Now onto what my answers were:
Specialist Paper I: Philosophy
- Is gender socially constructed? is sex?
Gender (girl/boy or woman/man) is socially constructed but sex (male/female) is biologically defined. Sex is defined by the role the individual plays in sexual reproduction, individuals that produce sperm are male those that produce eggs are female (other options include hermaphrodites, sterile, and those due mutations in sex-determining genes). I discuss the difference using dog breeds as an example since individual dogs are male or female but whole breeds are often considered 'girly' or 'manly'.
- Can emotions be reasons for making a decision?
Yes, emotions are evolved traits thus reflect a rational purpose. Knowing the rational purpose is better than using the emotion directly since the emotion may now be maladaptive due to our new environment but that inferring the rational reasons the emotions evolved is hard (that's why the emotion was a better solution than rational thinking in the first place).
- Does it matter if someone misrepresents the views of a dead philosopher to support her own philosophy?
Yes, it matters because it is essentially cheating and results in using logical-fallacies to support their own philosophy. Thus it reduces the validity of work in the field and can cause confusion if the original philosopher's original work becomes lost. Then a bit of a rant about how penalties for misrepresenting views need to be high because as academics become more busy with other stuff more and more misrepresentations will go by unnoticed.
General Paper I:
- Is chemistry the future of nutrition?
No, first the question is dumb because food and eating is more than just acquiring nutrition it is a social, cultural and pleasurable activity. Even if we ignore that chemistry can't replace Rubisco so can't replace growing plants for food. But, biology has much to offer to improve the efficiency and nutritional value of agricultural crops.
- Discuss: "Responsible, organized merchants will always surpass those of wealth rulers" [someone]
Disagree, I reinterpretted this into a big business vs small responsible business and used what has happened with newspapers in the UK (and around the world) as an example how wealthy rulers come out on top.
- Is increasing life expectancy good?
I broke this down into two subproblems. First discussing ending early-death (death in the beginning or prime of life usually due to infectious disease) which is good because early-death can be very disruptive to families and industry and innovation. Then discussing extending total lifespan which is bad because it leads to over-population and may cause political/cultural stagnation (too many people in the 'stuck in their ways' phase of life.
Specialist Paper II: Economics
- Is our financial system safer after the crisis?
Yes, recapitalization of banks and waking up regulators/scaring bankers is good. But these are temporary, the fundamental culture of bankers and politicians has not changed so 20-30 years and we'll probably be back at 2008.
- Is there a case for a transaction tax?
Yes, high frequency trading has reached the Red-Queen problem (everyone is running as fast as they can just to stay where they are) and resulting in tons of wasted effort on gaining a new microseconds on transcation time. Plus high frequency trading can cause instability in financial markets (see the Wall street fiasco of a little while ago). These two factors out weigh the small benefit of homogenizing prices between exchanges.
- If experiment is the key to rigour, can macroeconomics ever be rigorously evidence-based?
No, but the biggest problem isn't the inability to experiment on national economies it is the fact that the subjects of economics (people, governments, economies) are aware of the field and can change their behaviour in response invalidating predictions as a rigorous test of models/theories, unlike hard-sciences like astronomy or climate science which also face the problem of not being able to perform experiments on the whole system.
General Paper II:
- What is the role for hard science in historical research?
It should be used as much as possible (because written historical accounts and oral traditions are next-to-worthless) but often cannot answer the most interesting questions (eg. it can tell you how a sculpture was made and from what and when but not why or what the sculpture represents). The cost of hard science is also prohibitively high in many cases so it should be used as efficiently as possible.
- Should prisoners have the right to vote?
Yes, because either prisoners will be a fair representation of the society thus not affect the results, or if they are biased towards a particular subpopulation (eg. blacks in the USA) that is symptomatic of biased judicial policies and those victimized by those policies should have the power to influence change of those policies.
- If "excavation is destruction"[someone] can we justify excavation?
Yes, because destruction will happen eventually regardless of what we do, and less destructive methods cannot be developed without the knowledge gained from destructive methods first (plus some destructive methods cannot be replaced -> eg. you're not going to find a way to figure out a pattern painted on a piece of pottery while that pottery is underground). So we might as well learn what we can while destroying it rather than doing nothing until natural forces destroy it.
