Singer

I went to a lecture this evening at Ithaca College by Peter Singer, the Princeton professor who may well have the distinction of being the most adored and reviled living philosopher. Interestingly enough, he manages to get attacked about equally often both for being horribly immoral and for being implausibly morally demanding. But the lecture this night was pretty tame — he mostly argued that factory farming animals for consumption is immoral. I suppose this is controversy enough in many quarters, but it strikes me as an entirely sensible position.

Incidentally, it seems to be a common practice these days to google various terms and use the number of respective hits as a measure of how important the things are taken to be. The professor who introduced Singer today was no exception. He made a fair bit of the fact that if you google Peter Singer you get more hits than if you google Aristotle. Besides general questions about the significance of Google hits, I was suspicious of this professor’s figures. Peter Singer may be famous (or infamous) and all, but he’s not that famous. So what might have gone wrong? Well, ‘Peter’ is a pretty common name and ‘Singer’ isn’t exactly rare either. Besides, ‘singer’ is also a fairly common word. I bet there are quite a few websites that use the word ‘singer’ somewhere and also mention some Peter or other. With Aristotle, of course, we have none of these worries. Anyway, my hunch was right: once you do a search that at least roughly controls for these worries, the number of hits plummets to a small fraction of the number of hits for Aristotle.

Moral? If you want to make a point using Google numbers, at least make sure to get the search terms such that the results stand a chance of being relevant.

Sydney