Somehow I just cannot pass up this series of tweets: Pope Francis: “SocialJustice demands that we fight against the causes of poverty: inequality and the lack of labour, land, and lodging; against those who deny social and labor rights; and against the culture that leads to taking away the dignity of others.” Jordan Peterson (a Psychology Professor at University of Toronto): “There is nothing Christian about SocialJustice. Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul.

A peer-reviewed study found Christians hold more animosity towards atheists than atheists hold toward them. The going in assumption of the researchers was that both groups would be more favorable to their own in-group but it is actually asymmetric. The atheists do not really view Christians any worse than they view other atheists. On the other hand, Christians view atheists as worse than Muslims or convicted criminals. Unlike some other studies, this one took a cross section of the American population rather than just getting samples from atheist organizations and samples from Christian churches.

I’m really only posting this so I can find the word again. Sonder - from the urban dictionary: The realization that there aren’t any main characters in the world and everyone has a complex life, thoughts, crushes, relatives, dreams and mind just as your own. Essentially while you’re the main character in your life, you’re also a background character in someone else’s. Coined in 2012 by John Koenig, whose project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, aims to come up with new words for emotions that currently lack words.

I occasionally run into people who complain that I am tolerant of X, but I am not tolerant of them, so if I claim to be “tolerant”, I need to be tolerant of everything. NO I DON’T. I am tolerant of people whose actions do not adversely affect others. I do not pretend to be tolerant of people whose actions and beliefs do affect others. Two gay people getting married does not adversely impact anyone else.

I’ve been reading some of the attempts on the anti-abortion side to avoid tying themselves into knots with respect to the definition of when something is a person. This is similar, but not exactly the same as the Cartesian duality question of whether mind and body are separate. In a religious sense it also seems to touch on when a soul is attached to a body. Obviously they can’t say “soul” in the United States due to separation of church and state, but they can use “personhood” as a substitute.

After the leaked draft of the US Supreme Court decision yesterday, I decided to share this post from Lynn Ungar, a UU minister. Source: https://www.facebook.com/shirley.worth/posts/10159952661629483 OK, this is going to take a minute, but hear me out. I am pro-religion. I’ve been an ordained minister for 30 years, and not the kind of ordination you buy online. I believe in people coming together in community, being accountable to one another, and to something that is larger than our individual whiny selves.

In my last post I mentioned collecting random names by nationality as test data for a project. Doing my normal overthinking I started wondering about how authors could choose appropriate random names for characters and ran into discussion about “The Leslie Problem”. Suppose you are a gender equality researcher and your data has actual names, but no gender assigned to them. You can generally assume that “Mark” is probably male (I’m ignoring all the LBGTQ+ issues) and “Susan” is probably female.

I needed some random names, by nationality, for a project. So I turned to the intertubes and did a search for common last names for several countries and male and female baby names for those countries and then just did random combinations. Straightforward and relatively boring. I did a double take at the first English generated name and went back and looked at the very large list of actual english boy and girl names.

The first principle of the Unitarian Universalist Church is “to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” I find this easy to apply as a default position and more difficult to apply in specific instances. If I don’t know you, I start with an assumption that you are honest and are competent in what you present to the world as your current function when I meet you. From that standpoint, it doesn’t matter whether you are a President, CEO, policeperson, waiter, roofer, farmer or internet influencer, regardless of race, creed, etc - I start with the same baseline of respect for your inherent worth and dignity.

I recently saw someone post a quote that reads as follows: “If you have something to say, then silence is a lie.” I couldn’t help myself and responded “But what if what you have to say is a lie?” I was immediately downvoted because the participants thought I was commenting on the author (who I will leave unnamed) rather than the quote itself. I think that speaks to the sorry state of affairs and the unwillingness to actually engage.

Just a collection of quotes from the British author Terry Pratchett that people have found useful for various contexts: Give a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life. In ancient times, cats were worshipped as gods. They have not forgotten this. Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.

This post is Part 1s with the topics being Well Being, Wittgenstein and Values in Science. 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.

This post is Part 1r with the topics being Rational Disagreement, Moral Principles and Gender Categories. 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.