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Soaked feet, bone-dry cuffs

Mind & psychology. A little bit of epistemology. Plenty of other stuff. Lots of swearing. Some jokes, mostly self-deprecating. Everything's coming up Milhouse.

Kind of a rhetorical question about situationism

8/8/2019

 
The basic idea of situationism, in a nutshell, is that: 
​1. virtues motivate behavior
2. behavior is controlled by external factors (why? because social psychology)
3. virtues are internal
4. so, (by 2 & 3) virtues don't motivate behavior

Granted, a really rough characterization, but not too far off the mark. But just about any psych study will gesture in some way towards effect sizes. The environment is part of the cause for some behavior, but clearly not the whole story -- otherwise, the effect sizes for these studies would be ginormous. And they just aren't. But the studies are supposed to keep the environment the same, so variance in response is unlikely due to other environmental factors (or at least not solely to other environmental factors.) Is there some a priori argument why causes of variance can't be internal factors? It seems if the virtue theorist can get their foot in the door this way, it's a problem for most strains of situationism.

Plus, you know, individual variability in responses is a thing in psych. I guess the point of situationism isn't to eliminate internal factors but rather to show that they can't do the work needed to count as a character trait that might be developed into a virtue?

Post the first

8/2/2019

 
I keep meaning to write a first post. And I wanted it to be a real humdinger, like "look out world, here comes Charlie!" But if I've learned anything, it's that one gets better at something the more one does it. So rather than try to make this post a "holy shit my mind is blown nothing will ever be the same" piece, I'm just going to go with, "I need a first post. It's not the post you deserve but it's the one you're getting." 

I'm hoping to be able to hash out some ideas here. A lot of it will be thinking out loud on big data and epistemology. And also mind and culture. Other parts will be about teaching projects. Maybe other items for kvetching. Tantalizing, I know. Better content forthcoming, I promise.

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    I do mind and epistemology and have an irrational interest in data analysis and agent-based modeling. 

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