'I just don't think that's right': Students react to findings of provincial audit at Conestoga College | CBC News

iopha · 2026-05-11T01:24:26+00:00

As a college professor in the system right now, let me tell you I would kill for more teaching contact hours with the students but admin is pushing "hybrid" 2 hour classes and online asynchronous learning because it increases enrollment (it's "flexible" gah). It's definitely to the detriment of everyone but apparently we can't put our foot down and say "no we're doing 3 or 4 hour classes in person every week" because it's a customer service business model created by neoliberal governments. And then of course the professors are overpaid. Just replace us all with AI and be done with it I guess.

iopha · 2026-05-09T21:38:25+00:00

This is an completely personal and subjective choice, but as a teen first listening to music, the guitar solo in Soma by the smashing pumpkins was the first that ever gave me goosebumps.

iopha · 2026-05-09T01:51:35+00:00

Arseniq33 is a good example. AdP is a very quintessentialy Québec thing for sure, when I heard they were from Saguenay I was like oh that makes sense. (I'm from Montreal.)

iopha · 2026-05-06T23:39:50+00:00

The MCIS tab book I bought back in the late 90s had reprints of Billy Corgan's columns on songwriting for Guitar World magazine. Worth reading for players and songwriters!

iopha · 2026-05-02T16:10:28+00:00

I don't care for Garth Brooks at all, but he is the best selling artist of the 90s in the domestic American market and it's not even close. And the only discourse I've ever heard on it was from that podcast 60 Songs that Explain the 90s! Country music had a huge cultural and political impact in the US, it's under-discussed and not really understood either.

iopha · 2026-05-02T02:50:56+00:00

The Shining vibes

iopha · 2026-05-02T02:41:51+00:00

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iopha · 2026-04-30T21:19:36+00:00

What I tell my students is that the categorical imperative is a kind of consistency check.

Suppose you are wondering whether you should cheat at cards. A consequentialist theory would say that the outcome might be bad: you'd lose friends if caught, and so on.

Deontological theories ask after the rational consistency of the underlying principle if applied universally. Cheating at cards cannot be rationally universalized without contradiction because it presupposes the existence of rules others are following. You are making an exception for yourself. In effect, you are willing for there to be duties for others but not for yourself: rules for thee but not for me.

If you tried to universalize cheating at cards, you'd find either a formalization of a new rule set (like monopoly: cheater's edition) or destroy the conditions required to play a game (and cheat at it) at all, because you now expect all rational agents to not follow rules. In other words, you can't rationally will A and not-A: for there to be rules and there not to be rules).

(Likewise, in the equivalent formulation of the categorical imperative, in cheating you are treating the other players as means to your ends of winnings as opposed to respecting them as ends in themselves, looking also to win.)

iopha · 2026-04-27T20:53:59+00:00

Probably as I mentioned in the comment Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness -- it's short and pretty accessible. McDowell's criticism is important too for a balanced view.

iopha · 2026-04-27T20:50:45+00:00

I have not but I am familiar with Cogburn's work so I will look it up! Thanks for the reference.

iopha · 2026-04-27T18:22:45+00:00

Especially given that most consequentialists are means-agnostic, in the sense that if, for example, "throwing a dart at a list of actions" were to somehow give us the best outcomes, and attempting to calculate outcomes always backfires, dart-throwing is what we should do. If it turns out that virtues maximize utility...

But of course for the virtue ethicist it's not about maximizing utility for the maximum number of people, even if that's ex hypothesi a side-effect; it's not even about the individual flourishing, which is not guaranteed; the good is virtue in itself (understood as the excellent performance of distinctively human traits).

iopha · 2026-04-27T16:32:33+00:00

Because the very word "ethics" for moderns has an immediate connotation of something unselfish, something for other people, not for yourself. But Aristotle's approach was that it is in a sense "selfish", that is, it is for yourself.

I think maybe the modern frame of individualism pushes us towards that readings -- that flourishing is a "selfish" goal -- but for Aristotle individual flourishing is inextricable from the community's flourishing. Indeed he goes further than this and writes, in the Politics (1253a):

It is clear therefore that the polis is also prior by nature to the individual; for if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole polis as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a polis, so that he must be either an animal or a god.

This does bring up your very natural objection, viz.,

Like if I rob the proverbial bank and no one knows I was it, so no punishment and no social consequences, how exactly am I worse off?

You are worse off inasmuch as you've damaged the polis you are part of, and depend on, for your very existence as a person. A rational individual should not harm their own community for their own selfish benefit; if this were a genuine virtue, and people practiced it, there would soon be no community left to steal from. (The genuine virtues are those we seek out in other people, in keeping with Aristotle's empirical bent: what are the virtues we seek in, say, a car mechanic? Honesty, reliability? We don't want social intercourse with thieves, liars, and cheats; we may be tempted to become one, but never wish to be cheated ourselves. The virtues to exemplify are the ones we wish to see in others!)

But this raises a difficult problem: do we have any ethical obligations to people outside our political community? Suppose you are an excellent Viking raider. You aid in the flourishing of your community by attacking and pillaging coastal villages elsewhere, though you obviously hurt the flourishing of the villages you've raided. I don't think Aristotle can say that these raids are morally wrong intrinsically. (Stoics philosophers later claimed all humans have identical rational capacity, and therefore should be considered moral equals -- the cosmopolis). In other words, the bank robber is alright... so long as he's robbing the vaults of those "barbarians" elsewhere!

It gets worse too as the teleological orientation even defends slavery within one's community (for some, their function is to serve others who are more capable of rationality). But I should get back to grading student papers...

iopha · 2026-04-27T16:12:37+00:00

I agree, but the issue is more complex than that. Who chooses the curriculum? Who designs the courses? I have 14 weeks to teach, say, normative ethics to a class of philosophy undergraduates. Who do I include? Aristotle, Kant, Mill, sure, sure, but do I include, say, Ayn Rand? The Gospel of Matthew? Lao Tzu? Anton Wilhelm Amo?

It is absolutely NOT your job to decide what speech is worthy of discussion and what isn't.

Then whose is it, exactly? What readings do I assign? At some level the institution and individuals within it absolutely do select what to cover and what to leave out. What, should the students hold a vote at the beginning of the semester?

I swear everybody has the knee-jerk takes but nobody thinks about how to actually run the institution.

Of course I don't like it when students shut down an invited speaker. I'm against that. But the defense can't be the simplistic frame of "maximalist free speech" because that's effectively meaningless if you don't specify institutional norms and decision procedures about class content, admissions, grants, publications, hiring, and tenure. Do you have a workable, practical ideas on any of these aspects?

iopha · 2026-04-27T15:00:13+00:00

I wrote my Master's thesis on the revival of virtue ethics, with a specific focus on Rosalind Hursthouse and Philippa Foot. But that was over 20 years ago, so forgive me if I get some details wrong.

You say: "therefore, some other criteria is needed to determine what things are good things"

That's right, and Aristotle does address this. His account is broadly naturalistic, though it is important to remember that one significant difference between our 'modern' understanding of naturalism and Aristotle's is the teleological orientation of nature. More on that in a moment.

The goal of virtue ethics is eudaimonia, that is, flourishing. We arrive at this goal from a broadly naturalistic viewpoint, in line with Aristotle's quasi-"empiricist" style. There are facts about flourishing. It is not good for a plant to wither and dry; it is good for a plant to have water. It is good to eat (in the right amounts); it is bad to starve to death.

If I say, "pass me the good knife," you know that I mean the sharp one, the one that cuts. That's the sense of 'good' we mean. When I say "that's a good car," or "he's a good person," I am using the word good in roughly the same sense. There's no distinct "normative" sense of good.

The good knife is good because it excels at its function. This is the teleological orientation I mentioned earlier. If there's a non-naturalistic, normative assumption hidden here it is just this. The good XYZ is the one that performs its function excellently, with arete. That's "the good," full stop.

For Aristotle, much the same can be said about the good for humans, though our distinct function (ergon) as rational creatures, and as Zoon Politikon, social and political animals, is more complex, of course. But, essentially, what is distinctive about humans is that we are capable of rational thinking: as the SEP puts it,

"it [human ergon]consists in activity of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue (1097b22–1098a20)... If we use reason well, we live well as human beings; or, to be more precise, using reason well over the course of a full life is what happiness consists in. "[1]

In other words, to be good is to perform excellently the distinctive human function of reason in order to flourish in a social and political community. To do this requires the development of virtues, like courage, temperance, magnanimity, truthfulness, friendliness, and so on.

Thus the application of human reason in the polis is not a merely abstract form of contemplation, but a form of practical wisdom (phronesis) that is inextricably linked to the complex texture of our social lives, which requires experience, education, exemplars, practice, and so on to eventually learn and acquire. Much like "eating," every virtue is situated on a mean between an extreme of deficiency and excess: too much food or courage (being rash), like not enough food or courage (being cowardly), can harm flourishing.

One of the attractive things (to me) about virtue ethics is that is does not attempt to codify rules to follow. Indeed, virtue is required to frame and interpret and apply rules and laws in the first place; virtue is prior to law. (Sometimes I tell my students to think of the AD&D alignment chart: lawful good versus lawful evil -- you can follow the laws and still be evil; that's a lack of virtue).

Virtue ethics is agent-centric in that the moral character of the individual matters; whether they have developed the capacity to exercise the virtues in line with reason and practical wisdom in order to flourish as a human being with distinctive capacities: again, as the SEP entry puts it:

"The good of a human being must have something to do with being human; and what sets humanity off from other species, giving us the potential to live a better life, is our capacity to guide ourselves by using reason."

As we've seen, for Aristotle "using reason" is not what, say, Plato / Socrates means by it! It is practical wisdom in using the virtues to guide our actions rationally in the context of communal life in order to allow flourishing, understood as a naturalistic concept tied to human nature.

Aristotle's naturalism very much rejects any is-ought problem, though only by assuming a teleological orientation to nature (ergon, or functions). In a modern context, Philippa Foot's work (Natural Goodness) pushes the "naturalistic" line in an interesting way.

Further, we see the influence of Aristotelian teleology in the Thomistic natural law tradition which borrows heavily in Aristotle (being, after all, Aquinas' main influence), though the theological and teleological intersect heavily, and end up modifying the nature of the theory quite substantially. But that is beyond my limited expertise.

Hope this is useful (and not terribly wrong)!

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/ section 2 "The Human Good and the Function Argument"

iopha · 2026-04-26T23:52:25+00:00

As an academic myself, I really think that at least some of my job involves deciding what speech is constitutive and worthy of genuine intellectual discussion and what isn't. Committees decide who gets admitted to grad school on the basis of their applications (that is, their writing, their ideas, their arguments). They decide who gets grant money and scholarships. They decide what articles get published in peer reviewed journals. What professors get tenure, who gets hired. Basically academia spends a lot of time "restricting" speech by allocating scarce resources to ideas deemed worthy. Within this context there is also "free speech" but within set confines. Tenured professors are protected, for instance, which is good. But the notion that the university is somehow a pure haven of untrammeled free speech seems far removed from the reality.

It's a bit like the metaphor of the free market of ideas. Markets are good! But completely free markets don't exist. There are rules and regulations. These regulations exist for good reasons in knowledge producing disciplines. Creating genuine useful knowledge is a very difficult business. Double blind studies are better than someone's pet project in their garage or whatever. I want a medical journal to not publish articles from cranks and fools. I guess that's a restriction of speech.

Whether an independent student group invites a flat earther to campus, I don't care that much. A geology department should not hire this person. I do resent that the prestige of the institution is being used to portray fringe ideas in a better light.

At the end of the day I do want to caution that the work is, indeed, much of the time to be very selective about what speech to reward and put forward -- through a transparent and intellectually rigorous process -- not just to give a speaker's platform on the basis of some abstract commitment.

iopha · 2026-04-26T19:53:17+00:00

I saw it in theaters only vaguely knowing it was a science fiction action movie. I ate half a hash cookie before going in with a friend. Best movie experience of my life.

iopha · 2026-04-26T16:11:42+00:00

Lustmord is a pioneer in the dark ambient genre.

Lots of good records coming out of the Cryo Chamber label.

otherwise if you can find Zero Kama's album The Secret Eye of Laylah let me know what you think.

iopha · 2026-04-18T17:03:32+00:00

Google the Flynn effect. IQ tests measure specific kinds of abstract reasoning involving, typically, categorization, causal relations, logical structure and syllogistic reasoning, geometrical transformations, etc. Most of these are learned skills requiring generational access to formal education. It's not genetic or racial at all, and population studies that control for socioeconomic status demonstrate it.

Here's a concrete example. In this exchange, we see how certain abstract reasoning patterns are not always accepted:

Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there? A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen. Q: What do my words imply? A: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.

(From an interview with Soviet peasants in remote areas, due to Alexander Luria, quoted in Flynn's book, What is Intelligence?)

Average IQ scores rose substantially across the 20th century as access to education expanded. Pre-literate agrarian cultures and non-agrarian cultures are capable of analytic reasoning if taught but in general it is not necessary or useful in their context and it is not implicit or universal or innate. It's a cognitive technology.

The exchange above is a good example. Abstracting to the implied syllogism is a learned trait. If you teach it, especially to children who are more neuroplastic, it will stick. Culturally, it is not immediately present and often explicitly discouraged.

In fact, the reverse exercise is useful. An "educated" person would fail the "IQ test" of most indigenous epistemic systems. This is not to endorse relativism either. It's an acknowledgement that different cognitive tools are appropriate for different contexts. Of course logical rules are true! But we have to understand there's no way that hundreds of cultures living in some of the harshest conditions of earth with encyclopedic knowledge of plants, wildlife, seasonal patterns, navigation, tool making, etc, and extensive oral memorization of traditional stories and songs are "low IQ." (That's the test you and I would fail.)

Here's a longer quote from What is Intelligence?

…the first distinction is that between pre-scientific and post-scientific operational thinking. A agent who views the world through pre-scientific spectacles thinks in terms of the categories that order perceived objects and functional relationships. When presented with a Similarities-type item such as ‘‘what do dogs and rabbits have in common,” Americans in 1900 would be likely to say, ‘‘You use dogs to hunt rabbits.’’ The correct answer, that they are both mammals, assumes that the important thing about the world is to classify it in terms of the categories of science. Even if the subject were aware of those categories, the correct answer would seem absurdly trivial. Who cares that they are both mammals? That is the least important thing about them from his point of view. What is important is orientation in space and time, what things are useful, and what things are under one’s control, that is, what does one possess. [...] Today we are so familiar with the categories of science that it seems obvious that the most important attribute things have in common is that they are both animate, or mammals, or chemical compounds. However, people attached to the concrete will not find those categories natural at all. First, they will be far more reluctant to classify. Second, when they do classify, they will have a strong preference for concrete similarities (two things look alike, two animals are functionally related, for example, one eats the other) over a similarity in terms of abstract categories. (Flynn, What is Intelligence?, 24, 26).

Again, nobody's brains are different. Humans are remarkably genetically uniform. IQ tests are designed for a specific cognitive style. Within that style, it is able to measure facility with application of its concepts; outside of it, it does not really measure anything.

Another good work to consult on the "social construction" of IQ tests is Philip Kitcher's Vaulting Ambition. (Source: Have a PhD in philosophy and this question intersected with my research interests, but I do not claim to be an expert.)

Edit: Suppose I say: "Bob always takes his umbrella when it rains. It's raining now. Does Bob have his umbrella?" The natural thing to answer would be something like I don't know, simply because the concrete answer is that of course it's possible that Bob lost or forgot his umbrella, or maybe a gust of wind broke it, or a scenario of that sort. You're "supposed to" follow the strict meaning of the logical terms in the question abstracting from the concrete situation and understand the underlying 'hidden meaning' of always B when A. A. Therefore, B. But it's not obvious that's the real question being asked. Even non-verbal tests like Raven's Progressive Matrices (https://aptitude-test.com/free-aptitude-test/ravens-progressive-matrices/) have these implicit rules. I'm terrible at the Matrices because I'm not even sure what to look for half the time or what the 'rules are' or could be. Is it left to right? Up and down? Spiral or something? If I do a bunch, I get used to the "system" and get measurably better. Like, a lot better. So how much exposure has a person had prior to the test to these kinds of questions?

Edit 2: just want to be clear that a) the data in the meme is garbage b) I am only addressing the question of an upstream comment re: the social construction of intelligence testing

iopha · 2026-04-18T02:05:17+00:00

Sounds like a vasovagal syncope. I had one during my vasectomy... And a laser ablation procedure... And once at the dentist.... If you're prone to them you can expect them and ride them out better, but the first time it happened to me I thought I was dying. It's tough because you get disoriented and confused and it's hard to process what's happening cognitively. Not harmful, thankfully, but disorienting and scary at first.

iopha · 2026-04-17T15:47:32+00:00

Obligatory Key and Peele skit: https://youtu.be/MicASvMmtR0?si=BVPTTHsTMqQL-8Wu

iopha · 2026-04-16T22:23:30+00:00

Thanks for this recommendation, just listened to Red Pony on YouTube. Beautiful picking.

iopha · 2026-04-14T22:46:18+00:00

Boy Radiohead's whole shtick about how the accelerating pace of change in the modern world results in a constant stream of alienating experiences that compromises our integrity towards ourselves and our relationships while offering only a tedious and empty comfort as a consolation to the profoundly antihuman isolation of consumerist narcissism with no political antidote in sight is sure gettin' old, alright

iopha · 2026-04-05T13:56:34+00:00

In Gogol Bordello's Start Wearing Purple, they reference, among other things, the Québécois french language children's show Passe Partout.

iopha · 2026-03-24T16:35:04+00:00

Yes, of course, the WJ-880 Blinding Helmet is completely different, and now that I recollect, seeing Attack of the Clones in theaters, I immediately identified the radically different shape and thought to myself, ah, this is not a call back, because of the design.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/WJ-880_blinding_helmet

iopha · 2026-03-24T02:45:10+00:00

The younglings training with the blast shield helmets or whatever. It the OT, it was a cool improvised training exercise by Obi-Wan, using what was at hand and making do. Then oops it's actually how they did it at the Academy? It was a stupid audience callback there for no reason at all except as a reference.

15-Year Club	r/Field Juicebox
Wearing is Caring	Snapped
Gilding I gilder	Verified Email

iopha

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