Decided to switch out the actual title of this one ("If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious") for fear that it could seem clickbait-y. In fact I think the actual text is very lucid and thoughtful; for whatever reason, philosophers just seem temperamentally inclined toward "cute" titles like that.
I just want to comment that I only clicked on the article after reading your comment about the original title, and I feel that the edited title less accurately reflects the material.
You added your opinion to the title, rather than leaving it alone.
Ed:
In fact, your title less accurately reflects the material of the paper, which specifically deals with:
> Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.
Your title completely omits the key focus of the paper, and its examination, which the original title included.
You did this because you disagreed with the paper, and used the pretense of the nebulous notion of "clickbait" to edit in your disagreement.
The original title was more accurate as to the article contents.
I appreciate the note, but at the risk of being offensive you took something that was quite reflective of the style and content of the article and made it sound dry and academic -- almost research-y. It may have outright reduced the clicks to the article; at the very least, it probably changed the sort of person who read it.
Since several users have made a good case for the existing title, we've reverted it. If it were obviously in violation of the rules (misleading or clickbait), we wouldn't do that, but this is one at most arguable.
I think samclemens was genuinely trying to follow the guidelines, though, which is good.
Perhaps ironically, the post is at #2 anyway, which is way high for this sort of thing.
I admire DFW's writing a lot but I have to say that I largely agree with this critique of that speech (from the posted article):
"To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page. But an unquantifiable number of online readers, millions of YouTube viewers, and thousands of bookstore shoppers disagree. Among the more dispiriting aspects of the Wallace canonization is how much it has been built out of his suffering — the way the cult has revived, for precisely the post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint."
I'm not a big fan of this article personally (I loved Interstellar), but I do think it makes a decent larger point about science fiction narratives replicating 19th century frontier/imperial mentalities. Somewhat analogous to this article on imperialism and Star Trek:
"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a high-throughput distributed messaging system."
In the horrifying finale, Daniel Dennett turns up to reveal that nothing has changed! He was really just a distributed, persistent messaging service all along. And then Samsa wakes up and it was all a silly dream.
I'd really like to read this story, although I'd envision the ending closer to Animal Farm than The Metamorphosis. After all, I don't think a distributed, persistent messaging service is quite as shameful/unclean and useless as a cockroach/vermin thing.
and with every one of the hundreds of split-second network partitions that occurred each day, he is forced to choose between consistency and availability; sadly at any given instant, he can never have both. Until one day he learns how; he open sources this project, much to the disappointment of his employer who as punishment chains him to a cliff
I don't think you need to apologize - it's an interesting case study of how the apparatus of a scholarly journal, an academic affiliation and scientific credentials can lead us in sometimes scary directions. Historians and philosophers of science are right: who funds social sciences research, and the backgrounds of those who conduct it, sometimes really does matter. Not in the sense of 90s debates about relativism, but in a more practical sense that research questions in the social sciences don't emerge out of a vacuum and often have political overtones. I think you're correct in suspecting that this is one of those cases.
To those who are saying that this particular paper isn't invalidated by unsavory ties: you're right. But like I pointed out below, there are uncited claims about low intelligence correlating to lower economic status in the early modern period in here that strike me as suspect given the wider context.
Technically yes, but with the advent of academia.edu and the cratering public profile of for-profit academic publishers like Elsevier, it's becoming normal. In my field, at least, there's a perception that Elsevier and Wiley won't further damage their reputations by going after individuals posting papers (although I am surprised they haven't targeted Academia.edu as a whole).
Unrelatedly, the author's odd name "Michael Woodley of Menie" caught my eye. It would seem that he's the heir to a Scottish barony (Menie). I hesitate to even go there, but it's at the very least interesting that the (supposed) decline in general intelligence since the Industrial Revolution is being studied by an ancestral nobleman.
Edit: after reading the article and following up on the author's affiliation, the Ulster Institute for Social Research, this is definitely something to be taken with a grain of salt. The Ulster Institute has ties with "racialist" fringe scientists promoting what is essentially a 21st century take on eugenics. The paper is not necessarily inherently flawed because of this, but certain assumptions in it (like the uncited claim that lower socioeconomic classes have been historically correlated with lower g) seem fishy to me as a result.
Updating my earlier response -- these aren't just "ties", the Institute was founded, and is headed, by a noted White Nationalist.
The source I'd picked up the item from is, it seems, quite the racist himself. I should have seen it earlier given the topics he covered and how he was doing so in his blog.
The area of research interests me, but I'm exceptionally dubious about this paper.
Oh, and Woodley appears to be the son of Michael Woodley, aerial effects coordinator for several James Bond films. The elder acquired the estate in 1995. So this doesn't appear to be old money, per se.
Do you have a specific reference to the fringe racist science at UISR? I am not familiar with the organization.
I do find associations with the Flynn Effect and via the Southern Poverty Law Center (a group focused on black rights and equality in the US) a biography on Richard Lynn:
“I am deeply pessimistic about the future of the European peoples because mass immigration of third world peoples will lead to these becoming majorities in the United States and westernmost Europe during the present century. I think this will mean the destruction of European civilization in these countries.”
—Interview with neo-Nazi Alex Kurtagic, 2011
The source who tipped me off to this particular article is a UK psychologist who posts some interesting and occasionally provocative material on his blog.
I have to agree that the whole concept of assessing population trends in "g" is pretty tainted at this point. For some reason, this subject tends to attract a certain kind of person with an axe to grind.
http://theappendix.net/posts/2014/09/searching-for-jagari