In the last several weeks I've been thinking a lot about the twentieth century and its unimaginable crimes against humanity on an almost inconceivable scale. The Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Gulag, the mass starvation of prisoners of war, the executions and murders of vast numbers of innocent people; the reckless, unbounded cruelty of totalitarian states …
Mass murder in the borderlands
The facts of mass murder in eastern Europe in the 1930s through the 1950s are simply too horrific to fully absorb. These decades include the mass killings of millions of Jewish men, women, and children by the Nazi state and military and their collaborators in territories they conquered in eastern Europe -- the Holocaust. And …
The Gulag
The ruthless authoritarianism and tyranny of Stalinist rule depended on a leader, a party, and a set of institutions that worked to terrorize and repress the population of the USSR. The NKVD (the system of internal security police that enforced Stalin's repression), a justice system that was embodied in the Moscow Show Trials of 1936-38, …
Analytic philosophy of meaning and smart AI bots
One of the impulses of the early exponents of analytic philosophy was to provide strict logical simplifications of hitherto vague or indefinite ideas. There was a strong priority placed on being clear about the meaning of philosophical concepts, and more generally, about "meaning" in language simpliciter. Here are the opening paragraphs of Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical Structure …
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New thinking about European genocide and the Holocaust
Image: names of Holocaust victims It sometimes seems that some questions in history are resolved, finished, and understood. At various times the industrial revolution, the outbreak of World War I, and the French war in Indochina fell in this category. And then a new generation of historians comes along and questions the assumptions and certainties …
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Rational life plans and the stopping problem
Image: a poor solution to the stopping problem In earlier posts I discussed the question of "rational plans of life" (link, link, link, link) and argued that standard theories of rational decision making under uncertainty don't do well in this context. I argued instead that rationality in navigating and building a life is not analogous to remodeling your …
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Are randomized controlled trials the “gold standard” for establishing causation?
The method of randomized controlled trials (RCT) is often thought to be the best possible way of establishing causation, whether in biology, or medicine or social science. An experiment based on random controlled trials can be described simply. It is hypothesized that (H) X causes Y in a population of units P. An experiment testing …
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Tony Judt and Tim Snyder on the twentieth century
Timothy Snyder helped Tony Judt to create a "spoken book" during Judt's final months of illness through a truly unique series of conversations about biography and history. The book is well worth reading. Snyder is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, and the spoken book he …
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Judt on “A Clown in Regal Purple”
There is an intriguing paragraph in Tony Judt and Tim Snyder's Thinking the Twentieth Century that made me curious. Judt says to Snyder: My own tenure case at Berkeley proceeded under the shadow cast by a long article I published in 1979 criticizing popular trends in social history, under the title “A Clown in Regal Purple.” Various …
Tony Judt on memory and myth in the twentieth century
One of the historians whose work I greatly appreciate is Tony Judt. I've posted about his seminal book about Europe after World War II (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (link, link)) and his history of the French left in Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981) (link). Some of his …
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Understanding Society 