I was watching my second YouTube lecture on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (I know, a very Mr. Toad-like thing to do, but there it is) and saw a terrible mistake that I must correct. The story I told was not about Alfred Tarski but rather was about Alonzo Church. These things matter, after all.
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Here’s another one of those “things that matter.” Church’s doctoral advisor at Princeton was Oswald Veblen—the nephew of Thorstein, who could write better than most economists.
I find it highly valuable to be able to admit and say: I was wrong or I made a mistake. A philosophy of life must include fallibilism.
Nobody is penalizing you for watching your own videos. Then again, YouTube viewers are awful entitled creatures. Actually, I suppose that little is known about YouTube use. Interesting question, the perspective of the YouTube user.. I gather that Facebook is more studied.
Well, a good deal is known about the sheer amount or volume of YouTube use, which is kind of staggering.
I'm mystified by the claim that YouTube viewers are 'awful [sic] entitled creatures'. One can watch it for free at any of my local public libraries, and in my experience quite a lot of people do, including what look to be impoverished folks.--Once one has tasted it, who would want to live without it? When I read about it c.2009, the first thing I looked up was Iqbal Bano doing 'dasht-e-tanhei mein', and there she and it were, in multiple versions including a stupefying televised rendition from the 70's before a small group of Pakistani poets and politicians. Right now I'm working my way through John Mueller's comprehensive, indeed completist study of Fred Astaire; not all, but almost all of Astaire's recorded performances are on YouTube.--I have talked with folks from younger generations who worry about the decline of attention span (not exactly a new worry) induced by TikTok-type very short videos, and now spread to Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook etc. But surely the availability of the professor's lectures justifies YouTube's existence.
There's a lot of good stuff on YouTube and no doubt a lot of not-so-good stuff. There's just a ton of stuff, period.
Using Youtube has given me the opportunity to implement the idea of "lifelong learning" in a private way. RPW's Kant lessons are among the highlights, followed by his lectures on Marx.
Dan Robinson's lectures "Kant's Critique of Pure Reason" were also very entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVUHirBTIzE
Intense were the total of nearly 100 hours of lectures by Leonard Susskind on cosmology, special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. I must confess that my mathematical knowledge as an engineer reached its limits, but the gaps could not prevent me from seeing at least the other shore in some places.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyX8kQ-JzHI&list=PLLjeznqO-C0AVy5P39Hbybl0ew_03IkIx
From Stanford also came the lectures of Robert Sapolsky on "Behavioral Evolution". Although I do not agree at all with his conclusions about human freedom, his lectures were extremely interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL150326949691B199
But the problem with the private and individual use of all these wonderful archives of knowledge still remains. If someone does not know beforehand what he/she is looking for, the horizon often remains in position. This also applies to the use of Wikipedia or ChatGPT. The real challenge is to formulate the right questions. "tà mathémata" loosely according to Heidegger, we take from things what we already know. (Quote: "This real learning is thus a most peculiar taking, a taking in which the taker takes only what he basically already has.")
An interesting article on former professionals in England struggling or resisting Parkinson's disease by doing a new podcast called "Movers and Shakers" is described in detail by Guardian journalist Tim Adams in this recent story, ‘In some ways, Parkinson’s has meant a new lease of life’: meet the Movers and Shakers' found online on JUly 23, 2023:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/23/movers-and-shakers-podcast-series-two-parkinsons-disease-paxman
This could be useful to any one thinking about chronic disease and raging against the dying og the light. The podcast manifests the examined lives of a Parkinson's Disease group of patients and their adaptations.
The Movers and Shakers podcast is on apple at this link for one episode:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/movers-and-shakers-a-podcast-about-life-with-parkinsons/id1677410087
It is fair comedy and British style banter for the most part. A YouTube video news story is also available:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKZb58IQzlQ&ab_channel=Burbsonian
It is a group of friends meeting in the pub to discuss the meaning of their lives and share their stories.
There are countless treasures on YouTube, but for RPW's blog I would want to mention Raymond Geuss's final two class lecture series on Marx and Nietzsche. Also there's this excerpt of Alasdair MacIntyre (I've seen the entire lecture + Q&A posted somewhere) explaining the meaning of his famous invocation of St. Benedict at the end of After Virtue, and ending with a rousing call that since conservatism and liberalism are mirror images of each other, one ought to have nothing to do with either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA2LrtGgTM4&ab_channel=arrus
Does he mean liberalism in the contemporary U.S. political sense, or liberalism in the political-philosophy sense? The excerpt doesn't make it entirely clear, but if he means it in the contemp. U.S. politics sense, I don't think the "mirror images" remark is quite right. However, I might have to think about it more.
LFC--
MacIntyre means 'liberalism' in something of what you call the political-philosophy sense. For the most succinct statement of his views, see '1953, 1968, 1995: Three Perspectives' in the volume Alasdair MacIntyre's Engagement with Marxism. MacIntyre first argues that there are kinds of injustice characteristic of capitalism that arise "from the gross inequalities in the initial appropriation of capital" (p. 413) and from "the impersonal relationships imposed by capitalist markets upon all those who participate in them." (p. 414) He then claims that liberalism is "the moral and political counterpart and expression of developing capitalism" (p. 419), and that he has always rejected it for three reasons (p. 420): capitalists have aimed at, and succeeded in, first the domestication then the destruction of effective trade union power; "liberalism is the politics of a set of élites" that "ensures for the most part the exclusion of most people from any possibility of active and rational participation in determining the form of community in which they live"; and "moral individualism of liberalism is itself a solvent of participatory community." I take it that MacIntyre further thinks that conservatism and liberalism are mirror images in that, though they may offer opposed orientations, they both accept capitalism as a basic and irrevocable transformative set of practices, dynamic forces, and ideologies. Because of this acceptance, MacIntyre finds both liberalism and conservatism to be duplicitous, both deceiving and self-deceiving.
John R.
Thanks for the response.
John Rapko said...
'I'm mystified by the claim that YouTube viewers are 'awful [sic] entitled creatures'.'
YouTube viewers are, though imperfect, essentially kind, sensible, good-natured creatures.
Danny--
We anti-essentialist YouTube viewers are reluctant to generalize. Ney Matogrosso speaks for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St4Gka8CxbE&ab_channel=Raymond9
Might be my imagination, or maybe a reflection of my viewing choices becoming more selective and sophisti-ma-cated, but I think the YouTube culture has become less...awful, and frequently a lot more decent and hospitable, over the years. (With many notable exceptions, no doubt.)
Back in the day, it seemed like common knowledge that the YouTube comments section was among the Internet's most prominent windows into human culture at its ugliest. Wikipedia quotes some big names on this:
Most videos enable users to leave comments, which have attracted attention for the negative aspects of their form and content. In 2006, Time praised Web 2.0 for enabling 'community and collaboration on a scale never seen before', and added that YouTube 'harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred'. The Guardian in 2009 described users' comments on YouTube as:
>>Juvenile, aggressive, misspelt, sexist, homophobic, swinging from raging at the contents of a video to providing a pointlessly detailed description followed by a LOL, YouTube comments are a hotbed of infantile debate and unashamed ignorance - with the occasional burst of wit shining through.
The Daily Telegraph commented in September 2008, that YouTube was 'notorious' for 'some of the most confrontational and ill-formed comment exchanges on the internet', and reported on YouTube Comment Snob, 'a new piece of software that blocks rude and illiterate posts'. The Huffington Post noted in April 2012 that finding comments on YouTube that appear 'offensive, stupid and crass' to the 'vast majority' of the people is hardly difficult.
My impression fwiw is that even now the YouTube comments sections are not, generally speaking, where one goes for intelligent discussion, though I'm sure there's a good deal of variation.
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