Our contribution to a Palgrave blog (typos will be corrected).
Liberalism, Through a Glass Darkly
Our contribution to a Palgrave blog (typos will be corrected).
Booker Mural
Check out WWOZ’s A Closer Walk website. Whatever your preferred style of piano music, if you don’t know who Booker is, you really should delve into this amazing talent and one-off character.
Oakeshott as Conservative
The topic of Oakeshott’s conservatism is a contentious one, as Robert Devigne shows in his essay “Oakeshott as Conservative.” Using Burke as a touchstone, Devigne demonstrates that Oakeshott’s conservatism is complex and shifts over time. In his essays from the late 1940s and early 1950s, Oakeshott displays a Burkean antipathy toward rationalism and appreciation for tradition, though he also dissents from Burke on the value of philosophy and the rationality of history. Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, Oakeshott’s differences with Burke become more pronounced, as he moves in a more liberal and legalistic direction. Despite this, Oakeshott’s justification of the “salutary stalemate” between societas and universitas in the European political tradition seems to bring him closer to Burke’s identification of the “is” and the “ought.” Devigne concludes his essay by contrasting Oakeshott with the other seminal conservative thinker of the second half of the twentieth century, Leo Strauss, bringing out their very different assessments of modernity, Burke, and history.
Symposium on Roger Koppl’s Expert Failure
- Preface to a Symposium on Roger Koppl’s Expert Failure — WILLIAM N. BUTOS
- An Introduction to Expert Failure: Lessons in Socioeconomic Epistemics from a Deeply Embedded Method of Analysis — GIAMPAOLO GARZARELLI and LORENZO INFANTINO
- Expert Failure and The Intellectual Crisis of American Public Administration: How The “Fatal Conceit” Continues to Threaten Liberal Democracy — PETER J. BOETTKE
- Epistemics, Experts, and Adaptive Systems — WILLIAM N. BUTOS
- Approaching the Singularity Behind the Veil of Incomputability: On Algorithmic Governance, the Economist-as-Expert, and the Piecemeal Circumnavigation of the Administrative State — ABIGAIL DEVEREAUX
- Expertise, the Administrative State, and Corporate Governance: a Comment on Koppl — RICHARD N. LANGLOIS
- Ignorance and the Incentive Structure confronting Policymakers — SCOTT SCHEALL
- Massive Error — STEPHEN TURNER
- Arrogance and Humility in the Governance of Human Interaction: A Reflection on Roger Koppl’s Expert Failure — RICHARD E. WAGNER
- A Peircean Perspective on Koppl’s Expert Failure — JAMES R. WIBLE
- Response — ROGER KOPPL
The G&T Ceremony
Martha Argerich as a child
Martha Argerich’s intimate relationship with Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor began when she was 10 when she performed the concerto in its entirety at Buenos Aires’s Theatre Colón with Washington Castro conducting Orquestra Sinfonica de la Ciudat de Buenos Aires.
Machine behaviour
New survey paper in Nature inspired by Herb Simon. Sciences of the Artificial is an excellent and very accessible book that feature’s heavily here.
In his landmark 1969 book Sciences of the Artificial, Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon wrote: “Natural science is knowledge about natural objects and phenomena. We ask whether there cannot also be ‘artificial’ science—knowledge about artificial objects and phenomena.” In line with Simon’s vision, we describe the emergence of an interdisciplinary field of scientific study. This field is concerned with the scientific study of intelligent machines, not as engineering artefacts, but as a class of actors with particular behavioural patterns and ecology. This field overlaps with, but is distinct from, computer science and robotics. It treats machine behaviour empirically. This is akin to how ethology and behavioural ecology study animal behaviour by integrating physiology and biochemistry—intrinsic properties—with the study of ecology and evolution—properties shaped by the environment. Animal and human behaviours cannot be fully understood without the study of the contexts in which behaviours occur. Machine behaviour similarly cannot be fully understood without the integrated study of algorithms and the social environments in which algorithms operate.
Oakeshott and Hayek: Situating the Mind
The theme of rationalism provides Leslie Marsh with the opportunity to compare Oakeshott with another important critic of rationalism, Friedrich Hayek, in his essay “Oakeshott and Hayek: Situating the Mind.” Invoking Oakeshott’s famous dismissal of Hayek in “Rationalism in Politics,” Marsh makes the case that Oakeshott got Hayek plain wrong. If one understands both men to be centrally concerned with the anti-Cartesian project of socializing the mind, then a more fertile vista opens up for comparing them. Marsh approaches the topic from the perspective of the philosophy of mind and locates both Oakeshott and Hayek within the non-Cartesian wing of contemporary cognitive science known as “situated cognition.” Marsh concludes his essay by showing that the commonality between Oakeshott and Hayek with respect to the theory of mind extends to their political philosophies as well, a fact that is often obscured by labeling the former thinker conservative and the latter liberal.
Mind and Behavior: Vol. 40, No. 1
Valhalla Vodka
It’s been a while since something interesting on the boozy front has come my way. This vodka has flavour (without being actually flavoured) coming from a residual barley mash that hasn’t been fully filtered out. This really is sipping vodka, no need to mix this stuff though a decent mixologist could do something subtle with it. Valhalla Vodka won a Gold Medal from the “Beverage Tasting Institute (BTI) of Chicago in July of 2014. Following an independent, professional blind tasting, the Beverage Tasting Institute gave Valhalla Vodka a rating of 93 points (Exceptional), and described the artisan spirit as:
Clear in color. Bold aromas of toasty raisin bran and apricot granola with a soft, dry-yet-fruity medium-to-full body and a honeyed melon, cream, and delicate pepper finish. Lots of fruit character that will make for flavor-packed cocktails.”
manwithoutqualities 