"I'm really concerned about Hawai indigenous people's rights"

I signed up for a Philosphy of Science course this semester cause why not. I figured it could be a fun diversion from the two topics that absorb all my attention these days: relationship wisdom, and body-related books.

The teacher is a woman in her 30s with enough energy to drag the whole room, she reminds me of my teaching days. She's not exactly screaming, but she's well aware she's performing on a stage. She gives out the vibes of a very strong woman, and she's very good.

Five minutes in, and I'm already restless. And it's not because I had forgotten how hard the chairs are, and how their shape invites you towards the back and into a vertebra-friendly slouch. It's just an intellectually underwhelming experience.

We spend some time clarifying the difference between induction and deduction, and at some point we agree that observing three HB pencils is not enough to state that all pencils are HB, which leads to the sentence "I cannot make general statements about anything by looking at particulars". I ask if the proposition not all pencils are HB is not a general statement. She ponders and jumps around for a while, finally saying that it's an existential proposition and not a general one, cause you can rephrase it as there exists one pencil which is not HB. I just say okay: I'm not sold, but I also don't care too much about playing games with words at this age. I studied mathematics and know how we alter the rules when the results don't fit our wishes, and who am I to question her adjectives.

I'm struck by how the point of philosophy is about drawing lines on Very Arbitrary Matters®, and being paid to do so. It's nice to ask questions, and I, like Feynman, can live with not knowing. But asking questions that are conocted not to have an answer is quite silly. I want to cook my salmon tonight and having pondered on made-up problems is not gonna help me figure life out.

We spend time on the difference between analytical and synthetic propositions as defined by the Vienna circle, the gist being "If you wanna say something about the world, you need to look at the world", and I'm again amazed that such a study can get you a salary (and I work in tech, so I'm the first salary mystery of this century). Analytical propositions are all sorts of tautologies you can think of (dictionary definitions, math statements), whereas synthetic propositions are those referring to a piece of the world. And the Vienna circle's position is "analytical propositions find their validation in themselves; synthetic ones must be validated by observation; everything else is meaningless." Apparently this view of the world has lost traction -- and that's why there's so much rambling nonsense going on everywhere, I'd add.

Of course we couldn't have done without some remarks about covid. She brings up vaccine hesitance as an example of science skepticism: an opportunity for philosophy of science to prove its worth. I should have seen it coming half a kilometer away. I don't know how I manage not to shout THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT HAVE YOU READ THE STUDIES OR ARE YOU JUST AIRING YOUR MOUTH, because anybody who is not concerned by how those studies were run either have not read them or simply don't understand science. Or both, which might well be the case here. It takes me a while to explain, in a public discussion, that you can totally make up a definition of good science that includes the theories you want to legitimize and discards the ones you don't want, and it felt like it was the first time she heard such an argument. Still, it feels like the hours of mindfullness I've been practicing regularly the last few months have yielded some fruit.

But the most pissing thing of all is that every minuscule point made in class is an opportunity to collect everybody's opinion and follow everybody's train of thought. Every question is legit, every thought worth expressing. I'm sorry kiddo, but nobody cares about your thought. I don't care what you think about induction vs deduction. I don't care about where you stand on heliocentrism. Write in your final essay and shut up and let this class glide on. At some point we go on a tangent on how we've neglected indingeneous people's rights to access their sacred hawaian mountain tops by building telescopes on their top. Apparently, there's been recent protests and "it has sparked a debate and we don't do that anymore" -- I'd die to see the newspaper article about how we are dismantling all hawaian telescopes because we're finally respecting indigeneous rights and we want them to roam freely on their mountain tops. We're as bastard as ever and we don't give a piss, except that now that we've run out of mountain tops, we can act as sensitive chavaliers. A guy intervenes to say "This makes me really sad, it's crushing to know those indigeneous people are not being respected; I feel like they could contribute value to these projects", and I'm on the verge of clapping and bowing to his majestical sensitivity. If I were a girl, I'd already be wet in my pants.