of homemade mustard. “Dear Immanuel, are you going to give all your friends mustard?” “Everybody except Georg.…
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Wikileaks Rights and Wrongs
Would it be a good thing if, far from crushing Wikileaks, governments were required to post their entire correspondence on Wikileaks? In principle, this would appear to be highly desirable. A legitimate ruler over us it might justifiably keep secrets from us—but there is no such thing, neither leviathan nor the general will nor the…
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Political epistemology and recent Australian experience
One of the growth areas in recent analytic philosophy is social epistemology. Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge, but social epistemology often has a more applied focus. It asks about the conditions under which groups produce knowledge, and one of its central claims is that groups are often better at discovering truths than…
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The quixotic prohibition of attention-enhancing drugs in sport.
Amphetamines and major league baseball are in the news again, with a number of busts made for the prescription drug Adderall, which contains several amphetamine stimulants in its list of active ingredients.
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Education is child abuse
I took my son to school this morning. And I’m wondering if that was evil. Proponents of human cognitive enhancement are fond of saying that there is nothing very novel about their suggestions. There is no difference in principle, they say, between improving someone’s neural processing power by (for example) manipulation of the genome, and…
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Sex and Chess
For chess geeks (like me), it’s an exciting week. Tomorrow will see the start of the London Chess Classic. It will feature the first, second and forth ranked players in the world. Apart from their prowess over the 64 squares, all the competitors share another characteristic: they’re all male.
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People will behave badly if it’s not too much work…and if no one is watching
by Alexandre Erler An interesting article recently published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science concludes that people are more likely to transgress moral norms if doing so does not require an explicit action on their part. The researchers, from the University of Toronto, conducted two studies: in one of these, they asked participants whether…
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Is mathematics the Christmas present of the year?
by Anders Sandberg Is mathematics the Christmas present of the year? TheoryMine is a company that uses automatic theorem discovery and proof to generate new theorems via computer, which customers can then buy the naming rights for (for a paper describing the method, see The Theory behind TheoryMine). Is this a scam? Or does it…
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Cloudy with a Chance of Dementia
By Matthew L Baum “A test could indicate whether people in their 40s are more likely to develop dementia later in life, scientists say. But wouldn’t many of us rather not know?” reads the picture caption from a recent BBC News Magazine article .
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Is Discounted Therapy Fair?
by David Shipley A friend of mine is a therapist. She faced the following dilemma. My friend specialises in enhancing fertility and was approached by a prospective patient who wished to become pregnant but could not afford to pay the standard fee of £45 per treatment as she was on benefits. The woman was aged…