The Logic of Long Distance

"In the great boardinghouse of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom come out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, we should view them with scientific suspicion if they do." --William James, "The Will to Believe" One of the reasons I so admire James' view on things is that I think he's got his epistemology right. He understands that as knowers, thinkers, and understanders of reality we are vastly limited. Experience is pretty much chock full of uncertainty, vagueness, chance, and openness. Things hardly ever come out even or add up exactly. The truest confirmation of this fact is the feeling of pleasure that we get when our preconceptions about what's about to happen are actually fulfilled. If we were good predictors of the future and had a clear and firm grasp on reality, that satisfaction would be unwarranted. The attitude of science -- by which I mean no more and no less than the attitude of intelligent inquiry -- is ther...

Some rambling thoughts in response to this New York Times article on the question of whether we were born to run, trends, fads, and marketing: As cool as it is to think that our evolutionary history was driven by distance running (and I believe it to be the case--I recommend the account given in Our Kind , which was published back in 1989, long before the argument was applied to barefoot running), giving an account of how the foot developed is very different from giving a justification for how it should be shod in any particular case. It amazes me sometimes when I think of the miles I have put on these legs, which are still made of flesh and gristle, and how well they have stood up to the asphalt over the years. The vast majority of those miles have been in shoes, though I do have a tender spot for barefoot strides over dewy fields. These days it's hard to sort out the difference between education and marketing. The marketers educate us. The educators market to us. Harvard...

In the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant writes of what he calls the "transcendental object," and he refers to it sometimes as the "= x." Das ding an sich --the thing in itself. Kant's point when writing about the transcendental object is that objects are somewhat slippery to the human mind. Kant believes that we never truly apprehend things as they are. We see, instead, a kind of messy blend of sense-impressions and mental concepts. His ultimate point: the thing in itself is unknowable. Little known fact: Kant won the Koenigsburg Turkey Trot 5k 5 years straight (1750-1755). Two years later an achilles injury led him to hang up the flats and turn his obsessive mind towards becoming a billiards hustler. Though this sounds a bit like skepticism, Kant's view is different from common-sense skepticism which essentially denies any capacity for knowledge. Though Kant believed we could never apprehend the world as it is, he thought we could apprehend it better. We...

I was inspired by the tremendous running by friends, elites, and virtual training buddies in Monday's Boston Marathon. The event was a perfect storm of marathon geekery, as Americans Desi Davila and Ryan Hall ran well, a world's best was run, and there was that wonderful tailwind that added a little twist to everything. The tailwind has been analyzed now for a few days. Two accounts of the effect of the tailwind stand out for their excellence. They each capture a side of the sport--its "double barreled" nature as William James would have put it. The first is from the always reliable Science of Sport blog . I encourage you to read it. They argue that the wind gave the top runners a 3-4 minute advantage. In particular, the scientists there do an excellent job of talking about their method of analysis, which is actually historical, rather than "empirical." Philosophers, take note! The second analysis I will copy here below . It was written by the anonymou...