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Author Archives: krisnelson
Underdetermination and the balance between religion and science
The Duhem-Quine thesis, when simplified, explains how a given set of facts can produce more than one apparently true conclusion: essentially, different background assumptions lead to different outcomes. A related concept is known as underdetermination: that a given set of evidence can be explained by more than one–potentially conflicting–theory. How does this impact the relationship between science and religion?
Objectivity, science, and (a)political action
Theodore M. Porter, in Trust in Numbers, argues that the American distrust of elites–and of government itself–has led to a focus on “mechanical objectivity,” or rules to make decisions. In many ways similar to what American jurists call “procedural due process,” the idea of to diminish the necessity of personal judgement in favor of predictable, “transparent” processes and thus lessen the number of disputes over the outcomes of a bureacratic decision.
David Noble on “The Religion of Technology”
In The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, David Noble investigates the Western relationship between religion and technology.
Four planning rules to avoid project disasters
One key reason to study history? To learn from the past: (1) take small steps, (2) favor reversibility, (3) plan on surprises, and (4) plan on human inventiveness.
The problem of expertise in a liberal democracy
If free discussion and debate is core to liberalism–as Turner, backed by old-school liberal theorists like John Stuart Mill, argue–then anything that interferes with public debate and decision-making also moves a society away from liberalism (note, once again, that this is not the opposite of conservatism in the modern sense).
Stephen Turner describes “The Social Study of Science before Kuhn”
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions–in many ways established the modern field of science studies. Stephen Turner provides a brief, socioligist’s version of the lead-up to Kuhn’s seminal book.
Problems with treating privacy as a property right
One approach to dealing with privacy would be to extend property rights to cover information or personal data, rather as copyright, patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property extended physical rules into the realm of the intangible. While there are undoubtedly benefits to this, there are limitations as well
Benefits of viewing the right to privacy as a property right
If a core reason that copyright has always been compatible with the First Amendment is that it is a property right, then perhaps a way out of the conflict between privacy and freedom of speech and the press is to conceive of privacy in the same way–as a property right. Certainly it is already on its way there, as the “right of publicity” in many jurisdictions already implicitly does so, since it provides control over unauthorized commercial use by others.
Privacy and the First Amendment: privacy as property?
In Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Terry Hart does an excellent job of exploring why the First Amendment has never been held to interfere with the enforcement of copyright, including pre-publication injunctive relief.
The rule of law in Michigan
Should a state legislative body be insulated from judicial scrutiny of its “internal” processes? Is ignoring actual vote counts, and simply declaring something to have “immediate effect” sufficient to make it so in the state of Michigan? What is the relationship between the three branches of government?
Refactoring in propria persona: new design, new code
For almost a year I’ve been relying on the (quite good) Hybrid framework with my own custom additions based on Twitter’s Bootstrap framework–and 30+ plugins to tweak it to be just so. With the newest updates to Bootstrap, I wanted to update everything–but what I had, while functional, was brittle and hard to optimize. The solution? Re-work and re-implement the good; replace the bad, and the slow, and the broken.
Freedom to contract at the end of the nineteenth century
In Kermit Hall’s words, the nineteenth century saw the “triumph of contract” over property, tort, and equity, as the law came “to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produces.” (196-97) The early twentieth century continued this–at least until the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal forced the court to reconsider.
Post-war contract law in the nineteenth century
In many respects, the so-called “black codes” put in place in the South immediately after the Civil War exemplify the potential extremes of nineteenth-century contract law.
Contract law in the antebellum 19th century
The common law before the nineteenth century required contracts to be fair and reasonable: a “sound price warrants a sound commodity.” But by mid-century, William Wetmore Story’s famous treatise on contracts recognized that this basic understanding had radically altered. Contracts now required only “mutual assent of the parties” and “valuable consideration.”
My latest top five tweaks, tips, and plugins for WordPress
I love WordPress for its crazy flexibility and endlessly new plugins. I regularly take advantage of this to tweak and change my own site–and you can too! So what have I been doing lately with my favorite platform? Some of these are easy–just install a plugin–while some require more advanced knowledge to implement—but all of them will supercharge your WordPress installation.
