Things I Ask

As I was reading Robert M. Pirsig's second novel, Lila , I came across the idea of "Philosophology". Philosophology, or the study of philosophy. This idea saved my life. One of my goals since graduating high school was to study philosophy, to get a coherent understanding of major ideas from major philosophers. I wanted to know enough to group philosophers, to concisely sum up their ideas, and to read their works in the original languages that they were written in. I, like the people Pirsig described, thought that knowing about philosophy was essential before pursuing my own philosophy. What if people already wrote down what I wanted to write down? What if strong counterarguments already existed? But Pirsig said the same thing that a professor from the Yonsei Philosophy Department had said to me a year ago: given our short lifespans, it would be impossible. "You can imagine the ridiculousness of an art historian taking his students to museums, having them wri...

The Freakonomics guys summed it up well: "... voting exacts a cost -- in time, effort, lost productivity -- with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your 'civic duty.' As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, 'A rational individual should abstain from voting.'" -excerpt from a New York Times article This is unsettling, because many people consider the economic policies of candidates to be of the utmost importance. (According to the Chosun Ilbo article written on May 4th, 2017, polls revealed that economic growth policy was the most important factor of the 2017 Korean elections, at a rate of 28.5%. Policies regarding job creation came in second place, at 18.8%.) What to do, when the people who allegedly know the most about the economy take no part in shaping it? Surely, this major problem is difficult to remove without hurting democracy. Perhaps, then, hurting democracy is the best way to solve thi...

Sometimes, theories based on evolutionary psychology sound a bit too forced . For example, there is a claim that babies tend to look more like their fathers. The evolutionary explanation is well summarized by the Scientific American: " Fathers, after all, do not share a mother's certainty that a baby is theirs, and are more likely to invest whatever resources they have in their own offspring. Human evolution, then, could have favored children that resemble their fathers, at least early on, as a way of confirming paternity." (The actual Scientific American article debunks this view.) The reason that such theories sound "forced" is that the phenomena can have a myriad causes that sufficiently explain it. The paternal resemblance explanation is just one of the many possible explanations. Forced theories are bad because anyone can make them while no one can satisfactorily dispute them. To illustrate this point, I will propose a theory that seeks to explain...