[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:16] You're not even a man, you're like an early draft of a man where they just sketched out a giant mangled skeleton but they didn't have time to add details like pigmen or self-respect. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:19] Dave, the Cornell English Department voted to change their name to the Department of Literatures in English. What are you going to change the psychology department name to? I genuinely had no idea until you told me that the English department changed their name and I'm so confused.

[00:01:39] I have the article pulled up right now. What did they do? They added the word literature plural? Literatures, it's the Department of Literatures in English. I see here I thought literature was already plural. That's what I thought.

[00:01:59] The answer is the psychology department just voted to keep the name psychology department so we're not going anywhere. Maybe we're racist. It would mark a distinct change to the department's branding helping to eliminate what director

[00:02:14] of undergraduate studies prof Kate McCullough English said was the conflation of English as a nationality and English as a language. This is the part that I'm very confused about. We should talk briefly about the fact that this is part of a larger anti-racism.

[00:02:32] That's what the primary motivation, but at least according to this director of undergraduate studies, the idea is that Cornell students thought that English meant that you only studied British literature. You only studied like England, yeah. Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray and Bronte sisters. Is that the idea?

[00:02:57] That was being confused before? I mean, that might actually be true, which would make me sad about the state of high school education. It's clearly not. But does this, like where are they looking at the catalog and going like, fuck this?

[00:03:14] I don't want to study it to suffer from England. It's literature is in the book. I don't read fucking Dickens again. Jesus Christ. You can't make me read like the tale of two cities again. I'm not doing it. I don't know, man.

[00:03:27] Like with all these things, I'm sure there are good intentions that went into it and in that article that you linked, which we'll put a link to, it's the faculty members of color introduced the proposal. 75% of the whites agreed and then they had a vote.

[00:03:42] The 75% of the whites? Yeah. Is that reported in the essay? I think so. It says, no, it says by the time we were ready to officially take it to the department as a whole, we had over 75% of the faculty signed on. But not necessarily the whites.

[00:03:58] Yeah, I assume they were all except for these two. It says it was the decision to demand such a change was spurred by the summer's resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following George Floyd's death. Explain to me the connection between changing the English department name to

[00:04:17] police reform, police violence and criminal justice reform. Explain to me what the connection is or really what the connection is even involving race. The connection is as follows and this is making no claim about the character of the individuals that I am about to describe.

[00:04:37] The connection is if we add a word into the title of our department, we don't have to think as much about the criminal justice system because we've just done something and we put out a press release saying that we did something

[00:04:52] and this was a direct, because it was a direct response to the president's desire for Cornell to be less racist. By definition, it was... This is how things work now. This is how things work. So here's a quote, faculty around the country, not just faculty of color,

[00:05:10] but faculty in general began to look at the institution to see how we can advance a discourse that challenges structural forms of racism which get reproduced in students and in teaching over and over again. But what you're suggesting is no, they didn't actually want to look at

[00:05:26] the structural problems with the institution. They wanted to just do something symbolic and silly. Levine said ever since this isn't just us doing a symbolic gesture, so that defeats the argument. Here's the thing, you and I have even disagreed about some of these gestures

[00:05:51] when we talked about the red skins and the braves and stuff like that, where I'm of the opinion or I've traditionally been of the opinion that what does it take? Just change it even if only five people are upset about it. This one is just...

[00:06:08] It's not that I think that this... I'm not making some alt-right argument about this has gone too far. It's just that I don't get how this in any way addresses what it says it's addressing and that's what's frustrating to me about it.

[00:06:20] That anybody thinks that they've done something. And yeah, it's like directly that that they now feel like they've done something is a feeling that I don't think they should have. Yeah. Right. Exactly. That this is some sort of achievement.

[00:06:34] This is progress that this is actually addressing the real structural problems of racism in this country. And yeah, absolutely. Like I think that's the problem with it. Like A, it's I'm sure like a huge waste of everybody's time to have to debate something like this, something this inconsequential.

[00:06:55] But second, it is what you say it's the real issue here is that you feel like you've done something and so you're not turning to the actual hard problems, the real tough problems of... This is patting ourselves on the back like a bunch of people

[00:07:10] who already agree that racism is bad, making this effort to take action that is that keeps our hands clean. And and yeah, you know, again, not to malign these people, but I think there's two different theories of the psychology

[00:07:28] of what's going on when you do things like this. And I think that might be this the sense of the source of tension, at least when I think about this, like because I think to myself, well, how could we otherwise reasonable people think that this is something important?

[00:07:41] And I think it is on the one hand, you have people who think if we make these little changes, it will motivate, it will educate, it will make people aware of like the bigger problems and this might make it more likely to see things

[00:07:56] like you're talking about, like the police reform and stuff like that. And then there's people like you and I, I guess, who might be a little more cynical, who just think that that in doing this, what we've done is essentially the white liberal version of thoughts and prayers.

[00:08:09] Yes, exactly. This is the white liberal version of thoughts and prayers. I think so. There is another quote from a call of who says, in part, this is a result of an ongoing shift in the literary study in this department and others across the country

[00:08:25] to focus on a broader reach of literature. I guess the idea is fine, right? That's absolutely fine. Yeah, like put more authors who are, you know, not the Bronte sisters on the syllabus. Yes, absolutely. But but that just seems completely

[00:08:42] I don't know if I'm being naive, completely independent of whether you call it the Department of Literatures in English or the Department of English. Like it's there still you're still reading stuff that's in English and the authors that you want to include are still writing in English.

[00:08:57] And so that's just a question of hiring more faculty who are experts in those fields or who are interested in teaching those authors and who knows something about them and how to incorporate that into their syllabi. That's the thing, right? That's actually meaningful. The name change.

[00:09:15] And that's it's that the time spent here is time that can be credited to you so that you don't have to spend like the countless hours it takes to make the changes like hiring more faculty of color, because that's what actually those are like the tireless committee

[00:09:32] like work that people have to do to form committees and to like recruit people and like that's the hard work. I mean, they would argue we're doing that too, I'm sure. You know, but the question is why even why divert your efforts?

[00:09:47] I'm sure there'll be a back like a stupid backlash to this. So who's the audience? Like, who is the audience for this name change? Is it really like like students applying to the department or is it students here who are already wanting

[00:10:01] just deciding to be an English major or not? Or like I'm not quite sure who needed to hear a different title for the English department. Yeah, or how this is a structural to me, the part that's like they pluralize literatures, but by keeping the word English singular,

[00:10:18] I think that they are failing to appreciate that there are very different kinds of English is. So there were the departments of literatures in English is and then I would then I would feel like a victory had been the next police shooting, they can add the English is

[00:10:36] if there's another police shooting, I'm officially changing our name to Barry's Bads Wizards. I don't know why that matters, but it feels right. We we are trying to address the structural problems in this country for people of color. Speaking of things that you find it hard to understand

[00:10:55] how otherwise reasonable people could believe, we have a couple of things in store for you today, both from my field philosophy. I was saying earlier that we've been mostly focused on like bullshit psychology, I think. And in the beginning of the podcast, you know, for early days,

[00:11:19] first few years, we were more focused on the ways in which philosophy could be ridiculous and making fun of that. Lately, we've taken more of a taken more of the piss out of psychology. So it's time to address that structural inequality and consider

[00:11:39] two debates in philosophy that spell doom for my field and beyond. OK, and and these what you call them two debates is what actually makes me genuinely concerned about your field because this would be normally normally it's easy to say, OK, this is an intro segment

[00:12:03] and this is a main segment because, you know, like we're kind of kind of mocking one in an intro segment like like a one off paper. And then in the regular segment, we we discuss something that's closer to reasonable literature. But this is these aren't one off papers.

[00:12:20] Right. These are literatures. These are these are like these are people responding to people responding to people now in a way that I remember when we were talking about the zombie problem. So it's OK. So the first let's talk about the first debate.

[00:12:33] Well, I read the response before the original paper. Yeah. So the paper. So there's the there's the first paper, which is called Sideways Music by Ned Markosian. And the second paper is by Zachary Ferguson, who's a master student. This is his zombie paper, by the way,

[00:12:56] like my zombie paper I wrote in my first year as a philosophy graduate student. I feel like this is Zachary Ferguson's song turned sideways would sound as sweet. So like just to give the listeners a sense of what's at stake here, who wins this debate?

[00:13:13] Like bears on whether Einstein was right and the theory of special general and general relativity were were accurate, like that's what's at stake in this debate. So Markosian and his paper, Sideways Music, wants to argue against the space time thesis.

[00:13:35] And the space time thesis is defined by Markosian as the universe is spread out in four symmetrical and similar dimensions, each one orthogonal to each other, which together make up an isotropic four dimensional manifold appropriately called space time.

[00:13:55] Humans tend to perceive one dimension, the one we call time as different from the others in various ways. But in reality, no one of the dimensions is intrinsically different from any of the others. So that's what he refers to as the space time thesis.

[00:14:12] And I don't know, we can talk about whether that's inaccurate. One paragraph description of it. Right. I don't. Right. I don't know. The at some point, at some point, one of them says that that this doesn't seem to be consistent

[00:14:29] with the way physicists actually think about space time. But then they say, but it doesn't but it doesn't matter for this. Well, yeah, why would that matter? So. Oh, yeah. It's a general idea, right? Which is that you space and time are on a continuum.

[00:14:45] We happen to see the world as if like time was something ontologically different than space. But that's not the way it really is when you're really looking at the universe. And he says, well, that can't be right because if we assume and he thinks it's a pretty like

[00:15:07] uncontroversial assumption that aesthetic realism is true, which is the view that, you know, there is objective beauty in the world. There are that works of art, beautiful works of art, have intrinsic value that is independent of our ability to appreciate it. So like, let's say Van Gogh's paintings,

[00:15:29] which didn't receive much attention. Let's say the world just ended before anybody gave a shit about his paintings. They would still be intrinsically valuable, even if they were unappreciated by us. So it's a it's a realism about the value of works of art.

[00:15:46] And then he says, well, here's the thing. You can rotate things in space like paintings, for example, starry night, you can rotate in space, you can rotate at 90 degrees and you can still appreciate or it still has intrinsic value. It's not appreciated.

[00:16:08] It still has intrinsic value, which you could identify if you turned your head to the side. I think I but but but if you but then but look at something like music and then try to imagine doing, rotating a piece of music in time.

[00:16:28] And if you do that, if you turn a piece of music sideways, it becomes just a cacophony of notes and it loses its that would no longer be intrinsically valuable. So that's like a counter example to the space time thesis, which holds that there is no real distinction,

[00:16:47] ontological distinction between space and time. But there has to be because if you turned a song sideways in time, it would lose its intrinsic value. But we know that songs have intrinsic value. So yes. So that's so as far as I can tell the argument, I.

[00:17:07] So there's so much. Where to begin? Where to begin? Like, we're going to have to come back to to the aesthetic realism debate. But but like fine for now for for now. Let's set that aside. The rotating of a song 90 degrees.

[00:17:30] So he imagines Nina Simone playing seven notes. This is Markosian on a piano. And he says for the I think there's a phrase there for the more topologically minded of us. Imagine and then he imagines sort of like that string of notes

[00:17:48] being like a line and you are rotating that line on its axis so that from one perspective it's all flattened. So now it's seven notes played at the same time is cacophonous and that cacophony can't be intrinsically beautiful. So therefore, since things have intrinsic beauty,

[00:18:09] rotating them shouldn't matter. Therefore Einstein is wrong. Yeah. Props to the creativity of this. But I cannot I cannot tell if Markosian genuinely thinks that playing seven Nina Simone notes all at the same time says anything and like and noting that they're cacophonous.

[00:18:33] Says anything about the nature of fabric of space time. The logic of the laws of the universe and analysis. Tamela analysis. Yes, sorry. I meant to say this. Analysis is a really good. It's like a top philosophy journal.

[00:18:46] This is a top 10 general journal that specializes in short papers that make really sharp analytically rigorous arguments and then just doesn't waste your time. Like it just you know they're short and sweet and they're making an argument and or an objection to another argument. And they're done, right?

[00:19:05] Which you know, even though I think a lot of their articles are like this, where it's like, I can't fucking believe that anybody would like care about this or think that it was worthwhile. I do appreciate just the, you know, like short and sweet, no wasted, no bullshit.

[00:19:21] Like your theory out there and go home. I especially appreciate the attempts at helping us understand the arguments by in the original Markosian paper. He has like a like a fake little piece of art that he rotates on its side. Yes. To show us, see, it's largely unaffected.

[00:19:45] And and in the response by Zach Ferguson, he actually has this seven note Nina Simone melody titled the figure one beautiful melody. And then he has those notes all stacked together figure two cacophonous racket. Yes. But here's OK, here's my serious question.

[00:20:05] How do you have the balls to challenge like like a physicist of the stature of Einstein with with this? What can you imagine? So no, taking it a little bit seriously. The aesthetic realism argument that this all hinges on, right?

[00:20:23] Because if aesthetic realism falls, then all of this falls and we know nothing about space time. The argument that Markosian uses and that Ferguson seems to agree with is, yeah, sure, when you take a dolly painting, you turn on its side that doesn't change its intrinsic value.

[00:20:42] It just changes your perception of it. And so like you might have to tilt your head in order to to like really see the beauty in it. But that doesn't mean the beauty's changed. Right. Why is it so obvious that playing the seven notes at once?

[00:20:59] Isn't just an auditory version of like, well, that's the Ferguson argument. Right. No, I think Ferguson's argument is that even if you rotate musical notes spatially, it becomes cacophonous. Yes, that's a horizontal music. So he says so he says your he wants to defeat

[00:21:26] Markosian's argument by saying you think that this has placed time in the special category. But look, I can I can achieve the same cacophony by having those seven notes played by seven different pianos at several different physical distances so that they all arrive

[00:21:41] at the listener's ear at the exact same time, therefore rendering it cacophonous. Therefore your argument says nothing special about time. It's just like could just be the same. But so that's part of it. That's one half of it.

[00:21:55] The other half that I was referring to is that he says, look, you may be turning a dolly painting 90 degrees sideways doesn't affect its intrinsic value. But if you turned it and made it face the wall the whole time,

[00:22:10] it would lose its intrinsic value because it would be nobody could see it. Right? Isn't that what mind independence is? Like nobody has to see it. No, no, no. But like if the painting itself is like against the wall. So there's a difference between like nobody appreciating

[00:22:30] in Van Gogh painting that they can see versus just a painting that's just nailed to a wall like, you know, that's like impossible to even see in the first place. Then that's a different. Yeah, that's a different work of art. Yeah. That's and it's less intrinsically valuable.

[00:22:47] So like there's nothing special about space here. I feel like you've unwittingly you've unwittingly created a new kind of art that I'm going to call the back of a masterpiece. I'm just going to nail nail canvases to the wall and be like,

[00:23:02] you know, it's on the other side of fucking masterpiece. No, you can't look. Don't look. It would ruin it. Yeah. And that has aesthetic value. So then that means that quantum physics is wrong. But but yeah. But back to the seriousness of this scholarship,

[00:23:22] Ferguson does seem to accept that the Cacophonous Cluster Cord really is objectively aesthetically like ugly. But I just don't I don't get how. There's nothing special about space, like the same arguments you make about time, you can make about space both ways.

[00:23:40] No, no, no, yeah, I get that. I get that. It's just that in order to get there, like this is the part that I'm having a problem with. They think that you can rotate works of art into this,

[00:23:50] like, you know, in weird angles and still it's still objectively aesthetically pleasing. Even though I look at the rotated work and I think it's ugly, they say, but yeah, but that's that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the intrinsic beauty of it. Right.

[00:24:05] Why is playing all of the notes at the same time destroying the intrinsic beauty of it? Like, aren't there couldn't you just conceive of a creature who can hear seven notes at the same time and appreciate that? Like, isn't it conceivable that that it's not lost?

[00:24:20] It's aesthetic beauty. Yeah, I see what you're saying. This is the confusing part of like aesthetic realism, even though it doesn't depend on like actual people appreciating it something at a certain time. I think any work of art has to take into account

[00:24:38] the fact that human beings as they are, that's what the work of art is targeted for. And so that is part of the intrinsic aesthetic value is that it's made for human beings. Now, maybe that they can't appreciate it because they're Philistines. But that doesn't.

[00:24:58] But I think that, you know, when Van Gogh is painting, he is painting for other human beings. And so I think there is some sort of necessary connection between the target of the art form. Now, I say this not being all that familiar with debate,

[00:25:13] but that's what I think is going on here. And in fact, actually, Ferguson says now that I remember, he says, Markosian anticipates that the space time theorist, the one who believes in the orthogonal four dimensions. The one who just will say, yeah, well,

[00:25:26] all things being equal, I'll go with Einstein. We'll likely reject premise two, which is that turning a piece of music sideways does destroy its intrinsic value by arguing that rotating music in time does not affect its aesthetic value,

[00:25:40] although human consciousness is such that we are not good at perceiving it. Recent attempts to do this include and then he lists two papers. So the cottage industry is growing. Like there's already been two attempts at like refuting Markosian. No, this could be the next zombie.

[00:25:54] You know, they really got to get in on the ground up. But I agree with the conclusions of these arguments, but they both appeal to fantastical thought experiments that posit something extraordinary about the hearer, a perjuring time traveler and a higher dimensional being.

[00:26:10] Luckily for the perjuring time traveler, like perjuring, perjuring P.E.R.D. I thought it was a time traveler who lies under us. You can't trust them and higher dimensional being. Luckily for the space time theorist,

[00:26:27] it is possible to refute premise two by using a simple spatial analogy. So then he goes on to give his spatial analogy. Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that he doesn't want to go to weird thought experiments to show that like sideways music is

[00:26:40] that seems like the wrong way to object to this, to say no, actually sideways music is intrinsically valuable because like of a time traveler. I can I didn't look up those articles, but I can only imagine. Well, we're just going to get accused of straw manning

[00:26:58] what is a deep rich literature that has already answered our. But at the time. Yeah, go ahead. Well, so I want to talk just for a second about what I think is like seriously fucked up about just the fact that this debate can exist.

[00:27:15] You know, you know, my thoughts or my worries about psychology, that there's something fundamentally like at root wrong with the methodology. And I feel like any methodology that could that could use this to undermine a theory, you know, a theory that makes prediction,

[00:27:34] an empirical theory that makes predictions that we have to use in order to like launch rocket ships. Yeah, like the methodology that would say no, but Einstein never considered like the intrinsic value of music would be lost if it was turned sideways and time.

[00:27:54] Like there's something like fundamentally fucked up about. Yeah, it doesn't. It seems to it clearly doesn't pass a sniff test if like if you what you're arguing is for an empirical theory of the structure of the universe, like this doesn't pass a sniff test.

[00:28:08] What's disturbing to me is that nobody seems to be applying the sniff tests to any of this. It is it is like a circle jerk of of fake logical problems. When since when I mean, maybe it's always been this way.

[00:28:26] But like if what you're setting out to do is provide evidence against this empirical theory, don't you think as like an editor or as a reviewer you would say, dude, this doesn't even like it genuinely does not pass the sniff test for even conceivably

[00:28:44] telling us anything about how the universe works. Or do they do they actually think maybe that's what I'm not getting? Does Mark Hosean actually think that his sideways music says something about the universe and says, yeah, says that we should be more skeptical of the space time theory

[00:28:59] as he understands it in favor of a different theory that sees time as ontologically separate. I mean, yeah, I don't know. Like I can't get in his mind and to tackle it on its own terms, which is what Zach Ferguson does. And God bless this kid.

[00:29:15] He's he's a master's student that I looked him up. He's like second year in an MA program in philosophy. He got a publication in in analysis, which is really impressive and fine, like all of it. Like I don't blame him for doing it.

[00:29:33] Like I said, this was me when I wrote a paper about zombies. But I do think it's almost a mistake to just address these papers and take for granted these kinds of assumptions. I'm trying my best to think of an you know, I'm not a mathematician, obviously,

[00:29:50] like, but I do know that there are branches of mathematics that start with crazy assumptions and then work out the the sort of conclusions that might follow from those crazy assumptions in a way that, you know, in fact, probably most mathematics is like that.

[00:30:08] Right? Like they're looking for the consistency of these systems that may or may not have any instantiation in the physical world or like, you know, parallel lines meet in the distance. Like it doesn't it doesn't matter. And they're doing they're doing that as an exercise

[00:30:23] in seeing where the numbers take them. And my most charitable reading of this is let's just see where our our ability to do conceptual analysis using language takes us. Like, hey, it might take us here. I just can't get like there really is a tacit

[00:30:45] or if not explicit claim that something real is being said about the reality as we know it. And that's what I can't like. Yeah, I don't want I don't want to let them just sit in their corner and do this.

[00:31:00] And here's my other fear is everything you said about Zach Ferguson, I agree with if there is a hero to this story. It's it's Zach Ferguson because he's actually on his own on Marko's in his own terms, refuting. He says, I don't know anything about whatever space time.

[00:31:16] But like your argument is wrong because it's just flawed in this way. But but my fear is that the pressure to publish is just leads people and like further and further into weird, weird directions and people lose sight of like I think what we're saying with the zombies,

[00:31:40] you just lose sight of what you're supposed to be doing in the first place. Yeah, I mean, look, the pressure to publish and the effect that has on the quality of research is not exclusive to philosophy. That's not at all. That is something that affects all fields,

[00:31:54] including psychology in a big way as well. But that's a problem. And I think like I say, I think it's a methodological problem that there's something that makes like metaphysics like this OK. And so once it's established as OK and nobody's questioning the assumptions behind this

[00:32:14] this method of once you do that, then it's like, well, it's a literature is established. It's enough that somebody published something on it. That's enough to like enter that debate and respond to it and come up with counter examples. And then you're off to the races with that.

[00:32:32] So here's here is where I my my concern about philosophy starts to diverge from my concern about psychology in that. And I think we're going to have to revisit our which which fields more fucked because all of the things

[00:32:47] like the pressure to publish and the poor research and shoddy practices, all of those things are true in in psychology. But there is a semblance of sort of reforms and guidelines that a lot of people can agree on

[00:33:01] that would at least eliminate many of the flaws in current research. Now, you might hold that there are deep, deep flaws that can't be eliminated, but but there are still recipes to eliminate a lot of the like obvious flaws that we've been doing for the past few years.

[00:33:16] And in this case, like I'm not sure what the fix for the methodology is other than to say, like do work that has a better shot at being true. But but but it seems more like modern art,

[00:33:32] like where this has taken us is into the inability to distinguish parody, you know, from from, you know, like this is this is the signed urinal, right, which which is funny because that's what people think about continental

[00:33:46] philosophy. But I think that same critique applies to a lot of analytic philosophy, too, including what we're going to talk about in the second segment. But that that it is almost like you have to take a postmodern kind of standpoint, maybe even like critical theory approach.

[00:34:05] And the part of the problem is like there's no agreed upon assumptions of what's worth investigating or what, you know, like what would count like this is an a priori argument. So, you know, they might be unimpressed with us saying, well,

[00:34:21] look, there's all this empirical research that is behind the space time thesis, whereas this is, you know, this is just you are imagining something like the appropriately matched method is not like introspection, you know, it's like the actual sorry, I'm holding this up to the camera for

[00:34:43] Tamler because even though I know he's seen it, I want to put this as the cover art for this chapter because this has to be one of the least informative figures ever printed in a journal. It is then Markosian's normal art and sideways art.

[00:35:01] And it's just literal rectangle with like little designs in it flipped to the side and he labeled the axes as one. That's two. I can't this can't not be parody. I can't. It's very funny. I'm glad you pointed out the absurdity of that because I kind of

[00:35:19] glided over it, you know, it is brilliant. Like it's like, oh, yeah, no, those two things are like they have the same intrinsic value. That one is sideways. Actually, who's to say which one sideways, Ned? Exactly. They're both so beautiful and they're exactly as objectively

[00:35:40] beautiful. So yeah, I would like to talk about the the aesthetic realism stuff at some point, like in a real way because because it does perplex me. I think what you were saying is exactly the thing that confuses me.

[00:35:52] Can I read one sense is that this one quote one way. The proponent of the space time thesis could resist the argument from sideways music. I love that like, you know, he's imagining some like Einstein proponent like, oh, shit, like I got to I got to deal with

[00:36:09] how am I going to deal with this is by denying the assumption that there is such a thing as intrinsic aesthetic value in the world. To me, this response is wildly implausible. Yeah, it seems obvious to me that the world contains both tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness.

[00:36:24] But again, like I think how he understands that claim. First of all, I don't think it's obvious and he's actually imagination. It's crazy that he like it might it's crazy that he thinks that the obviousness of it to him because I'm fine with him thinking it's obvious.

[00:36:40] But it's it's so weird to me to think that his feeling of how obvious it is is like his admitted reason that his argument stands. Yes. I mean, he might say, look, I'm just this is directed at people who agree with me about aesthetic realism.

[00:36:59] And if, as he says, still I do want to emphasize that I have shown that proponents of the space time theorist must or even should did. That's funny. Must or even should deny the aesthetic real deny aesthetic realism, then that is a big deal.

[00:37:17] I'll read that sentence again. Still, I do want to emphasize that if I have shown that proponents of the space time theorist must or even should deny aesthetic realism, then that is a big deal. I mean, it's this paper is anything before it's a big deal.

[00:37:38] Like there's nothing like this paper is less than it is. Like when a little kid asks you what the opposite of a big deal is, you just give him this paper. Exactly. You know, when you see it in the next paragraph,

[00:37:51] he says another option for the space time theorist is to accept that normal music has intrinsic aesthetic value and to maintain that sideways music does too. The proponent of the space time thesis who takes this approach will explain our reaction to hearing

[00:38:02] sideways music by claiming that as a result of how human consciousness works, we are just not very good at perceiving the aesthetic value of sideways music. I, for one, do not find this response at all plausible, but this may well be simply an area where intuitions differ.

[00:38:16] In any case, I want to register that if this is the best response to my argument that is available to the space time theorist, fuck the math, by the way. Then we have again uncovered a surprising and substantive commitment of those who endorse the space time thesis.

[00:38:29] It's sort of like telling us how important the thing is that he just told us in a way that is like intended to like almost make us like convince us that what he said is important in a way that I would be taught not to write that way.

[00:38:43] You could just show it. Don't tell it. Like if the reader thinks that it's persuasive and important, then just say it. And the reader will think that. Right. Because this isn't responding to an objection. This is saying you could hold this. I find like that's the other response

[00:38:59] to the other objection too. I find holding that wildly implausible, but it would still just be a big deal to clarify that I'm committed to this and you're committed to this ridiculous assumption or intuition. But again, that's like that's metaphysics in a lot of cases.

[00:39:18] I remember in grad school, again, my first year, the same year I read all the Chalmers stuff, there was an argument by Peter Carruthers at Maryland about how the higher order thought theory of consciousness. Again, this is all a priority. There's you know, there's maybe some empirical

[00:39:35] stuff sprinkled in, but it's not at the heart of what these theories of consciousness are. But what the thing that really bothered me ethically was that he says, you know, the success of this argument, which again, 13 pages on like consciousness is that animals don't have consciousness.

[00:39:59] Therefore, they can't feel pain. And there are a lot of people who are objecting to factory farms. Maybe they need to step back and reconsider that, you know. So, right, you know, like it's in some ways worse than this, because probably NASA

[00:40:13] isn't going to read this paper and like reconfigure their next launching of, you know, some Mars mission or something like that. But but and actually nobody's going like that's not going to affect factory farming either. But just the idea that something that claim is

[00:40:31] yeah, the possibility that that could have that like that that's the result. Yeah. Not again, it's this methodologically, I don't know, objectionable, ethically objectionable way of approaching a topic like that. Yeah, I'm trying really trying hard to figure out

[00:40:48] what it is about these that bother bother me because you're pissed at this. Yeah, the we've said many times, like I'm a fan. I was more of an analytic philosophy than you because. But like, that's because I genuinely believe that there is something to the method

[00:41:03] that can get us to something true. And I'm trying to figure out where these are going so terribly wrong. And I think that they're just sloppy, sloppy premises. But if you even say that, you're saying, well, which one is the sloppy premise? Like, is it the aesthetic realism?

[00:41:21] That's, you know, it's not totally implausible. Is it that turning us sideways in time would be not intrinsically valuable? Well, maybe, but it's just it's more it feels like it's deeper than that. Like then then just like a couple of premises that are implausible or sloppy.

[00:41:40] It feels like, I don't know, there's something at the root of how we're approaching it that is just misconfigured to trying to understand reality. Yeah, there is this is the best that I can in this very unprepared moment. Like describe my my vague feeling of unease about this.

[00:42:00] There are clear cases of good arguments, valid arguments, sound arguments. And then you have articles like this and you ask, well, there was nothing in the use of logic that that to me thinks that should ever get you here. So where is where is the misstep?

[00:42:24] And it feels like it's a compounding of errors where it's like slightly sloppy premises or like too quick to accept some of the premises. And then you combine that with another premise you're too quick to accept with one that you find so intuitive

[00:42:37] that you can't believe that anybody would disagree with you. That's sort of like the p hacking of philosophy where you're like, let me get to this like super controversial, like let it be published conclusion by not showing that any specific step is way off.

[00:42:53] But like if I have enough error across all of those steps, I can get at a pretty fucking crazy thing like why childhood is bad for a solution. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. That's probably a good way of looking at it.

[00:43:05] Because it's not even that a total disregard for the empirical literature like Einstein had some, you know, way of at least arguing for special relativity that was a priori, right? This is the problem of trying to figure out where it goes wrong. It's like there's not a specific

[00:43:23] easy to pin down way that it goes wrong. And yet the result is nonsense. It's just pure nonsense. And so what happened? All right, right. Let's go on to our next reason to think that philosophy is totally fucked. We'll be discussing a paper called

[00:43:44] Why Childhood is Bad for Children? And then a paper that's a partial response to it, although not exactly. Well, it's part of the it's part of the growing literature. It's part of the growing literature. Why adults have to be children first?

[00:44:02] Again, not parodies as far as I can tell. But, you never know. Today's episode is brought to you by the Great Courses Plus. Dave, Great Courses Plus has real professors, prominent researchers who know how to teach, know how to engage people.

[00:44:24] As you know, I've been a fan of this company since way back in their cassette days. We're listening to Robert Greenberg and Teach Me How to Appreciate Classical Music. But now they're not doing cassettes anymore. They have an app you can learn anytime,

[00:44:44] anywhere on your TV, on your phone, on your iPad, wherever. And there are so many courses to listen to. And, you know, oh boy, a course that we've been enjoying is the great questions of philosophy and physics. And I haven't gotten through all of it yet,

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[00:45:29] about how the universe works, including space time, which is now really up for grabs at this point. Yeah, I mean, has he read the Sideway's music paper, though? Because until then, like, I don't... I think to be fair to Professor Gimbal,

[00:45:48] he recorded his lectures before that appeared in the analysis. So you're saying it might be completely outdated? Yeah, exactly. With its vast selection of subjects, Great Courses Plus truly has something for everyone. Russian literature, psychology, astronomy, history, as I said, classical music and so much more.

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[00:47:53] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time where we like to thank our listeners for so many things, including all the different ways they get in touch with us. They communicate with us. There are emails, tweets, not as much the Facebook messages

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[00:53:02] What are we discussing? Philosophy in quotes. By the way, have you seen this thing on Twitter just today? We're recording this on the night of the battling town halls between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

[00:53:19] And there's this big movement on Twitter to like turn on ABC and watch Biden so that he wins the ratings war. Because otherwise Trump will like brag about like he that he has better ratings.

[00:53:34] I did not. Luckily, I luckily I've had meetings for most of the day and have not seen Twitter at all. And now I'm just extra. So I take it that you think that this is a good thing. This is like.

[00:53:48] It's like a sign again that there's something fun. There's something fundamentally rotten about our country. It's not just like we need to vote this candidate out or this candidate in like it's there's something like it's it's it's it's reminds me of this problem where there's something just off.

[00:54:07] There's at the core of it fundamentally unsound about what what's going on right now. It is it is funny that you know this is something you've pointed out.

[00:54:17] I'm plenty of people have I guess that we we keep trying to find the thing that's finally going to help Trump and it's like OK OK OK everybody watch ABC. That's exactly right.

[00:54:33] Like the person who is trying to write the paper that finally shows that the zombie argument is unsound and we'll just put an end to the literature. That's like the person who thinks well this Ukraine thing that's the thing that will sink Trump.

[00:54:49] You know it's like yeah that's not how this works and the problem is deeper.

[00:54:53] The way that it works in philosophy is the person who writes that paper saying I'm finally going to put the rest of the argument ends up as a statistic of how many times the zombie paper was cited as a metric of its strength. Right.

[00:55:09] The analogy is like very like it's actually like really insightful I think because it's it's it's on two levels. Number one obviously this won't be the thing. There's one thing that could end Trump which is that he gets elected out of office.

[00:55:24] That's the only thing but but there's also it's like but the problem is deeper like even when that happens the fact that we are we are where we are and that people are thinking about politics in this way.

[00:55:35] Tune into ABC to help Trump get out of office like is the way that you're like that there's something like wrong about the whole approach the whole way we're going about things.

[00:55:46] It is absurd that a statement like that tune into ABC so that Trump gets worse ratings that it's this not like perfectly the capitalist dystopia that has been described in so many works of fiction that like we failed to even see it as such anymore. Yeah. Insane.

[00:56:05] Well, so on to our next paper that makes me feel. Yeah despair despair for my own field.

[00:56:15] This is this is a paper that was brought to my attention by someone on Twitter called at error theorist goes by the name of John I don't know if I don't think he had he I think he wants to be mostly anonymous and he tweets a lot of kind of cynical things about philosophy.

[00:56:33] I can't go to his Twitter feed right now because I'm on freedom. I banned myself after I got caught up and swept up in that whole thing. Anyway, it's an article called why childhood is bad for children by Sarah Hanan.

[00:56:49] This is the journal of applied philosophy, which is which I can't speak to the quality of this journal but the paper that's partly in response to it by Efrat Ram Tickton and Nathaniel Lipschitz why adults have to be children first.

[00:57:12] Why adults have to be children first that is published in the Journal of Value in Korea, which is a very well respected journal of in ethics and and that one just came out.

[00:57:25] So I'm assuming that this paper by and the Journal of applied philosophy is fairly well respected itself. I just don't happen to know about it anyway. Let me read the abstract of the Sarah Hanan paper.

[00:57:39] This article asks whether being a child is all things considered good or bad for children. I defend a predicament view of childhood which regards childhood as bad overall for children.

[00:57:53] I argue that four features of childhood make it regrettable, impaired capacity for practical reasoning, lack of an established practical identity, a need to be dominated, weird, and a profound and asymmetric vulnerability. I consider recent claims in the literature that childhood is good for children.

[00:58:16] So she's already she's just contributing to an established literature about whether childhood is good or bad for children since it allows them to enjoy special goods that aren't available in adulthood or which are harder to access in adulthood. I raise some difficulties for these claims.

[00:58:31] Then I argue that whatever version of these views survives my criticism will not establish the childhood is overall good for children. This is because the goods of childhood aren't significant enough to way outweigh the bad features associated with being a child.

[00:58:46] I conclude by suggesting that the badness of childhood for children means that we are likely to owe more to children than adults.

[00:58:55] So all you people who thought we don't know anything to the children as fuck them, their children this like the other that made you doubt the theory of relativity.

[00:59:08] This one paradoxically, if she's if she's successful, then we'll give children a bunch of shit and then it'll actually be good to be a child.

[00:59:16] No, actually, I don't think that's right because she is arguing for the intrinsic badness of being a child and a lot and a lot of her things are not.

[00:59:25] We can't fix by we can just assuage it a little bit like give them a little more candy on hell. Right. That scruff their hair and tell them they're good boys.

[00:59:37] Let me before we get into the argument here, I want to ask you so unlike the last one where it was hard to pin down like what the problem of the paper or just the debate was,

[00:59:53] here I would suggest that one problem is thinking about children as a monolithic group and and coming to a conclusion of whether childhood, broadly speaking, is good for children. That there's something actually like deeply misconceived about thinking of, you know, value in this way ethics in this way.

[01:00:23] This paper is addressing an issue that can't be addressed, in my view, in general and abstract terms, it has to be addressed by knowing like the conditions of specific children and what they face. Okay, so just to defend her approach in order to clarify what you're saying.

[01:00:47] What she's trying to do is point to features of childhood that she thinks really are universal across all children, whether or not they are empirically, I guess, she's just not going to cover. She's just thinking she thinks here are like whatever eight things that characterize childhood.

[01:01:07] It's not that you think that that step that you can't have that it's if I'm reading you right, it's that you think that even if you said these are eight universal features of childhood that those eight universal features of childhood could not be said to be good or bad without understanding the complexities of like the various kinds of situations that those children are in.

[01:01:29] So the very same universal feature could be good in one case and bad in another case.

[01:01:33] Yeah, I'm saying that so you're making a distinction between children and adults here, for example, right, but you're not making a distinction between different kinds of children different children who grow up in this way or and children who grew up in that way.

[01:01:49] And I'm saying that's not a defensible place to draw the line the line has to be drawn in a much more narrow way that there's really little to no value of discussing whether childhood in general is bad for children in general.

[01:02:03] It really just has to do with the specific nature of a way a child is brought up and it's not that she ignores, you know, the types of things that can happen to children but just approaching the question this way.

[01:02:17] It's a little like the problem I have with anti-natalism, right, like they want to make the claim that it's always bad to be alive. And I think that's you can't just lump all human beings together and say anything that momentous about them.

[01:02:38] Okay, like it's out but it sounds like you're not disagreeing though that there are these universal features of childhood. It's more that you think that the universal sort of category of children is where it shouldn't be applied.

[01:02:50] Yeah, never mind like the different ages of being a child and all that which no distinction is being made here. There's also just the vastly different conditions under which children are raised that I think you can't just glide over to make a statement.

[01:03:06] Now, the second issue you might have is just what does it fucking mean and she addresses this so we can look at that to say that childhood is bad for children.

[01:03:17] Like that's just part of a human life and that you know to say that like I feel like that's a harder issue to know what's wrong with because like I could see someone saying like being like an elderly person sucks, you know.

[01:03:34] So why can't you say it about being a child but there is something about just the fact that adulthood which is the thing that's held as better like you have to get through childhood first to get there.

[01:03:47] That is that makes this these are the kind of details that don't matter for them.

[01:03:54] Yeah, I know that this is just sort of being clever in some sense but being saying childhood is good or bad for children is you know I'm like well it just is what it is like child just is what it means to be a child.

[01:04:11] Like it's like that saying youth youth is wasted on the young like that's that's all that's like clever but it's not. Well, but I feel like there's more wisdom to that claim than anything that's going on here.

[01:04:28] And I want to note because she does recognize that somebody might have these problems. She says this the lives of children very immensely children's capacities ordinarily develop over time and particularly in particular children's natural and social circumstances very hugely as a result.

[01:04:50] Some children are much better off than others but there are also features of childhood conceived of as a series of developmental stages that are common to all children, albeit present to different degrees.

[01:05:03] The question here is whether these general and definitive features of childhood make childhood all things considered good or bad for children as a class.

[01:05:13] I think that while you can it's an intelligible couple of sentences there, I think it's ultimately incoherent good or bad for children as a class these general and definitive features of childhood. But I agree that that's something that needs unpacking if I'm going to say that.

[01:05:34] Yeah, I mean there's that it's not like I think that it will turn on what those features are and whether they are so like it just seems to me like look all things being equal having having a splinter in your foot is a bad thing.

[01:05:46] Some people are super rich and good looking and have a splinter in their foot so their life isn't bad. Some people are miserable and poor and have a splinter in their foot and that makes their life even worse.

[01:05:56] But it doesn't seem to me that weird to say we can agree that having a splinter on your foot all things in your foot all things being equal is a bad thing for people. Right. And that's all she seems to be saying here.

[01:06:08] But it would be a little weirder to say that something that you had to do as part of being a human being is bad, you know, like something like sleeping is bad for adults or, you know, eating is bad for adults or something like that.

[01:06:25] I take to be more analogous to this than the splinter. It's like this phase of human development, something that is part of our biology is bad for us. There's something strange about that maybe it's that.

[01:06:40] I don't know I take a more holistic, maybe virtue ethics view of like where you have to assess like a life and not just an individual aspect you need context to know what's going on. Whether some individual aspect is good or bad. But I don't know.

[01:06:59] Yeah, but even even like the other part that you're saying that the fact that you have to get through childhood is what raised the red flag for me as putting this in the same class as some of the other things that we were discussing, which is normally when you want to make an argument about goodness or

[01:07:15] or badness and again, she covers this but you're doing it because you think you have a shot of making a difference in the goodness or badness of someone's life.

[01:07:23] And in a journal of applied philosophy, you would think that that's that's sort of what you're you're trying to do. You're trying to like. I love that this is applied philosophy. I know.

[01:07:33] Yeah, like, you know, you want to say like let's let's all right then let's get rid of childhood but you know that that's impossible. So it's like well, what's the point of saying childhood is bad?

[01:07:44] Well, she she what she says is we owe a little more to them. But like in what sense like we have to be nicer to children like you should be nicer to children anyway. Have you been have you been a dick this whole time?

[01:07:58] It's not because that's why it's bad. This isn't a reason to like treat children better than you already do. I like her unless I well, this is I guess this is this is the argument. Okay.

[01:08:14] Yeah, so she says lastly it's important to get clear what I mean by goodness and badness for children. This article considers whether the state of being a child conduces to children's well-being. That is whether childhood is instrumentally and non instrumentally, prudentially valuable.

[01:08:31] I assume that good, the goodness and badness of children's lives doesn't entirely reduce to their experiences of it. A condition can be bad for someone without them recognizing this. It can be bad for them even when they think it's good.

[01:08:43] Children's experiences of childhood count as evidence for and contribute to the objective goodness of badness of childhood for them. But these experiences aren't the whole story. This is another one of those paragraphs where it sounds like you're saying something substantive and coherent,

[01:09:00] but like are we now clear what you mean by goodness and badness of children based on what you define it? Okay, so let's turn to her actual claims.

[01:09:14] So the first one she starts with is let's turn to the first of the alleged unique or exclusive goods of childhood, sexual innocence. Which honestly I never thought of that as like, I don't know, as like the major,

[01:09:31] like the first thing to list on the things of what's good about you. But she says, I find this claim puzzling, which is nowadays taken for argument in philosophy journals.

[01:09:42] I find this claim puzzling and think advocates of this view owe a clearer explanation of what they mean by sexual innocence and why it's valuable in the absence of such an explanation. I agree with that. Like if people are arguing that childhood is good because of sexual innocence,

[01:09:57] I also find that claim puzzling and think advocates of this view owe a clearer explanation for why they, what they mean by sexual innocence.

[01:10:06] So she says it can't be the claim can't be that children are asexual because children do exhibit sexuality even at young ages denying this disrespects children by failing to recognize them for who they are. I can't like how is that sentence in there?

[01:10:22] It disrespects them by failing to write like you need that. You see the Kantian like the Kantian comes out in all sorts of weird ways, but that's like one right there. Only a Kantian would write that sentence. So children are sexual.

[01:10:36] Don't tell me they're not denying it disrespects the children for fail recognized by failing to recognize them for they are. And it leaves them vulnerable because they're allegedly distinct and innocent. So the nature's are fetishized as a luringly different.

[01:10:50] So you're actually making them hotter to pedophiles by claiming that they're innocent. That's like the argument. The argument is like you're making it worse for them by claiming that they're innocent when they actually are just here. Let me read this paragraph.

[01:11:04] Note that the thought that children are less sexually burdened than adults might be driven by contingently bad norms and practices regarding adult sexuality. Many adults are sexually aware in ways that distract and frustrate them.

[01:11:19] So this is one thing she she one part of her argument is she says, look granting that a kind of sexual like not being burdened by all these like sexual complexities of being an adult human being.

[01:11:33] Maybe that would be good in one sense if you were a child and maybe it was better for you if you were a child. But that's only because social conditions being what they are like adults have to like repress their sexuality in all sorts of unhealthy ways.

[01:11:47] We could fix that. That's not an intrinsically good thing about being a child. It's just a contingently bad thing about being an adult. Right. The opposite of innocence is some sort of guilt.

[01:11:59] So you think if you think poorly of sexuality, then you then maybe that's reflected in your belief that sexual innocence is such a good thing. And so maybe you should check. I mean what she's saying is maybe you should check yourself and your attitudes towards sexuality.

[01:12:12] But I get confused because then she says one might insist that even after we improve our sexual norms, there will still be regrettable aspects of adult sexuality that children are spared while this might be true. I'm unconvinced that it suffices to render children's undeveloped sexuality good for them.

[01:12:29] So they do have undeveloped sexuality, but then she goes on to argue that they don't. They actually are fully sexual. And so I'm not this whole section actually confused me. Yeah, this is very strange. Yeah.

[01:12:40] And it was a weird way to start it off because unless there's plenty of people who talk about this as being like the number one, like the synod one on of childhood is like not knowing why you have a boner. Right.

[01:12:55] She says perhaps childhood children have sexual urges and some sort of sexual lives, but their sexual innocence inheres in the fact that they lack knowledge regarding sexual matters. This lack of knowledge may be what some people think frees children in the ways mentioned above. If so, I disagree.

[01:13:14] Lacking knowledge is often instrumentally bad for us. A lack of knowledge concerning human sexuality leaves children extremely asymmetrically vulnerable, especially when combined with the other features of their psychology and the power dynamics that necessarily prepared their lives. And then sometimes children are simply unaware of certain sexual realities,

[01:13:33] but they also often hold false beliefs. In addition to the instrumental bads this can generate, I think it is always non instrumentally bad for us to hold false beliefs. Right. That turns that that's a big part of like on many of her arguments is like when you say,

[01:13:49] well, you're protecting children from like the ugliness of the world. But then you're basically saying that they have false beliefs and it sounds like she's actually content sympathetic and thinks that that in and of itself is intrinsically bad.

[01:14:03] Like to have a false representation of the world is such an evil that it trumps the good that might come of like not knowing that people get tortured and killed or like not knowing about the suffering that's going on.

[01:14:15] Not knowing that that guy at the grocery store actually wants to fuck you even though you're eight years old. Exactly. That's a non instrumental bad to not know that. And so like again, where it's like,

[01:14:26] so what you're really actually saying is if I could give whatever my eight year old son the awareness that there are people who want to fuck him, then this would be a better thing. Well, it's just an instrumental be,

[01:14:41] I mean an intrinsic good that might be outweighed by the instrumental bad things about it. I think that's what she would say that there is these things have to be weighed against each other. And it is weird also because you know earlier what she said about well,

[01:14:56] if adults are so burdened by their sexuality, that's just because of our norms and our bad practices. But these things that she's saying about children also are definitely something that could be part of our bad practices of sexualizing children and could be reformed too.

[01:15:16] So it really doesn't speak to there is this weird waffling between I'm talking, you know, you can say this stuff about being like what sucks for adults, but that's just like we could just reform our practices. That's not intrinsic to being an adult.

[01:15:31] But then there is, but then she doesn't hold that same standard to some of the childhood thing. Yeah, yeah, it's a mishmash of arguing in a way that like doesn't seem tight to me, at least in this section.

[01:15:45] Because she also in this has to argue against adulthood being bad. And so often what she does there is talk about well, that's just a contingent thing that we could fix by improving our social world. But then if you're going to say that about adults,

[01:16:05] you have to also be willing to apply that to children. But you're right. That is weird that it's this like it starts the paper. Like the first part of the argument. Yeah, OK, so we can move on to the next thing, privileged access to common goods claim.

[01:16:26] She says, what about openness to future possibilities and play? Are these goods of childhood? It would be false to suggest that play and openness to future experiences are uniquely good for children or exclusively available to them. So she's tackling the exclusivity part.

[01:16:41] So, you know, adults can play basically, which is adults can play and adults have openness to their future. So there's nothing about childhood that makes you have exclusive access to these things. Yes, but again, that's the same thing that I was just talking about before.

[01:16:59] It's true that in theory, adults could be just as carefree, just as open to the future. But that's not the way the world works. But it's not. It's if you were going to play it that way, that like it doesn't matter

[01:17:14] what the actual reality is for adults, then you have to play it that way for the children too. What the actual reality is. Right. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is also sponsored by BetterHelp.

[01:17:28] Tamler, I don't know about you, but I find my happiness to be a little bit challenging as of late. Yeah. And we're adults, you know, we're not, we don't even suffer the disvalue of being children. That's right.

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[01:19:35] Thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. So she goes on to say, she's again arguing, she says, I'm unconvinced that most of these goods are necessarily more accessible to children than adults. Adults and children generally lead different sorts of lives in contemporary western cultures.

[01:19:57] Children do on average have more fun. However the important issue for our purposes is whether this is a product of essential features of childhood or of socially contingent practices. My view is that adults and children are fundamentally more similar in nature than many assume

[01:20:11] and that it's often our conventions that set us apart. I mean, there's a way in which I could find myself agreeing with that but then not in a way that would help her argument. Children do on average have more fun.

[01:20:29] Every time I read a claim like that I'm like, man, you could at least toss in a fake footnote. You just don't just say it. In fact, they're probably like by her very argument, there's probably tons of children who are having miserable times

[01:20:50] and tons of adults are having fun. That's where the average though comes in. On average if you sum total the fun of all children and all adults, you would find that children have a higher mean. This next is equal to 0.01. So it's a pretty strong result.

[01:21:10] In discussing imagination, McLeod claims that it's much harder for adults to create quote-unquote complex make-believe worlds because reaching a threshold of cognitive maturity and acquiring true beliefs about the world involves a loss of innocence and irrecoverably changes our capacity for carefree imaginative play.

[01:21:31] So then she says, I have no decisive arguments countering this empirical claim, but it seems to me that many adults have strong interests in and are able to engage in vivid acts of imagination and extended play. Think about the popularity of fantasy novels, television shows,

[01:21:46] movies and games for adults. The demand for fan fiction, live action role play, comic-con and cosplay amongst adults also comes immediately to mind. Sexual fantasy plays well behind. But this is so much like empirical claims by assertion.

[01:22:05] So on the one hand, she's like, no, I know children have more fun. And then she's like, I know, I know, like adults have just as much imagination. This is not the way to build an argument. It's waffling like again, it's that thing of like, well, yes,

[01:22:19] adults don't have fun, but that's just contingent versus actually we do have a lot of fun. Like look at all those like, I don't know, Buffy slash fiction. And you'll see people are miserable. They're miserable. And I love this.

[01:22:34] Parents are often keen to quote, help their children with science experiments in order to get their hands dirty and create something. I like why is it helping quotes? What's the relevance of that that like, yeah, we do. We can have fun.

[01:22:50] I think the point is here that all of what they're saying about children could be true about adults and often is true about adults. Like, yes, we could like play an imagination and open ended stuff. And look, they play sports and are motivated, but so do adults.

[01:23:08] Like adults play sports recreationally. I just played tennis a couple days ago. I think we know enough about like mammalian development to know that play just is like one of those things that biologically important in early ages.

[01:23:23] And, you know, like, I don't know, stick to one kind of argument. Like, of course we can go out of our way to have more fun, but we can also go out of our way to be less perverted. And, you know, I don't know.

[01:23:35] It's a whole lot of nothing. And also like, I think that you really do if you're going to make this argument, you have to go with like the reality of what's happening. And it is harder as an adult. It's not impossible.

[01:23:48] And I agree adults should do it more. I've done my best to still have like a playful attitude towards life and imagine it attitude. It was much easier when Eliza was like five or six years old, then you can really, you know, indulge that side of you.

[01:24:03] But then now that she's a teenager and me doing that would be weird. All the stuff I used to do with like her dolls and her things like then like, yeah, it's harder. That sucks. This is what the Toy Story movies are about.

[01:24:17] Like, it's like, you know, like, you get to a certain age and that stuff is no longer has its appeal. But the fact that you watch the Toy Story movie is evidence that you also like to engage in imaginative play. So, so I'm arguing, arguing every conceivable argument.

[01:24:34] And I went to Comic-Con dressed as a spa. And I have sexual role play. Also dressed as a spa. Yeah, I imagine I'm good. All right. So I feel like we should just move on to the bad stuff.

[01:24:51] She says that there are some aspects of childhood that are essential features of childhood that are just bad. The first one is just basically saying children are dumb, impaired practical reasoning. Like when they want stuff, they don't know how to get it. Like this frustrates them.

[01:25:07] It can be internally frustrating. And even when children don't realize that they're making errors, they will be less efficient in getting what's good for them. This is objectively bad for children's well-being. Although, honestly, given the physical limitations of being a child,

[01:25:22] one could argue that their obvious, like their obvious inability to do this well makes adults do it extra well for them. So like, you're a kid and you get fed three times a day without having to lift a finger. Right. Yeah.

[01:25:38] This might actually put you in a pretty nice position. This is where she gets kind of empirical, not like citing studies, but like other aspects of practical reasoning that often elude children include risk assessment and probability estimation. Yeah.

[01:25:55] Like it's like, yes, that's true for some, you know, like more for some, like there's definitely some children, especially if you're calling children, you know, like 12, 13 years old that are better than that and some adults. I don't know.

[01:26:11] I feel like she can write a book where each chapter is just the age of the child and how bad childhood is for you. Like when you're one, it's kind of shit, but it's not that bad because like they feed you and they take care of you.

[01:26:24] You don't have theory of how you're like. Anyway. Finally, childhood is characterized by impaired emotional regulation, which also impacts. So she thinks that, yeah, this isn't to deny that our emotions can play a positive role in our reasoning. However, it's harder. We just don't have the heart.

[01:26:46] We don't have the heart for this. This is less fun than I thought because it's a lot of the same kinds of frustrating style of argumentation. Well, but should we talk about this practical identity? Because this is getting closer to saying something possibly interesting if maybe deeply wrong.

[01:27:06] I don't know. Children's agency is also hindered by their lack of a stable practical identity. Children have less developed views on who they want to be and where they stand on a variety of important issues than adults.

[01:27:18] While children have aims, these aims often don't issue from an authoritative and settled pattern of projects and values. As a result, their aims are likely to be incoherent, conflict with one another and change frequently. This all sounds great to me so far.

[01:27:32] Dude, honestly, it seems to me that having less developed views about where you stand on a variety of important issues is like a good thing in many, many cases. And having a stable, settled pattern of projects and values

[01:27:53] is one of the things that I fight against as an adult. Exactly. And again, it goes against that, well, adults can be imaginative and have open-ended futures and all like, no, you can't say both of these things, right? But here she's just saying that this is bad

[01:28:11] and this seems not only good about being a child but also kind of the essence of what it is to be a child is that you're still forming who you are. That's part of the excitement of growing up is discovering that.

[01:28:27] This just reads to me by the end like a list of things that the author values as part of living a good life and the only thing that makes it an argument about whether being a child is bad versus being an adult

[01:28:41] is whether she's willing to accept the flexibility that adults can adopt the good parts of childhood or that children can like actually, or that either children can be more adult-like in some of these ways or that some of the, you know,

[01:28:55] what I would say is some of these childlike qualities that are intrinsic to childhood actually aren't bad. They're good. But it just reads like a list of values. So I think that's a really important point and a way, like an important way to understand

[01:29:11] why this is like deeply the wrong approach is you could take these things as just features of a good life that she's arguing for and features of a bad life and then it would be like, we can argue over

[01:29:27] like is this really a feature of a good life or not or what but to make it about being a child versus being an adult kind of drains it of the insight that it might offer about the question that actually makes sense

[01:29:42] that's coherent question like what are the features of living a good life? What are some features of living a bad life? Right. So for example, like the domination, right, that you're like at the whim of adults, there is I think decent philosophy on this already,

[01:30:00] like you know, on how much agency matters to your well-being and how sometimes having too much agency is not as good as you might think. And that just seems true no matter what, like no matter what, it doesn't have anything to do with... Yeah.

[01:30:15] Being a having autonomy is good. It's a good thing. It's not good if you're like a three-year-old though and you're like in the middle of like a shopping mall and you have to decide like how to get home and feed yourself like,

[01:30:29] but it's a good thing in general not having somebody like have dominion over you is a good thing in general. Autonomy is a good thing. It's a good feature of like a job is that they grant you autonomy.

[01:30:41] But like when you divide the world into children and adults, it feels like you're alighting over like the differences that actually matter, which is the kind of society that you want to have, the kind of I don't know workplace rules that you allow and what you know,

[01:31:01] like this is in a different version of this paper, this could be an argument against certain capitalist structures where people are free and not under dominion in one sense, but not in another sense. They still have to go to their job which they hate,

[01:31:19] but they can't afford to lose and their boss can treat them like shit and there's no way out of that unless they want to starve to death. That seems to be something worth discussing. Yeah. Not whether children are being oppressed by being children,

[01:31:37] but whether like a worker in an Amazon factory is being oppressed because they're beholden to this person. But then you wouldn't have the sexy childhood is bad for children title. But although by the way, hear me out here, this might actually be paid propaganda by Apple

[01:32:02] to convince people that treating children as adults is a good thing so that they can actually hire them to build iPhones in China. Right. We're increasing their well-being by pushing them out of childhood. Yes. So then she says, part of this owes to our granting families

[01:32:21] so much privacy and parents, so much discretion over their children's lives, the fact that adults have so much power over children. However, even if we alter these institutions, children will be necessarily susceptible to the arbitrary rims, whims of those who care for them,

[01:32:37] just as a slave is to a benevolent master. Holding such power over a slave is illegitimate, whereas parental power is legitimate to the extent that it's deployed in the children's interest. Nevertheless, this power to control still constitutes domination

[01:32:53] and the need for it is a bad-making feature of childhood. Yes, it would be better for children to be dominated than left through their own devices. Surely it's better to not require domination at all. But not if you're a fucking child. That's the freaking point, right?

[01:33:09] Yeah, like, holistically, look, reptiles hatch and they walk around and they leave their parents. Like yeah, they're not suckers. They don't have to be dominated. I don't have a Tamler. I'm losing my energy with this paper. Last thing about this paper, if childhood is so bad for children,

[01:33:32] one might conclude that children can be treated in a plethora of unsavory ways, provided it helps to emancipate them from childhood by speeding their transition into adulthood. This is what you were saying about that. Chinese iPhone argument. Yeah. I think we have some reasons to hasten children's development.

[01:33:49] However, there are good arguments, adherence of the negative conception of childhood can use to resist the conclusion that this be done by using children as a mere means to their future adult selves. You're right. I can't do this. I just can't. Far from supporting the mistreatment of children,

[01:34:16] the predicament view pushes strongly in the opposite direction. Our duties toward children are ordinarily more stringent than those we have toward adults precisely because of children's subjection to the bads of childhood. This paper broke. It broke me too. I mean, did anybody ever think that children,

[01:34:38] like did they come into this thinking, you know what I really need is an argument for why we should be good to children? And the way that I want you to get there is tell me how fucked up and shitty childhood is. Just in-

[01:34:51] And start with sexuality, go. I feel like this is a way of preserving the status quo. Somehow, like the trumps of the world are going to be able to stay in power, the real estate magnets, the corporations, like the frickin' Zuckerbergs of the world.

[01:35:09] They're gonna be able to stay in power because this is what people are talking about. You're on a Chappahouse vibe this episode. You're on a reel. I try, try. Why adults have to be children first in the journal of value inquiry? Can we just talk briefly about this?

[01:35:27] Recent, and this is the opening paragraph. I don't know if we have to go beyond this, but recent interest in the value of childhood has raised several interrelated questions. Is the state of childhood intrinsically valuable or only instrumentally valuable in order to achieve a state of adulthood?

[01:35:45] What are the features that give childhood its intrinsic or instrumental value or disvalue? And whatever the value of childhood may be, is childhood inferior or superior to the state of adulthood? Although the answers to these questions have significant moral and practical implications

[01:36:04] with regard to what is owed to children by adults and how adults ought to raise children, we will not have to address those more practical aspects of the issue. They just spent a paragraph telling us that they weren't going to talk about it. Wait, no, but it's this.

[01:36:22] It's the premise. Although the answers to these questions have significant moral and practical implications. Like if there is anything, this is like the last one, if there's anything that those, that work doesn't have is practical implications. It has like deep intrinsic interest more than it has practical implications.

[01:36:44] It is like groundbreaking work before it has practical implications. Yeah, like I'm trying to think of what a single thing that I would do differently raising a child after having read that paper. Just recognize, oh man, it sucks that you don't have a practical identity.

[01:37:02] Look at you not sticking to any of your values. You don't even know if you're a Republican or a Democrat. Sorry that you have all this sexual innocence that actually is bad for you, that leads you to have false beliefs. Let me show you this snuff film

[01:37:19] so that you have non-instrumentally good true beliefs about it. Right, like the contingent. It's hard for me to do anything other than the intrinsic good of showing you exactly what the world is like. So I peel back this curtain and show you beheadingvideosonliveleak.com

[01:37:43] so that you never think this world is good. But so we can't talk about this paper, but let me just say that one of the thing that it ends up being isn't really about that question, but whether like it always comes down to a pill.

[01:38:02] Like if you could give somebody a pill that would just make them an adult, like would that be good? Like should we do that? They admit this isn't practical because we can't as yet do that. But if we could, would that be a good thing?

[01:38:20] Fast forward them through childhood. They don't even have to experience anything at all. Just skip the chapter. Go to the next chapter. You know what people used to do with finding Nemo? They wouldn't show the first thing where the mother kills. Distressed.

[01:38:32] Or what they're probably going to do through the two chapters of this episode. Is there answer no? Because Kant. Cause Kant, but they also think, it's like they think Kant this, but we show that Kant that. I'm glad we know.

[01:38:54] I will stop funding the development of the adult pill. Life has spoken. I'm a very good man. More brains than you have. Anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad person. Very good man. Just a very bad wizard.

Episode 199: When Philosophy Goes Sideways