Students these days

 Yesterday I read Steven Hales' thought-provoking post about how students have changed (with thanks to Daily Nous for flagging it). Hales has noticed his students becoming significantly worse at reading, writing and basic maths over the course of his 30-year career. And he puts it down largely to smart-phone addiction.

Identity trouble

I started (and never finished) writing this post years ago about moving, and its impact on one's identity.

Now would be a great time to transition to a mandatory three-day working week!

The coronavirus and its associated lockdown has brought many downsides. But are there opportunities too?

Many people have been enjoying the birdsong and clean air brought on by the huge reduction in traffic. Much of this reduction has come from people who are not working, because they have been furloughed or, worse, lost their jobs. But some of it has come about because folk who would normally travel during rush hour to get to an office job are now working from home. Some companies are already wondering this might become permanent? Is office culture now a redundant hang-over from pre-internet times? Another upside, along with reduced carbon emissions from commutes, is that city-centre office space could be repurposed to provide desperately needed housing.

Some would-be home-workers are struggling, because home currently has one fixture that was lacking in the office - dependent children. And schools are desperately worried about taking them back off their parents hands because they can't see how to make social-distancing work with the numbers.  But there is a solution. Mandate a maximum three-day working week. That way, two -parent families will be able to work two full time jobs, as well as lavishing constant focussed care on their children. It would limit transmission of the virus, increase work life balance, aid gender equality, improve quality of life for children and improve the employment rate during the inevitable recession.

Radical thinkers have been calling for a shortened working week even before the new quarantine reality dawned. Technology was supposed to free us of unnecessary labour and free up leisure time. People work better, think better, when they have time to rest and reflect. It's finally time to access the benefits of mechanisation and get over the habits formed in the industrial revolution, to get off the treadmill of our own making. Rush hour traffic and 9-5 hours no longer make sense in the globalised, virtually connected marketplace. Five day weeks, farming out the kids and living on takeaway food isn't how anyone wants to live.

Let's transition to a mandatory three-day working week to get jobs for all and time for life.

Joy?

Does anyone else walk past this image a lot lately and think 'Joy?' I think Jennifer Lawrence is great, I loved the hunger games especially, but I can't help but notice that this is not a very joyful expression from her. That she is pulling the same passive, half-dead, 'I won't resist if you assault me' face that women have been pulling in artworks for centuries.

New email charter

The original email charter sets out 10 rules aimed at saving us all from drowning in emails:

1. Respect recipient's time (ie don't send an email unless you absolutely have to).
2. Don't treat email brevity as rudeness.
3. Keep emails as clear as possible.
4. Keep questions specific.
5. Don't add unnecessary cc's.
6. Don't let threads get too long.
7. Avoid unnecessary attachments.
8. Restrict short messages to the subject line.
9. Don't send contentless responses
10. Disconnect: don't spend so much time on email.

Much as I appreciate this charter and its attempts to consciously steer our norms regarding email, i don't think it goes far enough. 

Should we prioritise our health or that of the environment?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could get everyone eating more healthily, so that we all enjoy longer, better quality lives and require fewer medical interventions? And wouldn’t it be great if we could get everyone eating more sustainably, so that we could meet the nutritional needs of everyone on the planet without overburdening the natural environment? These goals have long been run together by the health food industry, endorsing natural foodstuffs as being better, both for us as individuals and for our world. ‘Natural’ implies fewer chemicals to clog up our bloodstreams and our waterways, after all.  But what if all of this is free-range baloney… What if there is natural conflict such that what is nutritionally optimal for human beings tends also to be the most environmentally burdensome, and vice versa. Faced with a choice between producing those foods that promote the health of human populations and those that promote the health of the rest of the living world, which should we choose? 

Quarantine ethics

It was recently reported that residents of slums in Liberia and Sierra Leone have been placed under military-enforced quarantines: nobody in, nobody out.

The ebola crisis has been reasonably visible in western media, and there was some discussion of the uncomfortable fact that the lives of several white aid workers were saved by an antidote too scarce to be widely deployed. But I am surprised that there hasn't been a bigger western reaction to the tactics that seem to be in use to control the disease in the African countries it is affecting.

In praise of an unkempt garden

There are plenty of houses, in the transitional area of Oxford where I live, whose gardens are what some would call anti-social. Lawns uncut all year, rubble piled up, weeds taking over and generally making the property appear vacant, unloved and unfriendly. At least, this is the typical societal attitude towards such gardens, I think. More careful, considerate homeowners keep everything neat and tidy, which makes the whole street feel safer, keeps house prices higher and generally pleases those inclined towards neighbourhood-watch stickers in their windows. Unkempt houses make a house look empty, which implies no one wants to buy it, which will depress all the prices. Or like it might be occupied by squatters, who are terribly dangerous. Or, worst of all, like students live there.

Philosophy of science for scientists, and science for philosophers of science!

See my post over at Auxiliary Hypotheses.

Feral

By George Monbiot
Allen Lane, 2013

What's the craziest thing you've ever done?

Territorial demarcation and the meaning of science

Larry Moran of Sandwalk says that Massimo Pigliucci has nothing to tell him and is on a mere quest for respect when he argues here that the new atheists don't have enough time for philosophy. Moran asks "What "intellectual" or "experiential" way of acquiring knowledge does Pigliucci think will add to the lack of evidence for gods and support of atheism?"

Isn't this just rationalism versus empricism all over again? It sounds rather like Moran is trying to claim that empiricism is all we need. But many people have shown that no pure empiricist strategy is possible. Quine and Kuhn give the arguments viewed as most conclusive. Empirical evidence, observation, data, whatever you want to call it.....these can never inform us about normative questions such as 'what is rational?' We can only do science with the help of rationalist principles concerning what we OUGHT to believe, what extra-empirical properties a GOOD theory should have, what are good norms of reasoning when we choose which part of a theory to take some evidence as having confirmed, and so on. Science is in the business of hypothesizing counterfactuals - 'what would happen if i were to do this or that...' and to make sense of these, of what it means for something to follow necessarily......there is no way that empirical evidence can ever help us understand necessity, lawfulness.

Lots of philosophy does a bad job of explaining why non-philosophers should care about it, because they spend all their time talking only to other philosophers and developing lots of cliquey jargon. But 'there is no such thing as science without philosophy', as Daniel Dennett once said -' only science whose philosophical assumptions have not been spelled out'.

On vanity

If they could choose, babies would probably be happiest dressed in sleepsuits (aka babygros) all day. Stretchy, snuggly, with integral socks and easy opening, they don't impose uncomfortable waistbands or restricted movement on the little wrigglers. Yet for some reason, you will rarely see babies older than three months wearing these in the day time. Instead, you will mostly see babies dressed as miniature grown ups - jeans and woolly jumpers for the boys, dresses and tights for the girls.

Lazy parenting

Haven't blogged so much lately. Orson feeds much more quickly now, and is hugely distractable so I'm actually in some ways missing the days when I was stuck on the sofa with one free hand for an hour at a time several times a day. 

Orson has been a delightfully easy baby so far, and I'm trying to stay aware of how lucky I am in that respect. He rarely cries, always smiles, and eats very (very) well. Nonetheless, I am completely and without limit exhausted by the end of each day. In part I think this is because, thanks to hormones or whatever, at least 50% of my brain, whatever Orson is doing or not doing, is incessantly  and intensely engaged with him. When he is asleep it says 'has he woken up yet? How long has he been sleeping? What are you going to feed him when he wakes up? Is he still asleep? Is he breathing? Did you dress him warmly enough? Has he woken up yet?' 

When he is eating it says 'Does he like this meal? Is he eating enough? Did you warm it up enough? Has he had too many carbs today? Doesn't he like it? Did you feed him too early? What did he eat earlier? Should i offer him something different? Am I going to encourage him to be a fussy eater?Is he choking? Is it too hot? Has he eaten too much? Is he going to get diabetes?'

Till I sometimes want to rip the top of my skull off and scream 'Enough! Shut up for a second' into the bloody hole.

Guilty as charged

An article at the Huffington Post details five things parents need to stop saying to non-parents and I am totally guilty as charged. Before having Orson I explicitly said to myself that I wasn't going to become one of those parents who can't talk about anything other than babies (yawn), who acts like their child is everyone else's problem (grr), or like the world actually owes them one for being generous enough to reproduce. There is a serious debate to be had as to whether reproduction qualifies, in some respects, as an act of biological altruism (for example, some have called mammalian breastfeeding a selfless act). But my gut instinct says its mostly entirely selfish. Aside from environmental guilt, I'm pretty sure that nobody (apart from maybe grandparents) gets such a kick out of Orson's existence as I do.

Anyway, Simo and I swore blind that we weren't going to stop going out, or let our lives revolve around the baby. We weren't going to let the everyday phenomenon of self-spawning make us lose sight of the bigger picture, of our idiosyncratic interests and intellectual activities. In short, we were going to be cool parents, who stayed just as close to all our non-parent friends and didn't become boring.

But its so HARD!!!! At some point, some number of weeks into the brain-numbing relentlessness of the nappy changing, breastfeeding, rocking etc etc you just realise that fighting the baby-take-over just makes life harder, and we-must-not-do-anything-that-makes-life-harder.

I'd like to think I'm still a fairly considerate parent. I fold my pushchair up on busy buses. I try to keep Orson quiet in places where people need quiet. I try not to subject family members to him before about 8am. But clearly I'm falling into all the cliches of a new parent who thinks everyone should be interested in the details of their darling offspring's daily habits (i'm blogging about it, for god's sake!) and that life pre-baby was a meaningless distant memory (see Exiting the cave). As for being a cool parent? I haven't got the energy!

So yes, I am guilty as charged, and I'm sorry! I really ought to be more considerate to the feelings of all those who cannot or choose not to have children. On the other hand, its hard enough worrying about the impact of all this on my academic life without worrying about my social life as well. Hopefully one day when all of this has calmed down a bit (*will that ever happen, she pleads*) my good friends will still be there for me, waiting patiently with a large bottle of vodka.

Praise

Got the proofs through today for a paper to come out in Journal of Biosciences - title is 'Origins of Evolutionary Transitions'. Its a paper I wrote after attending a conference in northern India last summer, and the first thing I've finished since becoming a mother! And I'm disproportionately pleased about it!!

It should be a small thing compared to the enormous achievements I've produced in the last four months. But somehow it's different. I've been pondering why that is.

Exiting the cave

When you are pregnant, people who are already parents say to you things like 'everything changes' and 'it turns your world upside down'.

Philosophy is a life skill

No, I'm serious. Stop laughing.

Love, sex, betrayal....motherhood?!?

Warning: This post contains seriously long sentences.

I once read or heard the statement that all successful song lyrics are variations on just two themes - a) I love/want/desire him/her or b) I hate/miss him/her. The pursuit of, celebration of, and nostalgia for romantic love would surely be identified by alien anthropologists as THE organising principle of all human activity, the meaning of life, the raison d'etre of our existence. Chuck in some other key passions involving envy, betrayal, guilt, fear and so on and you have the ingredients of just about any song, novel, play, soap opera or film that anyone dreamed up.

Wired generation

Modern mothers have so much more time to interact with their babies than did their mothers, or their mother's mothers. What impact is this going to have upon forthcoming generations?

How not to f*** them up

By Oliver James, Vermillion, 2010

Oliver James, a clinical child psychologist of unashamedly psychoanalytic bent, categorises mothering styles into three types, and offers advice on how to make the best job of mothering within the constraints created by each style. There is the Hugger - who is most generous and loving towards her baby, the Organiser - who prefers older children and finds the early years a challenge, and the Flexi - who chops and changes between both. In a nutshell, the best way not to f*** them up is to be a Hugger, and if you're too damn selfish to manage that, then make sure you get a top of the range nanny!

You might guess that I wasn't the most sympathetic audience. I'm disappointed by this, since I like James' Guardian column (no wait, that's Oliver Burkeman!), and I'm generally a right sucker for self-help psychobabble.