You might want to make "Oakeshott on Rome and America" the subtitle, and use something flashier—perhaps a pithy line from Oakeshott himself (cf. this)?—for the title itself.
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Congrats. Do you get to pick the title?
ReplyDeleteI certainly will have input into the title.
ReplyDeleteYou might want to make "Oakeshott on Rome and America" the subtitle, and use something flashier—perhaps a pithy line from Oakeshott himself (cf. this)?—for the title itself.
ReplyDeleteI certainly DO want a flashier title -- I just don't have one yet! Suggestions are welcomed.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations. I'm greatly looking forward to it.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to judge a work by its table of contents, so these titles might be hilariously inapposite. Even so, they are the best I could come up with:
ReplyDelete1. Constitutionalism's Empty Promise: Oakeshott on Rome and America
2. Rome, America, and the Failure of Rationalism: Oakeshott on the Fate of Two Civilizations
3. The Imaginary Chains of a Constitution: Oakeshott on the Roman and American Experiments
That last one is of course an allusion to the famous Jefferson quotation.
Good work, PSH.
ReplyDelete