Missing links

I'm pretty excited by the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae skeletons, and not just because if the models are correct, this fish looked awesome. From the times article:

In the fishes' forward fins, the scientists found evidence of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods.

So the fossils appear to be one of the best examples of a transitional form discovered to date. This should be bad news for creationists, and to a lesser extent, proponents of intelligent design.

The bad news for us is that the discovery won't really do that much. For a long time, the missing link argument has been a bad argument bolstered by a lie. The obvious points are that we have no strong a priori reason to expect a complete fossil record, and much less of a reason to expect a discovery of the complete fossil record. But while the anti-evolution argument requires that we have a complete fossil record, with missing links, claims about common ancestry can be established in spite of huge gaps in the fossil record. Given some large number of species with gaps present, we may be unsure of certain details of descent, we can identify evolved traits and get a course-grained image of the phylogentic tree sufficient to confirm the hypothesis of common descent. There's more wiggle-room for intelligent design here, as they don't question common descent, but even they would lack any strong argument from missing links.

The lie concerns the status of the missing links. While it is true that we don't have many transitional fossils similar to Tiktaalik roseae, creationists are fond of asserting missing links that are not missing. To take an example, some estimates show as many as 20 early hominid species, not all of whom are our ancestors, and quite a number of species who are not obviously either hominids or other apes (this isn't to say we could use a few more fossils). And yet creationists are fond of asserting that there is a problem of missing links between early apes and man. The argumentative strategy goes something like this: if you say there's a missing link between A and C, once a scientist finds B, you just proclaim one missing link between A and B and another missing link between B and C. That this rhetorical strategy has some force relies on neatly forgetting all previous claims about unbridgable missing links and completely ignoring the issue of what a problematic missing link would be, as in the last paragraph.

So I think it's safe to say that while this discovery might help convince some people who are sitting on the fence in this whole discussion, it won't have a serious effect on creationists and even less of one on the ID folks.

It had to be done

As usual, pundits are being stupid about how the final four has never consisted of all #1 seeds, and therefore you're stupid if you have them all in your bracket. A wee bit of probability. Most of the calculation is suppressed to prevent massive boredom.

If each #1 seed has a 40% chance of making the final four. Then the chances of all four making it are about 2.5%. Given that the tournament has had 32 teams for only 27 years, that leaves it a coin flip whether we would have had all four there by now. These numbers are also (roughly) compatible with another actual result, which is that all four have made the elite eight exactly four times.
Is 40% a reasonable number? Look at the distribution of results: 41.6% of the top seeds have in fact made it over the years.
Three top seeds: 3
Two top seeds: 13
One top seed: 10
No top seeds: 1

So duh, right? Well, no. There appear to be a lot of people who don't think it's just a matter of probability.

(If it didn't happen in '93, one of the greatest years ever for college basketball, it might never happen. The only No. 1 to miss the party was Indiana, which might have had the best team in the country until Alan Henderson hurt his knee late in the year. The Hoosiers were beaten in the regional final in St. Louis by No. 2 seed Kansas.)

So the odds are stacked heavily against Duke, Connecticut, Villanova and Memphis advancing en masse to Indy. Don't count on seeing it. Pat Forde.

That's true. With the four teams in the sweet sixteen, the chances that they'll all make the final four are still pretty bad. But unless one of the teams is mis-seeded (sup, Memphis?) the chances they'll make are as good as, or better than the teams that end up there.

In conclusion, this has been massively boring, but to the extent that you trust me you can be confident that it all works out and the guy lecturing you about why you shouldn't pick all #1 seeds is a hack.

Professors Ftw

Some people somewhere are peeved about sabbaticals. "Paying Teachers Not to Teach" and such.

The short rhetorical answer: Professors are exploited. These people are so smart and so well educated and you're paying them a pittance to teach when they really should be running the world.

The longer answer takes into account the quality of life issues, peculiar features of the market incentives concerning Ph.Ds and the substantial benefits that sabbaticals confer on the academic world, and admits that on the whole professors get a fair deal that isn't in need of substantial alteration in either direction. For a portion of that long answer, check the left2right post up there including the comments, and this bit from Keith Burgess Jackson in the rare moment when I'd agree with him.

Terrorism is not a success term

If you're a student of philosophy, you will eventually get yourself in trouble by saying "Oh, I'm a philosopher." Not only will your parents immediately feel a great sense of shame, no matter how far away from you they are, but also the person you are speaking to will think that you consider yourself the equal of Plato, Hume and Nietzsche. In the ordinary way of speaking, 'philosopher' and 'good philosopher' are nearly synonymous terms, in the way that 'Olympic athlete' and 'talented Olympic athlete' are. But really, 'philosopher' is more like 'plumber'. Not everyone is a plumber, and it takes a certain sort of skill that most people lack. But there's still such a thing a bad plumber.

Well, Mohammed Taheri-azar is just as much a terrorist as he is a philosopher. I just wouldn't want to hire him in either capacity.

The zeroth course in statistics

Given that we know that students give higher evaluations when they receive less work and get better grades, we know we should be somehow correcting evaluations based on the average grade in the course. There are a lot of technical details concerning the proper corrective, and fully removing the impact of grades seems like a bad strategy (after all, bad professors sometimes cause bad grades by teaching poorly), but doing nothing is just wrong. Figure out some way to offset harsh grading and low workloads, and then tell professors about it so that they'll have less of an incentive to be slack.

Wanna tell me I missed something obvious?

Libertarians are weird

From a comment on a crooked timber post concerning inequality:

Do you disagree with Dave’s contention that society is not a race, a but a cooperative productive endeavor?

I'm unsure what he could be asserting. Descriptively, there's a problem with Darwin. As an ideal, it sounds weird coming from a libertarian (I don't find his post particularly bothersome though).

Cartoons

I'm just going to repost something I wrote elsewhere about the cartoons issue. It's a bit less careful than I'd like it to be, but I'll put it up anyway.

What's amazing to me about this is that a lot of people who are nominally capable of serious thought about the state of the world who have just uncritically jumped on the bandwagon of defending the Danish journalists. What I wrote comes from the perspective that there are a lot of people who just want war between Christendom and Islam, regardless of the specific circumstances. They will say to invade Iraq because of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, but this is only the closest justification at hand. On the other side, Bin Laden represents the same tendency-whatever initial proximal causes led him to declare enmity towards the West, he has now reached a point at which provoking war between the Muslim world and the West is his goal. These people, who are thankfully fewer in number than the group of people who will support any given war, are our real enemies. Here's what I wrote elsewhere:

It's almost impossible to overstate how bad the reaction in the Muslim world is. It is seriously scary that such a large number of people in these various countries are capable of reacting in this way, and certainly when it comes down to it, it is necessary to defend ourselves against people whose actions follow this pattern.

But characterizing this as a simple case of free speech vs. ignorant heathens is missing the point by a long-shot. Muslims in the EU are subject to pretty vicious racism. These cartoons are just another episode in a dominant group doing everything it can to remind others that they are seen as inferior. There's an analogy with spoiled children who provoke an animal until it lashes out (usually in a more violent fashion than what the children were doing) and then the parents respond by putting the animal down, because it's hurt their poor innocent child.

Put this in a context where thousands of muslims (many of whom we have found out were innocent) are being abused in detainment camps, with religious humiliation being one of the primary tools used. Then consider that the same paper refused to publish cartoons of christ a few years ago on the grounds that they would offend people, and this looks less like an issue of free speech, and more about people who are interested in furthering a war between Christianity and Islam. Note that Andrew Sullivan is using a commentator who advocates deporting Muslims from Europe as an encouraging sign about the hard thought that people on the left are engaging in. The people who wrote these cartoons are in the business of ensuring that we spend the next 50 years at War with the Muslim world. They're no better than any other political leader who uses war as a convenient tool. If they get that war, yes, we better hope that our nations win, but for those of us who are atheists, apatheists, or just uninterested in having our politics governed by religion, there's more than one reason to be scared of what's going on here.

The other thing to add is that taking the long view, the retribution which will be enacted against the Islamic world for this incident will dwarf the damage that the rioting has done.

Basketball

While watching the game, it occured to me that most everyone complains about overpaid juvenile athletes, whereas no one complains about the announcers except for the occasional intelligent fan. This is in spite of the fact that announcers obviously are much less skilled and do much less work than the athletes(*). Announcers do three things:

1. Recite statistics
2. Make inane non-mathematical statements about the players
(2a. Make homoerotic comments about Sean May's "big soft hands")
3. Reminisce about when they played basketball

They do a pretty good job of two(three) of those things. But would it really kill us to require our sportscasters to have some notion that the law of small numbers doesn't exist? I'm not asking that they be doing 2-way-anovas before every statement they make, and I'm fine if the vast majority of the things they say have little to no statistical significance, but can we please not try to make predictions based on the free throw percentage of a kid who has taken 12 free-throws during the entire season?

Absolute statistical genius: "Wes Miller is 10 for 15 from the line this year, so he's not very good, but that's probably because he's been to the line so rarely."

Within a single comment, the announcer asserts that these 15 shots are enough to verify a stable level of free throw shooting ability, which is also so ephemeral that another 20 trips to the line or so could've erased it. Rarely have "p" and "not-p" been so rapidly asserted by the same person.

(*) Yes, the athletes eventually become sportscasters, but they're good at their first job and horrible at the second.

Projects

It's everyone's favorite game wherein I talk about things I want to get done in the medium to long term instead of actually contributing to the academic work which I need to get done today or this week.

1. I need to get a general familiarity with the major issues in metaphysics. The things I'm familiar with, I tend to know quite well, but I have huge holes. I think I'll read

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction by Michael Loux. This should mostly provoke the response that I've seen this before, and I'm just jogging my memory.
Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings by Michael Loux. This should be a bit more novel.
The Bible by David Lewis.

After those, I'll probably hit up Jason for suggestions, and possibly look at the syllabus for his summer course.

2. Talking to one of the best prospective students this weekend in WashU, I realized that I'll probably have to shelve my thoughts about the Special Composition Question for a while (see Quotidiens). He didn't have any devastating objections, but spending a little bit of time fleshing the idea out with him led me to think that there are too many things I don't know to make a serious attempt at articulating my proposal at this point. Taking it as a conjecture that I'm aiming to prove might be a good way to focus my studies.

3. Study some logic. I realized on the plane ride home from St. Louis that I didn't remember the rules of passage (and correlatively the process of prenexing quantified statements). I also never really got anywhere in studying modal logic. If I don't want to take logic during my first semester in grad school, I might could need to do something about all this.

From Wikipedia:

Kripke delivered the John Locke Lectures in philosophy at Oxford in 1973. Titled Reference and Existence, they are in many respects a continuation of Naming and Necessity, and deal with the subjects of fictional names and perceptual error. They have never been published and the transcript is officially available only in a reading copy in the university library, which cannot be copied or cited without Kripke's permission. In fact many copies are informally circulated among philosophers. Its influence, though considerable, is thus difficult to trace.

I find it slightly odd that a philosopher can deliver a seven part series of public lectures and then control the transcript so that others are technically (if not actually) prohibited from even mentioning it in print. There's such a thing as speaking off the record, but surely this isn't it (for contrast, most of the John Locke lectures for the past decade and at least a large number of those before then have been published as books).

Fish in a barrel pt 4

I ran across some confirmation of the obvious fact that the media is paying much less attention to the NSA spying leak than it paid the Lewinski scandal. Not a surprise, but it's useful to see some quantitative measures, on which the difference is striking.

The charitable interpretation is that the Clinton administration had so many fewer scandals that the media was forced to spend time on unimportant or completely imaginary wrongdoing. (Media Matters)

Interesting tidbits

From Bill Lycan's preliminary description of his seminar on Dualism:

"First we shall examine the standard objections and consider some Dualist replies.
(I have come to think that the standard objections are actually pretty
feeble.)" Unless something has drastically changed, Bill is a staunch materialist in spite of this, so it's interesting that he'd trash the standard objections.

"April 4: Intentionality! (I think plain old intentionality is a much
worse problem for materialism than is anything in the area of subjectivity,
qualia, phenomenal character,....)"

I fairly well agree with that. In the fall of 2004, I wrote a paper for Bill on the Knowledge Argument. The argument runs as follows: you can know anything you want about the physical structure of the world, as well as neurology and psychology, the dynamics of color perception, etc, but if you have never seen red, then none of that information will tell you what it is like to see red. Therefore, there is some fact you do not know if you merely possess all the physical information. This is a problem for materialism (when you try to make this sentence precise, there be dragons in that forest...). The standard response is to say that you do gain information when you experience red which is not a consequence of physics, etc. This is just because you have a particular "introspective perspective" that is, your brain monitors the activities going on inside of your brain more or less directly, so that particular types of activity in your brain appear to you as seeing red.

My paper argued(*) that this response didn't get you squat, because the notion of a perspective was every bit as problematic for materialism as the explanatory gap between physics and color sensations. The problem is closely linked to how original intentionality arises: how is it that this particular lump of matter comes to have a viewpoint on the world, which is roughly similar to having any intentionality at all, since presumably any creature with intentionality has some sort of perspective.

(*) Actually, my paper did not argue anything. It flailed at various targets.

I am a ridiculous creature

One good way to improve your Go is to review games you've played, noticing what worked and what didn't, finding slack moves, whether or not the opponent noticed them, etc. It's best if you do it with someone substantially stronger than you, or at least your opponent, but it's still worthwhile if it's just you.

In that spirit, I present you with a commented game I played. No, really..I took a game which was on my computer, wrote down comments, showed some alternate sequences, etc. It's in a .sgf file.

There's something wrong with me.

Commented game

Fish in a barrel pt 3

Duke is really freakin good. They have played five ranked opponents and won by an average of 16.8 points. The fact that they are the obvious choice to win the national championship this year makes me very sad.

Go

I played the best game of Go today. Only made one obvious mistake at the beginning of the game when I thought I could push through a one point jump and cut when I couldn't. I ended up starting a decent sized fight which I was pretty sure I could win. Then I came up with a several move sequence which exploited a throw-in and shortage of liberties to catch six stones. That then led to a one sided ko which netted me ten points or so.

I was about to post a couple of mundane updates earlier this week, one of which would've included a complaint that my Go was stagnating and every game I played was bad. Good timing.

A minor quibble with Chomsky

From his newsweek interview:

Well, it's extremely difficult to talk about this because of a very rigid doctrine that prevails in the United States and Britain which prevents us from looking at the situation realistically. The doctrine, to oversimplify, is that we have to believe the United States would have so-called liberated Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and [the] main energy resource of the world were in central Africa. Anyone who doesn't accept that is dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or a lunatic or something. But anyone with a functioning brain knows that that's not true—as all Iraqis do, for example. The United States invaded Iraq because its major resource is oil. And it gives the United States, to quote [Zbigniew] Brzezinski, "critical leverage" over its competitors, Europe and Japan. That's a policy that goes way back to the second world war. That's the fundamental reason for invading Iraq, not anything else.

I think Chomsky is slightly off on his analysis of the 'rigid doctrine': I think you were perfectly able to admit in civilized discourse that part of the reason we invaded Iraq was its oil reserves, you just can't do that while maintaining that this fact has any moral relevance. This isn't really based on any detailed thought about the situation, I just feel like I heard a lot of people (even within the media) talk about how we were involved in part because of the oil, but I agree with Chomsky that you never heard anyone prominent act as if that made any difference to the justification of the invasion.

On the subject of bad excuses

It appears that the supreme court nominee was part of a Princeton organization which was opposed to large numbers of women and minorities attending the university (it's hard to determine exactly what the group's stance was, but it seems clearly reactionary). The best excuses that the various people were able to offer when interviewed by the Daily Princetonian were that he might not have been in the organization despite having listed it on a resume, or if he was in it, that was merely to get jobs and wouldn't have mentioned it on his resume unless he was exploiting a connection to someone in the organization. So either he's a liar or completely unprincipled. Good traits for a justice, I hear.

A tepid defense of conceptual analysis

Over break, I read Frank Jackson’s book “From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis, along with a review of it by Steve Stich and Jonathan Weinberg. S&W pose two questions to Jackson concerning the empirical assumptions that he makes: first, Jackson seems to rely on a dubious notion of concepts as embodying a folk theory, and second, he seems to assume interpersonal consistency of intuitions about hypothetical cases without any basis. What I have to say mostly bears on the first question.

S&W note that in the contemporary cognitive science literature most researchers have adopted theories upon which our concepts do not resemble any sort of “folk theory.” For reasons of space, they only examine one alternative, exemplar theories of concepts.

On such a theory, a given concept is constituted by a set of exemplars, which can be seen as detailed ‘descriptions’ of particular members of the category. When called upon to answer whether some new object is a member of the category, we determine how similar it is to several of the exemplars, and render a verdict on that basis (much of the processing will be unconscious). One important fact about the theory is that a person’s recent emotional and cognitive history “primes” or activates a subset of the exemplars, as well as altering the level of similarity which must be achieved for a positive judgment. So there is a substantial degree of intrapersonal variance in people’s intuitions, as well as interpersonal variance in the exemplars various people have.

Neither of the points which S&W make are very definitive attacks on Jackson’s account as they stand (in all fairness, S&W present them as questions). There is a doctrine, typical of the rationalists, but also present in Aristotle, that only a certain sort of person is capable of properly doing philosophy. For instance, Plato believed that you had to spend years studying a variety of subjects in order to develop your “rational intuition” (not the Platonic term) before you could properly do philosophy.

I don't know whether exemplars are supposed to be the sort of thing you can intentionally influence but it seems possible given that Stich points towards “the importance of myths and parables in moral pedagody, since these stories can serve as the basis for building stored up exemplars” (639). This fits with the fact that you can inculcate reluctant undergraduates with the traditional philosophical intuitions (Gettier and Twin Earth cases, for example). Since one’s recent cognitive and emotional history prime the exemplars that are used in a particular case, perhaps one of the abilities that characterizes a good philosopher is the ability to prime the proper exemplars in herself. If that was true, then there could be an account of how both interpersonal and intrapersonal variation in conceptual intuitions can be compatible with the possibility of conceptual analysis.

There are still problems for this sort of account. Jackson meant to defend an account of conceptual analysis on which the philosopher is elucidating folk concepts—if this is the case, that places a limit on the divergence between the exemplars used by the philosopher and those used by the folk. Still, even this account does not require perfect agreement in judgments-you possess the same concepts at different times in your life, even though you activate different exemplars and make different judgments at different times.

Pointing out that this account is available obviously falls quite short of defending it. In particular, what reason do we have to suppose that anything about the philosophical training we undergo in the Anglo-American tradition has any of the effects on our intuitions that are mentioned above? I think even if everything I've said so far is correc, that question might prove impossible to answer.

A steaming pile of shit

A little bit of philosophy of science can be a very bad thing. Albert Aschuler on the Dover court decision:

The court argues that ID does not follow the ground rules of science because it is not “testable” or “falsifiable.” Like most writers on the subject, the court invokes the image of science associated with Karl Popper – a view still endorsed by many scientists but rejected for good reason by most philosophers of science. W. V. Quine (and before him Pierre Duhem) showed that paradigm-preserving explanations are always available. New data never require the abandonment of a particular belief when we are willing to sacrifice other beliefs. In that sense, no scientific proposition is ever falsifiable.

This summary of 20th century philosophy of science would be poor by the standards of an undergraduate paper, while the apparent inference to rejecting any demand for falsifiability is simply appalling.

Resolutions

Eat, sleep, relax. Keep up the good work. Eat all of the candy and drink all the booze I received this christmas (I've failed at this one for some of the recent holidays).