A life in words

  • Quidism: the belief that things matter

    The belief that nothing has objective or inherent meaning – commonly called nihilism – is quite popular these days. In some ways I’m sympathetic: if you come to reject or at least harbor serious skepticism of the existence of a non-material, spiritual realm, and that’s where you put ultimate meaning, then brute material reality seemingly…

  • Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    The core cause of unaffordable housing is there not being enough housing.

  • Prof. Mark Davies’ ouster at BYU

    Mark Davies was a professor of linguistics at BYU who created tools for analyzing large collections of text, a method known as corpus analysis. He ran a website, corpus.byu.edu, where these text collections were available for anyone to use. The site, now at english-corpora.org, and Dr. Davies’ website, describe a process of administrator mismanagement that…

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion…. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations…. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form….John Stuart Mill, On LIberty