Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Joshua Habgood-Coote  and Nadja El Kassar on their recent paper,  Receptive Publics ( Ergo , forthcoming). Joshua Habgood-Coote is a research fellow at the school of philosophy, religion, and history of science at the university of Leeds. Natalie Ashton is a research associate at VU Amsterdam, Nadja El Kassar is Professor of Philosophy at University of Lucerne. Joshua Habgood-Coote It is common to hear the following kind of complaint: You can’t say anything these days! You never know who might get offended, or whether you’re going to get cancelled for saying something totally innocuous. Back in my day we just said it like it was, we were all a lot more thick-skinned, and we just came out and said uncomfortable truths. This complaint makes a historical comparison: things used to be better because you could say what you thought. Both better psychologically—we weren’t spending our whole time in a defensive crouch—and epistemically—we could get to the truth, ...

Today Cass Sunstein  (in the picture above) talks about his book Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice . Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is now working on group decision-making and various projects on the idea of liberty. Choice is often an extraordinary benefit, but it can also be an immense burden. Time and attention are precious commodities, and we cannot focus on everything, even when our interests and our values are at stake. If we had to make choices about everything that affects us, we would be overwhelmed. We exercise our freedom, and we improve our welfare, by choosing not to choose. That choice opens up time and space for us, enabling us to focus on our real concerns. Establishing these claims, and identifying their limitations, are the purposes of this book. When you use a GPS, you are effectively asking it to choose a route for you; it provides a default route, which you can ignore if you li...