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cincinnatus_c
"What is not known is why the high-pressure system that has hovered over Toronto in recent weeks, resulting in week-after-week of record-breaking heat, has refused to budge.
"A high-pressure system is a dense mass of air that presses down on the earth. The current high-pressure system--known as the Bermuda high--is bringing hot, humid air into southern Ontario, which explains the dense humidity over the past few weeks.
"The movement of the jet stream farther north has also contributed to the blistering heat, said Frank Seglenieks, the weather station coordinator at the University of Waterloo. [!]
"The jet stream ... is currently over Hudson's Bay, which means that Toronto is a long way from cooler weather....
"Temperatures are expected to continue to be above 30C until at least Friday."
So, that was Alejandro Bustos, in the Toronto Star today. This is like a game of broken telephone.
What's particularly funny about it is, three pages on, there's the Star's weather page, courtesy the good bots at Accuweather, which has a map for today showing the jet stream running south of the entire Canada/US border, and which does not predict highs of 30 or above for a single day in the forecast period.
High temp today, here: 27. Dewpoint then: 16. High dewpoint: 20 (but at 9 a.m.).
High temp today in TO: 31. Dewpoint then: 16. High dewpoint: 20 (also in the morning).
Notice that the humidity today was almost exactly the same as it was last week when people started going on about the humidity.
One reason I'm giving the readings for TO is that I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the dewpoint Environment Canada was reporting for here was fluctuating very suspiciously. That resumed today, bouncing from 16 to 11 to 15 to 9 to 11 in consecutive hours.
As promised, read about moral luck on the Greyhound today. (Nothing noteworthy was overheard on the Greyhound.)
Anita R. Noguera, "Mad, Sad or Bad: Moral Luck and Michael Stone" (Nursing Philosophy 1, 2000), is a great example of (a) the hazards of interdisciplinary journals with (presumably) non-specialist referees, and (b) the effects of the sheer over-proliferation of journals (and this one is published by Blackwell, even). This is probably the worst article I've ever read in a professional journal. First, it misunderstands "moral luck" as "luck having to do with moral matters": it simply takes luck to be morally exculpatory. (It seems the gist is that Michael Stone, crazed hammer-murderer, committed his crazed hammer murders as a result of all kinds of luck, so maybe we shouldn't be too hard on him, or on the mental health professionals who turned him loose).
Second, a lot of it just doesn't make much sense, sometimes for plain grammatical reasons, sometimes due to unfathomable logic (e.g., "it would later be claimed that he was not mentally ill, but suffered a personality disorder"). If I hadn't actually read Williams's original piece, I doubt her explication of it would've made any sense. (This is a common, terrible, problem with philosophical exegeses, though--the exegesis is more opaque than the original.)
This is the kind of paper that, if an undergrad handed it in to you, you might think (and the student would definitely think) you should give it an A, just because s/he worked so darned hard on it. But then, if you're me, you think, "I have to give this paper a C+, maybe a B, tops, because I need to help keep this person out of grad school."
It must finally be noted that this article puts Nitzer Ebb's "Fun to be Had" in my head.
Next: Daniel Statman, "The Time to Punish and the Problem of Moral Luck" (Journal of Applied Philosophy 14, no. 2, 1997). Statman is the editor of an anthology called Moral Luck which includes Williams's and Nagel's pieces, but which, oddly, is not in any of the libraries to which I have access.
This article is mostly about the question whether, if you know that someone's going to commit a crime, you're justified in punishing them before they actually commit it. (No Minority Report references; I guess the movie hadn't come out yet, and the Dick story was too obscure.) Statman's line is that, on the basis of a thorough anti-moral-luck position, not only would "prepunishment" be justified between the formation of the intention and the act, but it would also be justified ifyou knew that someone was going to form the intention to commit the act.
So, this is another article that starts with a fixed position on moral luck and uses it as a lever against another problem. It's also another article that strays from the Kantian basis of the problem. (Maybe it's just my prejudice (though it also seems to be Nagel's) that the problem essentially has a Kantian basis, though. Clearly there are several different problems of moral luck (which, as most of the articles say, Nagel pointed out, but Nagel only thought one of them was the problem of moral luck)--and more on that later, probably tomorrow.) On the Kantian basis, you can't even admit the possibility that you can know in advance exactly what people are going to do--there's no morality unless you assume people are autonomous. (What about the other day's not-really-about-moral-luck article, though? Doesn't it show how you can have predictability and autonomy? Not sure what to do with that.)
Anyway, started one more moral luck article on the Greyhound back tonight; I'll probably finish it tomorrow, and that should make for the last moral luck update for a while. Which would surely be a relief for somebody, if there were anybody for it to be a relief for.
"A high-pressure system is a dense mass of air that presses down on the earth. The current high-pressure system--known as the Bermuda high--is bringing hot, humid air into southern Ontario, which explains the dense humidity over the past few weeks.
"The movement of the jet stream farther north has also contributed to the blistering heat, said Frank Seglenieks, the weather station coordinator at the University of Waterloo. [!]
"The jet stream ... is currently over Hudson's Bay, which means that Toronto is a long way from cooler weather....
"Temperatures are expected to continue to be above 30C until at least Friday."
So, that was Alejandro Bustos, in the Toronto Star today. This is like a game of broken telephone.
What's particularly funny about it is, three pages on, there's the Star's weather page, courtesy the good bots at Accuweather, which has a map for today showing the jet stream running south of the entire Canada/US border, and which does not predict highs of 30 or above for a single day in the forecast period.
High temp today, here: 27. Dewpoint then: 16. High dewpoint: 20 (but at 9 a.m.).
High temp today in TO: 31. Dewpoint then: 16. High dewpoint: 20 (also in the morning).
Notice that the humidity today was almost exactly the same as it was last week when people started going on about the humidity.
One reason I'm giving the readings for TO is that I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the dewpoint Environment Canada was reporting for here was fluctuating very suspiciously. That resumed today, bouncing from 16 to 11 to 15 to 9 to 11 in consecutive hours.
As promised, read about moral luck on the Greyhound today. (Nothing noteworthy was overheard on the Greyhound.)
Anita R. Noguera, "Mad, Sad or Bad: Moral Luck and Michael Stone" (Nursing Philosophy 1, 2000), is a great example of (a) the hazards of interdisciplinary journals with (presumably) non-specialist referees, and (b) the effects of the sheer over-proliferation of journals (and this one is published by Blackwell, even). This is probably the worst article I've ever read in a professional journal. First, it misunderstands "moral luck" as "luck having to do with moral matters": it simply takes luck to be morally exculpatory. (It seems the gist is that Michael Stone, crazed hammer-murderer, committed his crazed hammer murders as a result of all kinds of luck, so maybe we shouldn't be too hard on him, or on the mental health professionals who turned him loose).
Second, a lot of it just doesn't make much sense, sometimes for plain grammatical reasons, sometimes due to unfathomable logic (e.g., "it would later be claimed that he was not mentally ill, but suffered a personality disorder"). If I hadn't actually read Williams's original piece, I doubt her explication of it would've made any sense. (This is a common, terrible, problem with philosophical exegeses, though--the exegesis is more opaque than the original.)
This is the kind of paper that, if an undergrad handed it in to you, you might think (and the student would definitely think) you should give it an A, just because s/he worked so darned hard on it. But then, if you're me, you think, "I have to give this paper a C+, maybe a B, tops, because I need to help keep this person out of grad school."
It must finally be noted that this article puts Nitzer Ebb's "Fun to be Had" in my head.
Next: Daniel Statman, "The Time to Punish and the Problem of Moral Luck" (Journal of Applied Philosophy 14, no. 2, 1997). Statman is the editor of an anthology called Moral Luck which includes Williams's and Nagel's pieces, but which, oddly, is not in any of the libraries to which I have access.
This article is mostly about the question whether, if you know that someone's going to commit a crime, you're justified in punishing them before they actually commit it. (No Minority Report references; I guess the movie hadn't come out yet, and the Dick story was too obscure.) Statman's line is that, on the basis of a thorough anti-moral-luck position, not only would "prepunishment" be justified between the formation of the intention and the act, but it would also be justified ifyou knew that someone was going to form the intention to commit the act.
So, this is another article that starts with a fixed position on moral luck and uses it as a lever against another problem. It's also another article that strays from the Kantian basis of the problem. (Maybe it's just my prejudice (though it also seems to be Nagel's) that the problem essentially has a Kantian basis, though. Clearly there are several different problems of moral luck (which, as most of the articles say, Nagel pointed out, but Nagel only thought one of them was the problem of moral luck)--and more on that later, probably tomorrow.) On the Kantian basis, you can't even admit the possibility that you can know in advance exactly what people are going to do--there's no morality unless you assume people are autonomous. (What about the other day's not-really-about-moral-luck article, though? Doesn't it show how you can have predictability and autonomy? Not sure what to do with that.)
Anyway, started one more moral luck article on the Greyhound back tonight; I'll probably finish it tomorrow, and that should make for the last moral luck update for a while. Which would surely be a relief for somebody, if there were anybody for it to be a relief for.
