Daniel Little
Diane Vaughan's recent Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk is an important contribution to the literature on safety in complex socio-technical systems. The book is an ethnographic study of the workspaces and the men and women who manage the flow of aircraft throughout US airspace. Her ethnographic work for this study was …
Continue reading "The air traffic control system and ethno-cognition"
Morality is a part of everyday life and personal experience. It is also, of course, the subject of a large field of philosophy -- philosophical ethics. What principles should I follow in action? What kind of person do I want to be? What do I owe to other people in a range of circumstances? We …
It is really important for people to understand that ChatGPT is not a valid source of academic content or references. And it is not just useless because it makes occasional "errors" -- it is unreliable all the way down as a source of knowledge. Remember how ChatGPT works. It is a Large Language Model, trained …
An earlier post considered the question of how to assess the quality of ChatGPT as an academic writer. One particular concern shared by professors in humanities and social sciences is whether ChatGPT will lead to "AI-plagiarism" in which students substitute ChatGPT sessions for their own work. This particular worry seems unjustified at present, but there …
Continue reading "Ten paper topics in philosophy and history framed by ChatGPT"
I've taken the view that the hoopla about ChatGPT is overblown, and that the texts generated by large language models in response to "prompts" are nothing more than strings of sentences, without coherent meaning. But now that I've spent an evening playing with the tool, my opinion is changed. I'm frankly amazed at how informative …
An earlier post mentioned the topic of folk psychology and its relation to cognitive science. Scholars like Paul Churchland question whether there is a realistic correspondence between the properties identified by our folk-psychological understanding of each other and the real underlying cognitive processes on the basis of which we operate. My interest here is a parallel question for social …
It is evident that we approach the social world, and specific social settings, with a body of "framework" assumptions about what is going on, and how we should behave. Here is how I put the point in an earlier post: It seems clear that human beings bring specific frameworks of thought, ideas, emotions, and valuations …
image: github analysis of Twitter follower network (link) Twitter's paroxysms in the past two weeks have been unsettling. But suddenly, I am coming to believe that many of us have misunderstood what we were getting into when we got involved in Twitter in the first place. We had made assumptions about the advantages that Twitter …
John Dewey's Democracy and Education is over a century old. But it still seems strikingly modern, even avant-garde, when compared to many pedagogical practices currently in place in both secondary and post-secondary schools. Here is one line of thought that is especially insightful: that learning is a constructive and active process for the learner, not a question …
When philosophers think of action they generally have in mind a combination of intentionality and simple motor movements. "John flips the switch to turn on the lights." But a great deal of human action is substantially more complex than this. Skilled bodily performance -- playing the piano, returning a tennis serve, fabricating a guitar -- …
Understanding Society 