At the risk of jinxing it, I’ve posted a late draft of Appreciating Covers.
I coauthored it with Cristyn Magnus, Christy Mag Uidhir, and Ron McClamrock, giving it the longest list of coauthors on any of my papers so far.
EDIT: There was initially a problem with the link. Should be fixed now.
In the Guardian, Sean Monahan offers a skeptical take on the metaverse. That’s not a term I heard before, but it was coined by Neal Stephenson in 1992— evidently because he wanted a synonym for cyberspace that didn’t sound like too much of a William Gibson knockoff.
Mark Zuckerberg evidently thinks that the metaverse is the next big thing. Discussing an interview with Zuckerberg, Casey Newton at the Verge offers a parenthetical joke: “The metaverse being unavailable to us at press time, we used Zoom.”
So far as I can tell, though, the metaverse is just supposed to be an on-line there which has the structure of a social and practical space. Thinking that will be a mind-splitting development misses the fact that we’ve had it for decades already. Back in 2000, I argued that internet chat rooms created virtual social spaces that were largely independent of physical space.
Continue reading “The new buzzword is as overhyped as the old buzzword”Some people have argued that the phenomenon of cover songs is inexorably bound up with racism— white musicians lifting black music. For example, Don McClean wrote that “A ‘cover’ version of a song is a racist tool.” I don’t think so. Here’s part of what I say in a current draft…
Continue reading “Hey, mister banjo”…although covers were sometimes used as racist tools, racism is not intrinsic to the concept of a cover as such. As Michael Coyle puts it, crossover covering of R&B hits by white artists “exploited racist inequality but did not arise because of it.” The word cover originally had a sense of coverage which was not in itself tied to race, and covers in that sense continued.
Today I attended the awkwardly named Joint Online Symposium presented by CVMST and SRPoiSE. It was a great event. I learned a lot, asked some questions, ranted a bit.
Continue reading “Values in scientific communication at CVMST+SRPoiSE”I just read a nice paper by Gabriele Contessa on the mitigation of inductive risk, cleverly titled On the Mitigation of Inductive Risk.1 His primary question is whether responsibly applying values in science should left be left to individuals or whether there ought to be community-level processes. He offers a number of arguments against the individualistic approach and briefly sketches what a socialized approach might look like.
Continue reading “Mitigating epistemic risk”Like many other professors, I started making video lectures last Fall. It was hard but unsatisfying work. Even so, 97% of the students in the section of Introduction to Logic that just concluded thought that my video lectures were at least somewhat clear and helpful.2
Continue reading “Lectures in logic”I taught 17th+18th Century Philosophy as a synchronous on-line course this semester. It’s a course I used to teach regularly but haven’t taught for about 8 years. Here are some reflections.
Continue reading “Looking back at the semester, 17th+18th c. philosophy”10 PRINT “Art concept pluralism undermines the definitional project is the title of forthcoming discussion note that I co-wrote with Christy Mag Uidhir. In it, we argue that…”
20 GOTO 10
Under the headline How philosophy is making me a better scientist, Rasha Shraim discusses how her undergrad degree in Philosophy is helping her in genomics and data science.3
The article ends by recommending Philosophy resources for scientists and, under the heading of Logic and inference, suggests my free textbook forall x.
They don’t link to the webpage for the textbook here at fecundity.com, instead linking to the University of Minnesota Open Textbook Library. Nonethless, they give the citation as “(Fecundity, 2012).” It’s odd to see that in the same sentence as “(Oxford Univ. Press, 2012).”
It’s been a while since I’ve complained about the narrow understandings of open access that too many people have got, but I’ve been meaning to post about Keith Burgess-Jackson’s provacatively titled Why I Publish in “Predatory” Journals—and Why You Should, Too. He argues rightly that open-access journals have several advantages over traditional journals, but fails to imagine relevant alternatives. To summarize the advantages he discusses:
On the basis of these reasons, he argues that (a) we should stop publishing in traditional journals and (b) we should start paying open-access journals to publish our papers.
This is the falsest of false dilemmas, and the recommendation he arrives at is pretty bad.
Continue reading “Open access and the falsest of false dilemmas”