August 2010 Archives

Well- In response to your question about is there anything we have learned in this class that would help us make an informed decision in this upcoming election.  (Not inlcuding years of graduate economics).  Well, it may be easier to answer what not to do.  Do not look for a set of ideals we affirm and use our educational resources to self-rationalize the validity of such an action.  Do not look to commercial media outlets for information.  (Maybe mpr is okay).  Do take into account the bias that may be a part of your news sources.  Do refer to the criteria of adequacy whenever someone makes a claim.  Do remember that the best offense is a good defense- when avoiding bad information.  Do take into consideration what paradigm we are a part of and account for our economic normal science accordingly.  (Beware of those who do not suppport this current best way of describing our state of economics.)  Help anyone....

Objective knowledge is hard to sit with. It is based on so many aspects of the definitions. I have come to believe from this class that knowledge is just the bases of what your mind undoubtfully can believe to be true. Yet for the knowlege to be objective it has to carry no history or be independent of experience. So how can we say any knowlege is actually objective and not subjective? I also beleive that we can learn about or gain a knowledge about a culture/society with out actually living the experience as long as you consider their views with a non bias approach, which would be objectively looking into the topic.

For you to objectively look at a topic you literally have to conciously tune out your own beliefs form what I have come to believe. Because our brains are automatically wired to go toward what we know.

Wow...This class has been great! Not really what I thought it would be based on but I have learned alot and am very happy to have been apart of this class.

From Peter Druckers classic management book, The Effective Executive, 2006:

"..the effective decision does not, as so many texts on decision-making proclaim, flow from a consensus on the facts.  The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of the serious consideration of competing alternatives."  (p. 143)

If you shelter yourself among others who agree with you, is it therefore likely that your worldviews, perspectives, thoughts, and decisions will become more restricted and less informed?  

There's an election coming up.  We'll have to choose a new governor for the state of Minnesota, and we'll have to vote for state and federal legislators.  Let's suppose that we want to vote for the candidates who will do the most to improve the economy -- to create conditions which will get the unemployment rate down and produce good-paying jobs for everyone who wants to work.  There are other issues to worry about, but let's just stick to that one, and see if we can figure out who we should vote for, if that's our primary issue.

The Republicans are telling us that they will create jobs by cutting (or at least not raising) taxes and by getting rid of regulations that are needlessly hindering businesses.  Part of their message is that government cannot create jobs (because the dollars it spends to create those jobs are either taxed or borrowed out of the private economy, so more government funded jobs just means fewer privately funded jobs) and that the economy suffers mainly from excessive taxes and regulations. (In other words they are advocating "supply side economics".)  Here in Minnesota they want to balance the state budget (which is several billion dollars in the red) purely by cutting spending.  At the Federal level they want to extend the Bush administration's tax cuts and cut (unspecified) spending.

The Democrats are telling us that we need to use government money to put people to work improving our infrastructure, educating our children, and investing in energy efficiency and in alternative energy technology (so-called 'green jobs'). [details]  Part of their message is that the economy is suffering mainly from insufficient demand.  (Businesses aren't hiring because they don't think they will have customers if they expand production.) So we need more government stimulus to get things going in the right direction again.  (They are advocating Keynesian economics.)  They want to balance the state's budget largely by raising taxes on the rich.  At the Federal level they want to let Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy expire, keep the cuts for the middle class, and borrow more  money in the short run.  They would try to get the Federal budget back into balance only after the economy revives.

So we have starkly contrasting diagnoses and starkly contrasting prescriptions for our economic woes.  Do we have the tools to figure out who's got the right medicine and who's selling snake oil?  Is there a truth here to be discovered?  Can we discover it (without spending years in graduate school studying economics)?  Can anything we've learned in this course help us?

Does anybody know why the fonts keep changing in my longer entries?  When I look at the HTML there are no tags that would be accounting for it, but I can't seem to put together a long entry (where I'm cutting and pasting from various places) without ending up with different fonts coming in more or less at random

I've been thinking about how to wrap things up as the end of the semester draws near..  First, in this post, I want to say a bit about how the press let the American public down during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.  Then, in another post I want to raise a question about how we should make up our minds who to vote for in the election coming up in November.

Part of the story we like to tell ourselves about the way our democracy works is that the press is supposed to function as a 'watchdog' and to provide a critical counterweight to the government. But it seems to me that the media did not provide much resistance to the Bush Administration's effort to 'sell' the war in Iraq to the American public. The case for war was made to the American people and to the world with a lot of very scary claims about the 'gathering danger' of Iraq -- including the possibility that Saddam Hussein would give a nuclear weapon to terrorists who would use it to blow up an American city. As we have subsequently learned, the evidence for most of their claims was much shakier than they led us to believe. And for the most part the US media simply relayed these claims to the American people, without much analysis and certainly without giving anywhere near the same kind of prominence to the views of people (many of whom had excellent credentials) who had a different view of the nature of the Iraqi threat and what would be the best way to deal with it.

The fact that, as David Kay put it, "We were all wrong" about Iraq's possession of chemical, biological, and (especially) nuclear weapons and the fact that the war in Iraq has been much more difficult and costly than the Bush administration predicted has led some in the media to re-examine the way they did their jobs in the period before the war.   The New York Times apologized to its readers here.    But the Washington Post had a more interesting account of how they got it wrong:

An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?" ...

As reporter Karen DeYoung put it: "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power. If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said." And if contrary arguments are put "in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front page, a lot of people don't read that far."

The Post helps us to understand one of the most problematic features of the American media system: the way it functions all too often as a mouthpiece for the US government by giving statements from high government officials automatic credibility and (usually) front page display, while giving critical and dissenting voices much more skeptical treatment and less prominent placement. But I don't think it's just the current administration that gets this kind of treatment -- it's the political establishment more generally.  If there had been prominent Democrats vigorously dissenting from the Bush Administrations claims, I think the press would have given them prominent coverage.  (A big part of the failure of the press and the political system to challenge the Bush administration's erroneous assumptions about Iraq had to do with the fact that the Democrats chickened out, intimidated by the fear of being labeled unpatriotic.)  And now, certainly Republican critics of the Bush administration get plenty of air time and newspaper space. 

This leads to the problem discussed by Neil Levy in one of the readings for Assignment #7:  that 'balanced' coverage can be just as misleading as 'one-sided' coverage.  That's because 'balance' is often amounts to a lazy reporting of what various people say, with little or no effort to figure out who is telling the truth.  Levy argues that this has seriously undermined the public's understanding of the global warming issue.  The "He said, she said" model of balance gives global warming skeptics a level of prominence in the media that is out of proportion to the scientific credibility of their point of view.

If the media are going to serve us well, it seems they are going to have to try to tell us not just what the administration in power want us to hear, and not just what the party out of power says in 'rebuttal'.  They are going to have to try to discover the truth.  In my ideal world, that would be one of the main functions of journalism: to identify and consult people with real expertise and to pass their expert opinions on to those of us who don't have time to find out for ourselves. Sometimes this happens. But it takes time and effort to develop enough knowledge of an issue to figure out who the real experts are. Lazy or ignorant reporters can end up passing off shills as experts and thereby leave us confused or misled.

Is there any chance they will be up to the job?  (Will their bosses let them do that job?)

I've been thinking about this paradigm-shifting stuff.  And what I really know or don’t know, and why, and how it has all changed over time.  Have I gone through any paradigm shifts?  I don't recall any specific monumental "aha" moments, but things have changed.  As a kid, I was very idealistic, and very naïve.  I believed that almost everyone was good and had enormous potential, that "right" should and would triumph, and I believed in absolute truths.  There was a certain way things should be done and that most people saw it the same way that I did.  Now, I view the world a mass of widely differing opinions and I define "truth" and "knowledge" as the specific principles or ideas I've made a personal commitment to, rather than universal constructs.  I am still naively optimistic.  I am wondering if anyone else has noticed any major changes?  Of if you have your own definition of truth, or reason(s) for believing in your knowledge?  It would be nice to get final thoughts from people.  

Very good point Todd, I think that when people are asked what's really important to them, alot of their daily habits and activities probably wouldn't match up with that vision very well. For example, people might broadly say the most important thing in life for them is to make the world a better place, to be a good Christian/Muslim/Jew, to be a responsible and thoughtful citizen, etc. But if we carefully look at what we do during each day is much of it lining up with whatever core values we may hold? Or are most people just hypocrites?

Yesterday, I posted a response to Gwen's post on her understanding of Fay's readings. Unfortunately, I had been having a difficult time understanding Fay's interpretation of Relativism and Multiculturalism. My belief is that my mis-understanding of Fay stemmed from my preference for Kuhn's SSR and my apparent ease of understanding his views. However, I decided to use Descartes method of demolishing everything completely (especially my views) and start again at the very beginning of Fay's Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science to fully understand what Fay is Actually stating. Well, I am almost done with the book with a whole new perspective on the philosophy of social science. From my understanding of the book, Fay provides the readers with a view of social science, one that seeks to learn and understand the differences of people. I feel he provides a REAL way of understanding and accepting our cultural differences while appreciating belief systems unlike ours. My A-Ha moment happened near the end with Fay's description of the dynamic character of social science and the synergistic character of genuine multicultural interaction, "Engage, question, and learn" rather than simply, "Recognize, appreciate and celebrate difference." (p. 241)

Paul makes an interesting, or perhaps painful, observation about the disparities between what we think is important to us and what actually consumes our days.  I think this is true for many (most?) people.  Is this an epistemological wake-up call?  Does it mean we really do not think these things are important?  When I consult for various businesses and leaders tell me what is important to them or what their priorities are, I simply respond, "Show me your budget.  Then I will tell you what your priorities are."  There is something refreshingly revealing about how we spend our time and money.  In fact, a good budget analysis (of time or money) can serve as a call to action!  Perhaps, we just got caught up in things.  Maybe we should make an adjustment and do one thing next week (lol.) that will involve something important. 

It is so much easier reading and understanding Fays material (over Kuhns) but he does evaluate claims that hold similar paths. I do appreciate how he always seems to pick the good out of the theory. I believe he does a really good job on stating his belief but also not being bias to others views as well.

I have shared lots of his viewed throughout my life.

 

I am sorry for I have not been very active in the posting on the blog for this class. All of the post are so well constructed and full of informative information so I comment on some but just read and learn from most. Your post are full of so much informative information!!

Fay seems to do a great job of being open-minded, careful not to get trapped in black and whites. He seems to reject true Nomologicalism and Historicism with the basic assumption that they are just to direct and leave no flexibility or shades of grey. I feel he does a great job with criticizing and analyzing all concepts of an issue, i wonder if this is common or he faces scrutiny for being on the fence with issues...something i believe is not a bad thing especially when we discuss a topic as dynamic as relativism.