Would You Check?

Via Mind Hacks -- Steven Pinker says of the genes that increase the risk for Alzheimer's disease:

Still, I figured that my current burden of existential dread is just about right, so I followed Watson’s lead and asked for a line-item veto of my APOE gene information when the P.G.P. sequencer gets to it.

I would check. One reason is that I'm young enough that there's still hope for various forms of treatment or preventative measures to arise before I reach risk age. But second, if prevention isn't possible I'd just as soon kick off due to heart disease as have my soul slowly destroyed -- Camel unfiltereds here I come! -- at about age 55-60.

Internet Philosophy Lesson

via Wired.

Required watching for 100 level philosophy courses?

Burn the Rope

Via Play this Thing!:

Stay for the credits after playing You Have to Burn the Rope -- if you need help, or not, check out one of the walkthroughs.

Go Toronto!

Toronto is single-handedly changing the gender ratios in academic philosophy (from the Leiter Reports):

Kirstin Borgerson (Toronto) hired by Dalhousie University. AOS: Philosophy of Science, Bioethics.

Danielle Bromwich (Toronto) Post-Doc at NIH. AOS: Ethics

Sari Kisilevsky (Toronto) Post-Doc in Law and Philosophy at UCLA. AOS: Philosophy of Law, Political Philosophy.

Kara Richardson (Toronto) hired by Syracuse University. AOS: Early Modern, Medieval.

Chloe Taylor (Toronto) hired by University of North Florida. AOS: 20th Century Continental, Social and Political Philosophy. Previously SSHRC Post-Doc at McGill University.

Margaret Cameron (Toronto) hired by University of Victoria as the Canada Research Council Chair Candidate in the Aristotelian Tradition. AOS: Medieval Philosophy. Previously Assistant Professor at Hunter College, City University of New York (tenure-track) and a Research Fellow at Cambridge University.

A local cheer to former card-sharp Douglas Parvin (Rutgers) hired by Augustana College. AOS: Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind. Yay Doug!


And, apparently Princeton still needs to remind us that it's Princeton (bolding mine):

David Baker (Princeton) hired by University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. AOS: Philosophy of Physics. Also had tenure-track offers from NYU and University of Wisconsin.

Congrats to all!

Closest Possible World?

The Wall Street journal poses a counter-factual: about Margaret Seltzer's Love and Consequences.

I’m curious to hear what Juggle readers might do in a similar situation. Not that many people will have a sibling who makes up a memoir, of course, but would you publicly call out a family member involved in unscrupulous doings — even if it meant ruining his or her reputation and career? Or in your family, does loyalty trump all?

According to David Lewis's method of handling counterfactuals (scroll down to Possible World Semantics), the way to analyze this question is to look at the closest possible world where it's true that my sibling wrote a fake memoir and see whether or not I ratted them out.


My intuitive answer is that I wouldn't rat out my siblings. But, thinking about it, that's because my siblings are cool and very nice people.

The kind of sibling who would not only gin up an entire book parasiting on the suffering of others, but also continue the lies through who knows how many meetings and, one would expect, future book tours and such, probably isn't a cool and very nice person. People don't just wake up one day and suddenly break into a massive pattern of deception and manipulation -- they've been practicing it for a long time. That's why they're so good at it. And, while I might not go out of my way to rat out that person, I'd certainly tell the truth if anyone bothered to talk to me.

Which shows one of the weaknesses of Lewis's treatment. Which world is closer: the one where my very cool sister suddenly writes a false memoir, or the world where my sister has serious emotional problems, a lifelong habit of manipulation, and finally gets called out on it after pushing everything too far?

Technically, I think the Lewis account would have to say A -- thus the answer should be "No ratting." But I think my more considered judgment is the correct answer.

Neo-Humean Epistemology

Cabinet Flunkie Who Was In Ally McBeal to President Palmer --

I know your history with Mister Bauer runs deep, but don't let that impact your judgment here. 24, Season 6, Episode 2

-- apparently advancing some new critique of inductive reasoning.

Lost Articles

I've been asking around to see if anyone knew the name of or had a link to the research article that showed that the personal interview is a poor hiring mechanism (and typically does worse than simply looking at resume, references, and so on). Brian Leiter mentioned it a while back, but neither he nor Frank Arntzenius (who originally pointed it out to me) remember the name or where to find it -- but Prof Leiter did note that it was a psych article.

Given the psych angle, I figured I'd ask Gary, but seeing my limited success I thought maybe better just to throw the question out there in a desperate attempt. Can anyone help?

Also, I'd read a few months ago an article online, probably via some new service, citing a study that said that, on average, 20% of any organization's resources are wasted on ego-projects for the CEO. If anyone else remembers that article and has a link or some help to find it that'd be great. My Google-fu is weak.

Research for Screenwriting is More Fun Than Research for Philosophy

While researching training different sorts of animals I came across the following quote, commenting on why one normally trains hens instead of roosters to play tic-tac-toe:

"Roosters have only one thing on their mind," he explains, "and it's not playing tic-tac-toe." -- Bunky Boger

Mandatory Confessions

After the recent business with the British Sailors, it seemed to me that a good way to undercut this sort of strategy and help protect your troops in the field would be to simply have a standing, and very public, order that captured troops must agree to sign any confessions and make any statements that their captors require.

By making it official, it stops being about whether or not your soldiers are tough enough to resist, or even whether they were coerced into finally revealing the secret truth, and instead just about them following standard policy.

When a captured soldier is put on TV, the Prime Minister or President can come out and say that they're doing their job -- and that if they'd been ordered to admit to killing Kennedy and making blood sacrifices to Satan, they'd say that too -- because the purpose of the general directive is to get the valuable government property of these soldiers back home.

Niggers and Zionists

In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat.

-- from AntiWar.com via The Leiter Reports.

Given that the Leiter Reports have tried to (rightfully) support the idea that one can criticize Israel's policies without being anti-Semitic, posting an article that uses a quote like the above strikes me as seriously problematic.

While there are certainly some self-identified Zionist organizations, and I imagine a few of which are worthy of criticism, the use of Zionist as a pejorative must certainly be understood to evoke emotional responses above and beyond what would be associated with the more neutral use of the term.

For instance, the above quote relies on the rhetorical image of the militant Zionist lobbying America to support their program -- an image evocative of the Protocols of Zion (an "antisemitic literary forgery that purports to describe a Jewish plot to achieve world domination"). If the writers did not wish to subtly or not so subtly conjure up these images, why use the term "Zionist" instead of the more neutral and less historically-laden term, pro-Israel lobby?

How many millions of people in the world when they hear "Zionist" think of the various competing political and ideological movements compared to how many think of the secret Jew seeking dominion over the world?

When I was in the service, some otherwise progressive folks referred to one of the black guys in our unit as a nigger. They quickly explained that here they meant simply "nigger as generic term for asshole", and that white guys could be niggers too. Admittedly, the guy was kind of an asshole. But we already have a more neutral and less historically-laden term for asshole.

It's called "asshole".

So Much Truth in One Cartoon

--From the deliciously nerdy Piled Higher and Deeper.

The only bit that could use adjustment is that the adjunct faculty should look poorer, more harried, and lonely.

Zen Cat

We wrestled with it for a bit, but Jaru and I recently started letting our cat, Minou (that's her to the left), go out and meander the neighborhood. We were worried that she'd fight with other cats, run in traffic, smoke weed, and hang out with the wrong crowd.

I was also worried that she's an awfully pretty cat, and that somebody might go in for an impromptu adoption. To reduce the risk of this I made sure that we got Minou a collar with name and phone number etched onto it before we let her out. I figure that most people wouldn't adopt a cat that's clearly got an owner, whereas they might if the cat was pretty enough and the ownership was vague enough.

There's another cat in the neighborhood -- we call him Pinky. He's below. Pinky doesn't wear a collar. Maybe he's a stray, maybe not. Regardless, his owners, if they exist, have little to fear because he's one ugly cat. It's a bit disconcerting since his coloration is so close to Minou's -- but then you see that face (the pink nose is often scratched up from fights) and you just know the cat is safe from cat-nappers.

Chuang Tzu has a story where someone mentions a useless tree who's "trunk is so bent and knotty that nobody can get a good straight plank out of it. The branches are so crooked you can't cut them up in any way that makes sense."

Chuang Tzu points out:

So for your big tree. No use? Then plant it in the wasteland - in emptiness. Walk idly around it and rest under it's shadow. No axe or saw prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down. Useless? You should worry!

An Ugly Road to Mideast Peace?

It looks like Iran is going to end up with a nuclear arsenal. Certainly, if they wanted one, within the next three years is the time to do it. My guess is that, if this were likely to happen, Israel would start advertising its nuclear arsenal as a fait accompli as well--then proceed to build up the kind of ridiculously large stockpile of weapons that these things seem to accompany.

The odd side effect of this is that it might be the only thing that succeeds at stabilizing the area. We don't have much of a track record from which to collect evidence in this regard, but the emerging situation between India and Pakistan at least indicates that the Cold War wasn't an anomaly, and was instead a natural result of nuclear stand-offs.

These two texts, Fearful Symmetry and The Spread of Nuclear Weapons argue toward that, but, man, I wouldn't want to live downwind of these places.

Speaking of Utilitarianism...

Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. -- Patton.

Speaking of utilitarianism, I wonder who did the math that recommended the drone airstrike that took out 18 villagers in order to kill 4 al Qaeda members. Pakistan is playing up the fact that there was a key bomb expert in the group, given that al-Zawahri wasn't there after all and that maybe this thing might damage popular Pakistani support for the CIA.

I rather suspect the math doesn't favor this sort of thing even if you're 100% certain that al-Zawahri was there and I wonder how many fresh, new Pakistani key bomb experts were made of those 18 villagers' friends and relatives.

The ugly fact of this is that even the brutality calculus militates against this sort of decision--so it's just slop. Seems that after 1918 we might have figured out that wars of attrition are ugly and ineffectual, and that body counts are what you resort to when you've run out of ideas but want to look like you're doing something.

I included the Patton quote at the top because it's wrong. You win wars by destroying your opponent's ability to fight--in conventional wars by seizing strategic terrain and destroying industry. Killing angry people just creates more angry people.

The Brutality Calculus

Utilitarianism can be condensed into the statement:

The right action is the action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

As a credo, it works well in many situations, but famously runs up against other key principles in hypothetical situations, such as being forced to murder an innocent person in order to save many lives (perhaps by preventing a riot).

We also have what are sometimes called Kantian intuitions. These intuitions say that we should not use people as if they were mere tools in order achieve other goods, even if those goods are much greater in scope.

In real life (as opposed to philosophy classrooms and Star Trek episodes), these principles don’t come into conflict too often. However…

Chile appears likely to elect its first woman leader (make that, elected), Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist. The country has come a long way since Pinochet, and is now considered the region’s “most stable economy”, with “one of Latin America’s lowest poverty rates”.

While not as monstrous, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan also went through long periods of fascism, during which their economies developed, and have emerged as nations with free market economies (tempered by greater or lesser social programs) and strong democratic institutions.

It looks like both China and Russia are also making the transition from centrally planned economies run by authoritarian regimes to free market economies with democratic institutions (we hope at least):

Post Soviet Russia shifted quickly to democratic institutions, then followed with free market reforms. Since then, Russia’s economy has suffered from extensive volatility. It now appears that Putin is rolling back many of the democratic reforms, and his popularity is soaring.

China retains its non-democratic government, but now wedded to an expanding free market. I’m not sure, in fact, what differentiates China’s free market communism from the capitalist fascism of pre-1980s Taiwan. We’re also still waiting to see if democratic reforms are coming, though I believe the growth of an educated middle class that comes with free market capitalism brings about democracy, whether or not the people in charge want it.

From the above, it appears that the most efficient method of transition from an authoritarian government to a free market democracy involves going through an initial phase of capitalist fascism, then bringing in the political reforms later. And, for my liberal-minded friends, remember that not only are these countries transitioning to democracies, but they’re often more liberal-socialist than the United States.

Too bad for you if you happen to be radically minded and living during the transitional period. Of course, if Russia’s example holds for other nations, listening to our Kantian intuitions might result in this generation suffering under economic chaos, criminal rule, then having to go through a capitalist fascism phase anyway.

It does seem that there are some counter-examples:

• Czechoslovakia’s transition was smooth and fast without needing the fascism phase.
• Hungary seems to be doing well now.
• And Argentina doesn’t seem to have benefited much from its fascism.

If, however, the transition via fascism method is so much more efficient than the alternatives that it outweighs Kantian reasons to ensure liberty first, then we end up with some counter-intuitive, even scary results:

President Bush should trim back on the whole “freedom is on the march” thing. Freedom should sit on the bench, while the people get busy opening their own businesses, exporting and importing stuff, and sending their kids overseas to get engineering degrees then come back and open LCD manufacturing plants – all the while, unfortunately, making damn sure not to say anything that would irritate their leaders.

In fact, Saddam’s regime was just the kind of fascism we too often supported in the past, but which seemed to turn out well despite our blundering. Had the U.S. spent the 90s palling up to Saddam, while making clear the limits of his leash, then left him in charge and removed the sanctions, then Iraq might have developed significant free market institutions and eventually morphed into the kind of democracy we see in the Asian tigers.

That might be cold comfort, though, to Ms... President Bachelet and the others who were tortured on the road to freedom.

As The Crow Flies

In my high school physics class we had one day where we were to learn about reading maps (um, it was not AP physics...)

So the teacher -- a sharp guy -- gives us this map of Southern California and has us read off various things. I do some measuring and, behold, it's forty miles from Glendale, CA (where I went to high school) to San Luis Obispo (where my grandparents lived).

Now, my family drove that trip fairly often, about 4 hours each way -- road signs saying something like 220 miles or so. Thus, something felt fishy about the map... So I go up to the teacher and point all this out, mention my personal experience travelling up the gorgeous Pacific Coast for long hours.

And the teacher says something like:

No. That's it. Forty miles. As the crow flies.

And he makes a little crow-flying-in-a-straight-line hand motion to illustrate.

So I retire to my seat thinking that might be plausible -- then a bit later it starts to sink in that it's only plausible if the crow flies through hyperspace or has been toking serious quantities of Melange, or something.

Anyway, it was probably one of the most valuable lessons of that class: not only can textbooks and class handouts be demonstrably wrong; but also, otherwise smart people will believe things that actual, real experience (and common sense) proves false, so long as those things are written down.

And, to finally bring this around to my contemporary point: maybe it's not so bad if students get taught Intelligent Design in high school science classes. Start cultivating that suspicion of authority early and maybe sell a few more Pink Floyd albums.

Honk If You Oppose Genocide

Driving back from Santa Monica I passed the VA building in Westwood (I think that's what it's called). This place has a history of collecting all the protests and people with signs.

Anyway, there was a cluster of signs saying "Honk if you opppose genocide". Being generally down on genocide and having access to a convenient car horn I cheerfully honked.

A bit later though I started to wonder. Are there a bunch of people out there that we need to educate -- who mistakenly used to think that genocide was good but have now been enlightened?

Getting out and being active strikes me as a good thing -- even when it's about something as controversial as whether or not we should promote or criticize genocide.

However, the scene struck me as symptomatic of an endemic problem in society: wanting to take stands and talk about the incredibly simple issues and avoiding the complex, but real, problems -- then giving up when you can't find a simple solution to the complex problem.

For example -- something like "we should obey our Kantian obligations to save those in immediate threat of starvation, even though doing so may cause more harm in the long run by propping up corrupt regimes", or vice-versa, doesn't fit on a sign. Or at least doesn't fit on a sign that you can read while driving past on the road.

Reminds me that I'd like a pair of bumper stickers that say:

If you can fit your moral philosophy on a bumper sticker,

then you've got a bumper sticker's worth of moral philopsohy.

Vagueness

For those of you without a philosophy background, one of the puzzles some people pimp for tenure is vagueness -- for example, is a refrigerator with one bottle of mustard and some weeks-old green tea drink left there by your last girlfriend empty? Does it become unempty if you add a bottle of beer to it?

I put some clothes in the drying machine and had a choice between the timed-drying -- which never seems to be long enough to actually result in dry clothes -- and the by-dryness, drying.

The by-dryness part of the dial has little adjectives like "less dry", "dry", "more dry", and "most dry". It's true that I can get my head around the concept of more or less dry -- perhaps there's some way to measure water content left in the clothes.

But really, I just want my clothes to not feel wet. If they feel wet, they aren't dry. And if they don't feel wet (er, ceteris paribus...) they are dry. So dryness is a binary function but Maytag is trying to convince me it's a continuous function -- the philosophically rigorous, but practically useless, bastards! Personally I think the dial should have three settings:

• Not Dry
• Dry
• Dry and Extra Hot

Game Theory: Criminal Recidivism

When outlining I take long walks during which I occasionally even manage to think about what I'm outlining.

But mostly I think about random crap. For example, it occurred to me (and I imagine many other people before me) that once you got that being a criminal label, one of the big motivations not to commit a crime has been removed. After all, before you commit your first crime you're threatened with both prison time and going from a clean record to a criminal record. Afterwards it's just the prison time and a more extensive record (in addition to various other motivations such as gaining criminal training/networking in prison, and the criminal record making finding non-criminal jobs more difficult).

One resource says that about 50% of released prisoners end up back in jail within 3 years--which is pretty awful. Perhaps it's mostly the same 50% that keeps getting out and going back in, but the other 50% is a much larger population of one-time crooks--but that's sort of doubtful.

Anyway, I was curious if there had been any programs tried out where former prisoners could somehow work off, perhaps through community work, their criminal record and if having such a program helped reduce crime. Of course, some people would try to game the system, but I'd imagine there'd be little point in putting in a bunch of community work hours to reduce your record if you were planning on going back and commiting more crimes. Also, having the hope of getting a fully clean record might provide an additional incentive for former prisoners to do the community work and stay straight.

Game Theory: WGA Writing Credits

The previous post on game theory and football was actually a setup for today's post, where I talk about the Writer's Guild of America's guidelines for assigning writing credits, which are the screenwriting credits you'll see in movie credits, titles, and on websites like the Internet Movie Database. This will be a critical essay, but I'll try to follow up later with at least some ideas on how to improve the credit "game".


Section 3 of the WGA's guidelines for credit arbitration lay out the considerations that go into determining what the credits will look like for most movies you see. I've also copied part B.4, the guidelines for the "Screenplay by" credit, to a seperate blog post since I'm going to focus on that.

Other than some minor quibbles, it's a perfectly acceptable historical system of determining the writing credits. I have seen some comments that it's too subjective an account, which is definitely true. But certainly no-one was expecting to create some sort of algorithm into which you plug various drafts of screenplays and out of which comes a definitive answer. It's the sort of process that you really need a group of people to look at to evaluate correctly and the suggestions:

The percentage contribution made by writers to screenplay obviously cannot be determined by counting lines or even the number of pages to which a writer has contributed. Arbiters must take into consideration the following elements in determining whether a writer is entitled to screenplay credit:
* dramatic construction;
* original and different scenes;
* characterization or character relationships; and
* dialogue.

strike me as something reasonable people could use to come to some sort of decision in what is necessarily a messy process.

However --

Writing credits are not history; writing credits are a game, the goal of which is to gain as much credit as possible.

In a historical project, such as determining the causes of the Amercian Civil War, historians do research, write papers, and argue -- but none of what they do has any effect on the Civil War itself.

But the guidelines for determining writing credits have a huge impact on how people write and rewrite screenplays.

Given that financial rewards, such as residuals, are directly linked to the writing credits, and future work or feeling good about seeing your name in the titles is indirectly linked to the writing credits, there's a strong incentive to write so that one receives a "Screenplay by" credit.

This means that if I get a chance to do a rewrite of a script, I have a strong (self-interested) incentive to substantially change at least 33% or 50% of the material, even if the material doesn't need that much changing. In fact, it's an interesting little game by itself: I'm best off if I change enough to get as much credit as possible, while making the story something good, and retaining key elements from the earlier drafts that the producers, director, and actors aren't willing to sacrifice (otherwise I get removed from the project or the project dies).

This is markedly different from when I do a rewrite of my own script -- then I keep the good bits and eliminate the bad bits, and, hopefully, after a few iterations of this I have a screenplay composed mostly of good bits.

Interestingly, the 50% rule is intended to protect the first writer. Yet, like the "promote the passing game" rules the NFL pushed -- the effect on the writing credit game is just the opposite.

Of course, financial and self-interested reasons aren't the only motivating factors for writers (and rewriters). Writers are also motivated by aesthetic reasons -- write the best film, and by moral reasons -- show respect for the previous work done on the project. But the WGA is telling me when I'm rewriting that adhering to those sorts of scruples can prevent me from getting a writing credit. Also, as the original writer on a project, I have to be sympathetic when someone comes along later and makes drastic and unnecessary changes because the WGA has essentially ordered them to do so, if they want that vital "Screenplay by" credit.

And, a set of guidelines that punishes writers for doing the artisticly or morally right thing is a bad set of guidelines.