I do this manually. Usually after several listens to the entire Discover Weekly I'll already have a couple in mind I want to hear more, and I'll pull these into my collection playlist.
On the other end though, some Monday mornings I pull up Discover Weekly and there's this soul-crushing moment when I realize there's a brand new playlist and I forgot to add some treasure I'd been listening to all the last week. I've lost one or two songs in this manner. But if they're still relevant to me in the future, I trust Spotify to eventually lead me back to them somehow. That's how crazy good Spotify is to me. :P
I once saw a service that automatically saves your Discover Weekly to a new playlist each week. I've done this manually to "snapshot" a few great Discover Weekly sets, but if I was a little smarter I'd use automated service to save me from those occasional regretful Mondays.
>You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.
The mere presence of debate does not preclude certainty about overarching principles. Various denominations might disagree about what's moral in a situation, but they can at least agree about why this specific kind of morality is important, and what reasoning and evidence should be relevant in the discussion, and how this morality plays into a larger conception of the Christian life. Elements like the Gospel, the Apostle's Creed, and the metaphysics of traditional deism can all be harnessed to conduct and resolve debate. There are more certainties than there are the opposite. And perfect certainty will never be achieved, even on a theological level. Since one of the charges of theology is to adapt and present Christianity to a changing world.
Unlike, say, secular moral discourse, especially manifest in political speech, which makes no effort whatsoever to establish shared principles. There are few, if any, first premises which can initiate debate. There are few agreed-upon standards for what counts as relevant evidence, or how certain values outweigh others.
Wading in secular moral philosophy, the situation becomes even more dire. No one could ever hope to walk into a secular philosophy class with modern material and achieve any guidance about how to conduct their life.
The ability to debate and resolve issues is the marker of a healthy tradition. Not all issues can be resolved. But there should at least be a vehicle to coming to the best available answer. Studying, say, the progression of Catholic theological doctrine is a good example of this. But in our post-Reformation era, in which every theological debate ends up spawning a new Protestant denomination, your lack of confidence is understandable.
I do, of course, agree with you that our broader cultural approach to such issues is entirely arbitrary and resistant to intellectual progress.
Edit: Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice, Which Rationality is a stellar treatment of this problem you're noticing:
Morality from religion? Please. Who practices what Jesus personally told his believers to do?
"anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery." Matthew 5:32
Combine that with God's official "Thou shalt not commit adultery"
And especially for the protestants, directly by Jesus again:
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." Matthew 6:19 "But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal."
And of course, who does this, as Jesus says:
"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire." Matthew 18:9
Now explain why you don't do what Jesus and God personally, according to the holy books, tell you to do if you get the morality from the religion.
Even if you are a believer you have to see that it's a human consensus that decides what's moral at any particular point in time. That consensus was historically at some times at some places more influenced by some holy books, therefore the witch hunt ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.") and luckily it's not that much anymore, at least in Europe.
Have even more fun trying to accept the morality from Islam holy books. Note the whole Quran is claimed to be the actual "words of God.": "Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward." Quran (4:74)
Even Catholics are quite inconsistent. There's the oddly progressive Old Catholic Church that split off from the mainline at the turn of the 19th century over papal infallibility. There's the sedevacantists who think all Catholic activity after the Second Vatican Council is illegitimate. Even among those, they can't agree whether or not popes after Pius XII even can be legitimate if they recant their alleged heresy, or if it's all lost. The latter conclavists thus actually get to elect their own popes (who are antipopes from the perspective of the mainline).
Then amongst traditionalists and others, they can't agree on whether or not classical liberal principles are compatible with Catholic doctrine or not. Christopher Ferrara and others thinks that all of United States history was a giant mistake and that we should revert to pre-Enlightenment theocracy, Tom Woods and others argue that liberalism is what Catholicism logically leads to.
No, there isn't much certainty about overarching principles. That you can't conduct your own life based on secular morality is false. Most people don't conduct their lives on any explicit morality. The ones that have ever pondered these questions in depth have always been a minority. Everyone else has only trickled down breadcrumbs from some clergyman, or ignored it.
I don't think it's an accident that a modern, secular framework hasn't arisen to replace traditional religion. For what resources could a framework draw upon? The founding principles of the Enlightenment have stricken notions of "value," "good," "bad," and "purpose" from the realm of knowledge. Modern rationality is anti-teleological. It precludes any exploration of first causes. When constrained by the epistemological standards of empiricism, theorizing about such subjects is impossible. For before it produced modern standards of scientific proof, it was a rebuke against Aristotle and Aquinas, whose methods represented the most fruitful exploration of "value," good," etc. Modernity's absence of such a framework is a feature, not a bug.
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has written in far more depth about this change. Anyone who's concerned with modernity's apparent difficulty in handling "meaning of life" questions would be advised to discover how exactly we landed in this situation:
MacIntyre's work was incredibly interesting to this layman. The main point I took away from it is that earlier moral theory asserted that the moral good was the same as in the sense of "this is a good chair". Looked at this way, the ancients had much simpler answers for moral questions than we do, because they all boiled down to "is this person fulfilling their purpose by this action?". Virtue ethics, which he's famously associated with, then brings back that question, with an intermediate step of "what are the traits of a person who is fulfilling their purpose as a person?", as a way of reducing the original question to a heuristic than can be applied to situations.
Where I think this has a problem is that people may disagree about the purpose of a person, or people in general. Just as a chair's purpose is most clearly set by the chair's builder, talking about a person's purpose intuitively implies a person's builder, or "Builder", if you will. A rock shaped by water and accident to look like a chair may serve as one, and so be a good chair, but being a good chair doesn't have any apparent bearing on whether it's a good rock. Without design and intent, purpose is a little fuzzy. Hence (I believe), MacIntyre became religious a while after writing _After Virtue_.
So, even though virtue ethics, if accepted as better than consequentialist ethical theories, makes moral questions simpler, it seems a bit arbitrary with regard to the actual answers, and two virtue ethicists might disagree on which are the important virtues without either being more correct than the other. Without a creator, virtue ethics is on only slightly firmer ground (in my opinion) than consequentialism, but with a creator, it provides strong moral guidelines while not requiring that those guidelines apply to the universe at large, or to said creator. That is, for a virtue ethicist, believing in a creator god grounds moral theory for humans in a way that neither deontology nor consequentialism can.
>'If there's no major reduction in Government loans and grants, we're in good shape,' said Donald Routh, dean for financial aid. 'If there are reductions, then we have some very real problems.'
Modern liberalism offers no solution to the problem of evil. It assumes that as long as your basic needs are met, and you're mentally sane, that you will behave as a rational, non-violent person. It sees humans as essentially materialist, subject to the same universal desires, which can all be met in similar ways, and which are never distorted to any great degree. So it is stumped by the sort of despair that such jihadists harbor in their hearts, for according to its philosophical principles, such a thing should not be possible.
Modern liberalism leaves no room for evil. The contemporary social conservative-liberal axis reflects personal responsibility. Conservatives believe individuals are entirely responsible for individual happiness and liberals believe society is entirely responsible for individual happiness. If westerners are joining ISIS they are not evil, they have been failed by the collective and are seeking happiness elsewhere. They want variation, excitement, or certain moral standards that western society cannot or will not provide. Is that evil? If we lived in ISIS-controlled territory we'd likely want to escape and would also be branded as evil by those in power.
I'd argue income inequality is very much the culprit in this problem: individuals need not be in economic strife to feel unsatisfied with life. Wealth helps enable empowerment but individuals still need the mental tools to maintain it, and our society vastly undervalues mental health (except among the most fortunate).
You statement assumes that everyone who joins/supports ISIS is evil or brainwashed like the people in that article.
Imagine you are a resident of a town just captured by ISIS in Syria. Assuming that they don't kill you immediately for being a Shia, Kurd, Christian or Yazidi, how hard would it be for you to say no to supporting them, when the alternative is death, or to flee to another place only to be forced into destitution due to lack of economic opportunity.
No doubt ISIS seems to have a special capability to recruit people with sociopathic desires, but any army marches on its stomach, and that requires regular, non-evil people, to participate in the effort.
There seems to exist this technocratic fancy about "critical thinking." As if it were a discrete group of rules which could be cultivated in students by simply sitting them down in a classroom, lecturing to them about the rules, and then asking them to apply them in practice scenarios. This, of course, is how one teaches grammar, and most normal subjects.
But would such a student actually become a critical thinker? Or would they simply become a regurgitator of logical fallacies, able to spot them in encountered arguments, but not able to discern whether the reasoning was ACTUALLY fallacious? Take, for instance, the "slippery slope" fallacy. Which is not necessarily a fallacy, because "doing A will lead to B" is valid if both A and B stem from the same principle C. If affirming A implies affirming its principle C, and if B is related to principle C in the same manner as A, then yes, "doing A will lead to B" is valid reasoning.
This is certain value in studying philosophy generally, and formal logic specifically. But it is not a fundamental subject in the same way that most HS subjects are, and it will be of no avail to students who have not already reached a high level of reasoning.
The mistake Paul and other technocrats make when calling for "critical thinking" is that they treat it as an actual subject matter. But there is not textbook for "critical thinking," with which a teacher can instruct a class. It is an intellectual virtue, like curiosity, or honesty. It is not taught directly, but indirectly, through other subjects. THROUGH the constraints and methods of science, one learns to think critically about evidence and causation. THROUGH reading and analyzing literature, one learns to detect intentions, both explicit and implicit, in the voices it encounters. THROUGH algebra and calculus, one learns to think about abstract objects and their relationships.
There is no "shortcut" to critical thinking, just like there is no shortcut to teaching children to be responsible or caring or hardworking. It is a skill that has to be practiced in the various arenas of life.
While I suspect you are correct that there is no 'shortcut' (or syllabus) to critical thinking I think one is able to perceive critical thinking ability in others. If critical thinking is seen to be useful by a potential student, that is likely enough to drive that student to improve that skill. So critical thinking doesn't necessarily need to be taught from a textbook, but could be taught by example. (Of course, this assumes that the teacher is able to do so, which is another can of worms). I propose that it would be possible to have a 'critical thinking' class in schools, where, for example, students are shown critical thinking applied to a range of different problems and are encouraged to apply their own. Yes, you are correct that it is a skill that should be practiced everywhere, but at the moment this is not even addressed.
One less obvious area in which Kuhn has exerted tremendous influence, and one not mentioned in this story, is on philosophy, and especially the history of ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre's framing of moral thinking as "history-constituted tradition" was sparked by Kuhn's similar framing of scientific thinking. Except MacIntyre uses this approach to discredit the entirety of academic moral philosophy, from Hume to Rawls. And, while doing so, exposes popular ethical maxims as the arbitrary parodies of such work. He now advocates a return to "Thomistic realism," initiated by Aristotle and developed by Aquinas.
>Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven.
Science always proclaims to be "data driven." Galileo and the Ptolemaics were working with the same "data." When Aristotle examined the bones of animals, he was working with the same "data" as Darwin. What changes is how they interpret it: what standards of truth and observation they observe in its collection and synthesis. There is no such thing as "raw data."
Re: "There is no such thing as 'raw data'" -- and of interest to Kuhnians everywhere -- this is a terrific book about climate data, climate models, & computation => https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vast-machine
Galileo did not work with the same data as the Ptolemaics. He was first-handed, observing and measuring the world himself, which is exactly what those other people were NOT doing.
Anyone interested in the necessity of understanding history for philosophical and moral thinking ought to read MacIntyre's Whose Justice, Which Rationality. It argues that a "history-constituted tradition" is the inevitable system in which we make intellectual progress, and analyses the major movements in philosophy as support.
>What if the fence was put there for purposes of adverse posession?
Answering that question is the very reason for pausing to investigate its purpose. Questioning past purposes before reforming is not equivalent to "defending the fence absent any documentation." Your own characterization of this "mindless conservatism" is itself a straw-man of the behavior Chesterton's fence recommends.
The alternative is an endless cycle of deconstruction that impedes any progress, as every possible step or rational for it brings a possible mask to power. The Nietzschean project, though fun, has produced nothing besides criticism, and would never succeed in taking any kind of action about said fence.
> Answering that question is the very reason for pausing to investigate its purpose.
So you answer the question and determine the fence is there because of adverse possession. And then everyone else you present your findings to says, "that's not a good reason, so clearly you're not using Chesterton's fence and we shouldn't make any changes." See the issue?
Chesterton's fence and/or the Principle of Charity only have the potential to lead you to a good answer if the other party is putting in a good faith effort. But as soon as that's not the case, these cognitive rules of thumb basically become tools of oppression. And if you've ever watched congressional testimony where the parties are forbidden by rule from criticizing each other, it's easy to see that lots of people purposely take advantage of this.
Also, in the context of business the PoC means assuming that people are acting in their self interest, but in the context of politics or whatever it means assuming that people aren't acting in their self interest. As a rule of thumb for improving your thinking then these sorts of ideas probably make sense, especially for things like entrepreneurship or software engineering, but at an epistemological level the phrase "not even wrong" comes to mind.
> So you answer the question and determine the fence is there because of adverse possession. And then everyone else you present your findings to says, "that's not a good reason, so clearly you're not using Chesterton's fence and we shouldn't make any changes." See the issue?
I must confess that I don't. I guess this depends on why you are doing this: if your goal is to convince other people that you should remove the gate, you must accept that it is a possibility that other people may not find your argument convincing. That is their prerogative, right? If you need their permission to remove the gate, there is nothing you can really do without convincing them anyway.
If, however, you are doing this for your own benefit, it may help you understand the system and propose/tweak your own solution to the problem better.
Or maybe I don't understand what you are saying here.
Do you do this manually, or use the API?