My mind has many nooks and crannies ... like an english muffin
2020 Philosophy Survey Part 1a: Aim of Philosophy, God and Eating Animals
· ☕ 452  words life philosophy  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
This post is Part 1a with the topics being Aim of Philosophy, God and Eating Animals. I recently came across the 2020 Philosopher Papers Survey of 7,685 academic philosophers around the world. (I think < 1,800 actually responded). I then ran into my first problem - uhh, what do those answers mean? It reminded me of tax lawyers writing for other tax lawyers. One piece of advice I used to give younger tax lawyers when they were writing for a business audience - drop the nuance.
Motte and Bailey
· ☕ 457  words politics rhetoric  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I have run into an argumentation tactic several times in the last few years and I finally discovered that it has an actual name. Consider the following: You and I are arguing over something which has a common usage understanding. I can’t convince you and then I insist that we are arguing over something using a technical definition different than common usage. I can prove my point using that definition. Have I won the original point?
Joscha Bach on Political Opinions
· ☕ 228  words politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I like this comment from Joscha Bach, a German cognitive scientist: “Political opinions are unlike other kinds of opinions: they appear to be without alternative to the one who has them. ‘This protest is invalid, because the people who participate in it are wrong.’ = ‘These people have political opinions that are different from mine.'” I sometimes need to remind myself that other people’s ways of looking at things may or may not be better than how I look at things.
Responding to Sophists
· ☕ 907  words life  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I just want to quote from a reddit comment I ran across on how to deal with people who want to argue about terrible positions and are more concerned with scoring debate points than having a reasonable discussion. This is as much a reminder to myself as a note to others. This comment can be found at https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/77hda6/how_to_deal_with_unproductive_gadflies_like/. “Card carrying Sophist here (a rhetorican who teaches philosophy). There is no sure fire way to deal with these folks, but there are a few things worth suggesting.
Upcculfity
· ☕ 548  words politics life  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I was watching a youtube video on Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity and reading the comments left me thinking about the many feet of lumber in both the eyes of the commenters and myself. I’m going to somewhat change the terminology used because it is rather loaded with dog whistles and use a made-up word “upcculf” or “upcculfity”, which I will define as a state of conciousness of a true believer in X (left wing, right wing, multi-level marketing, crypto currencies, anti-vax, blind intellectualism, … [insert name your belief to which you have become a convert]).
False Equivalences
· ☕ 164  words politics rhetoric  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I don’t know about you, but I often see exchanges of the following type (replace “murder” with any of a thousand different behaviors which are unkind to other people): Team Humanity member: “Murder is wrong. Gang A and Gang B murder people. Stop it.” Gang A member: “That is false equivalence. Gang B murders more people and more enthusiastically than we do.” Team Humanity member: “Stop murdering people.
Retired One Year and No Regrets
· ☕ 804  words politics tax rant  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
So, one year into retirement and so far no regrets. I could rant at the abyss about the global state of affairs, but I know exactly how much attention the abyss would pay. Several people asked me if I was behind the Twitter feed @GoodTaxTakes. The answer is no, but I agree with probably 90% of it. Click on the title of this post for some thoughts about the current state of affairs in international tax which I can get away with because I don’t represent anyone anymore.
Covid and Police
· ☕ 73  words covid politics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz

Per the Officer Down Memorial page, so far 243 police officers have died in the line of duty in 2021 and of those deaths, 132 are from COVID-19. So more deaths from Covid than every other cause combined. Remind me why police unions are opposed to masks and vaccination? Seriously, I don’t get it.

Simpson's Paradox
· ☕ 339  words statistics  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I was recently re-introduced to Simpson’s Paradox in statistics - how aggregation can mislead. (I’m just making up the numbers here to demonstrate the concept.) Suppose you have China with an overall illness survival rate of 95% and Italy with an overall illness survival rate of 85%. On the face of it, that looks like China does a better job of taking care of patients than Italy. But now suppose you look at the survival rate by age group and Italy has a higher illness survival rate in every single age bracket.
Salem Witch Trial Connections
· ☕ 552  words genealogy  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I made a comment to my wife about the fact I have ancestors on both sides of the Salem witch trials. So of course I had to prove it out against the family tree (old New England families with relatives who were very interested in genealogy; the family tree currently has over 7,500 people in the database). So, just for fun, here are the results: Actually Accused Winifred Henchman (1597-1671), eleventh great grandmother, accused and acquitted (1659 well before the Salem hysteria).
Yes, you can celebrate with the competition!
· ☕ 147  words happy  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
From the Doctor Who tv episode “The Doctor Falls”: “Winning? Is that what you think it’s about? I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because, because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun and God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do, because it’s right!
Either they work or they don't. NOOOOOO!
· ☕ 380  words life science pandemic  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I recently had a useless discussion with someone who was unwilling to either wear a mask or vaccinate and took the position: “If the vaccines work why the fear, and if they do not work why take the risk of getting them?” His refusal to wear a mask was based on his trust in his immune system “I’m healthy and if you wear a mask you are living in fear and halfway dead already.
Creativity and Semantic Distance
· ☕ 172  words life creativity  · ✍️ Peter Hiltz
I am in the process of reading a study on creativity and semantic distance. A McGill University newsroom article on it is here. The concept is fairly simple - more creative people will find connections between words that general usage would indicate are “less” connected. “Cat” and “dog” have the feeling of being “related” words. “Cat” and “test tube” feel like “more unrelated” words. Efforts have been done (see the study link) on measuring the “relatedness” of words by crawling the internet and measuring how close the word pairs are to each other in normal usage.