[newsletter]
Aesthetics are facts too and other things
21 Feb 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: Facts are just a special kind of belief… Because there isn’t really anything tangible that distinguishes a belief from a fact. Cultural and aesthetic beliefs are facts too, in a certain light—we’re tracing the fuzzy boundaries of our religions, theories, and convictions to put certain meaningful aspects of the world at the centre. They’re just as true as the facts that are more stable, and objective. They’re just centring on something different.
Main idea: Cultural and aesthetic ‘facts’ are as real as any ‘objective’ truths. They’re just centred on different kinds of meaning. Trivialising them because they ‘go against’ the evidence is failing to recognise what evidence they care about.
Beliefs and the Unacknowledged Evidence:
Beliefs may withstand the pressure of disconfirming events not because of the effectiveness of dissonance-reducing strategies, but because disconfirming evidence may simply go unacknowledged
A rebuttal to the classic ‘cognitive dissonance’ account of why believers continue to believe after the failure of a prophecy. In this case, the culture makes the failure less salient. One wonders whether this kind of surrender to a culture that protects you from dissonance is not simply another mechanism for reducing cognitive dissonance.
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Is science done by a small elite? The ‘Newton hypothesis’
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On the slow, steady consumption of the behavioural sciences by the concept of the ‘prediction machine’.
Human beings aren’t pieces of technology, no matter how sophisticated. But by talking about ourselves as such, we acquiesce to the corporations and governments that decide to treat us this way. When the seers of predictive processing hail prediction as the brain’s defining achievement, they risk giving groundless credibility to the systems that automate that act – assigning the patina of intelligence to artificial predictors
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People underestimate how enjoyable and engaging just waiting is.
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Do We Want Corporations to Save the Ivory Tower?
Unfortunately, the research we see today is of a different nature. In a section titled “Inventions originating from large corporate labs are different”, Arora & Belenzon enumerate the kinds of innovations we’ve lost in the shift towards university labs:
- Corporate labs work on general purpose technologies
- Corporate labs solve practical problems
- Corporate labs are multi-disciplinary and have more resources
Interestingly, the growing unrest within and toward academia appears to have been the hallmark of the corporate world. Do we want corporations to save the ivory tower?
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,