“There’s a tremendous amount of sort of digging in to the original beliefs […]. These people, I’m talking scientists […] are [often] blinded to the data” – White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas (from a recent interview with British website unherd.com) This post continues the theme of potentially turning my curiosity about the current … [Read more…]
Over the past week or so I’ve begun to wonder whether I should turn my curiosity about pandemic policy-making and related actor behaviour into a more serious investigation. One of the reasons is that, like Harvard’s Sheila Jasanoff has observed, I’ve noted the prominence of future projections and associated forms of model-based analysis. Additionally, specific … [Read more…]
With life in Melbourne, Victoria, having just dramatically changed for at least the next six weeks under a stricter lockdown, there are some aspects of a related press conference held by the Victorian Premier announcing changes to Melbourne’s restrictions (and associated statements released by the Premier) which appear to deserve some brief commentary. I have … [Read more…]
This post outlines an emerging direction in my thinking and which I believe needs to be further developed: a sociology of knowledge practices. This sociology would mobilise social theory and adopt a view of humans consistent with sociological understandings in seeking to better understand a particular set of human activities: ‘knowledge practices.’ Two recent theoretical … [Read more…]
Back in 2013 colleagues and I published a paper in the journal Futures which posited a ‘social maturation’ framework. The framework posits a sequential process (of six phases) through which an issue passes and a range of indicators for each phase. This analytical framework is a kind-of linear model in which the early phases are … [Read more…]
This is both a distressing time and an incredibly interesting time to do social research and inquiry. For example, scholars of moral psychology and human groupish-ness can examine new cases such as the splitting of people in different tribes in relation to the pandemic: e.g. folk enthusiastically embracing stay at home orders (e.g. those telling … [Read more…]
This post will be fairly brief because I just want to note a couple of things that are presently of interest to me which I might wish to further explore at a later date: First, the pandemic – or, rather, behaviour during it – has reminded me of a distinction I started thinking about during … [Read more…]
A brief framing note: in the current emotionally charged context it’s probably wise to first articulate some framing thoughts and try to avoid potential misinterpretations. It’s clear that SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes are significant threats. It would be a grave error and immoral to ignore its effects on the health and lives of … [Read more…]
Like many people I’m pondering the intensifying COVID-19 infectious disease crisis, with daily life here in Australia (I live in Melbourne) beginning to transform as governments implement policies which upend daily life and many industries. Initial forecasts suggest we’re likely to see the worst level of unemployment since the Great Depression. I have no idea … [Read more…]
A couple of years ago a couple of cognitive scientists – Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber – published a provocative book called The Enigma of Reason which seeks to both engage with puzzles regarding human reason and theorise the cognitive mechanism(s) involved. In my PhD thesis I suggested that their findings regarding human reason are … [Read more…]