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 health threats. It would be a grave error and immoral to ignore its effects on the health and lives … [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…]
I’m currently reading Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling by James E. Alcock and I noted with interest that some key chapters address knowledge practices and/or issues and factors relevant to them: Chapter 2 notes the ways cognitive ‘schemas’ often automatically fill in the gaps when responding to … [Read more…]
I recently spotted an interesting piece on the use of ‘extreme scenarios’ in climate policy research and debates. If you ignore the inflammatory click-bait title regarding “climate porn” and focus on the substance of the piece it makes some interesting observations regarding the apparent institutionalisation of particular ways of constructing scenarios that are relevant to the … [Read more…]
Reading Roger Pielke Jr’s review of David Wallace-Wells’ new book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future got me thinking about a process described by Pielke Jr as the transformation of “carefully caveated scenarios of the future” produced by scientific communities into “most likely futures” (or related future-oriented claims). He writes: The scientific community … [Read more…]
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) – subtitled Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts – is a social psychology book centred on self-justification and cognitive dissonance. The book also implicitly emphasises a particular philosophy of science which is linked to human psychology – it’s this aspect which got my attention. … [Read more…]
Though my doctoral research began as a fairly straightforward impact evaluation of forward-looking interventions (which I call “prospective exercises”), it evolved into a more complex piece of research and theory-building. Two of the ideas that emerged from this broader inquiry are: To understand the use and impacts of a prospective exercise (or similar future-oriented research) … [Read more…]
Over the past year I’ve sometimes been so consumed by worry and anxiety that it has been difficult to function as well as I’d like to. Some of the things that have caused me to worry have been rational concerns, broadly-speaking. For example, periods of unemployment and associated job searches can be highly stressful. At … [Read more…]
One of my intellectual side projects is to more fully develop sociological conceptions of knowledge practices. This inquiry builds on some of the analysis of prospective knowledge practices presented in my PhD thesis and will hopefully also inform other current work (e.g. work on the roles and effects of knowledge practices in transition processes). Below … [Read more…]