Reapparation

Did I say I'd write about Pittsburgh? That was silly of me—I have nothing to say. Nevertheless, a promise is a thing which you halfheartedly fulfill the day after you said that you would. If you're smart, you realize that your promise lead to an unutterably

Since arriving, I have lived a hermit-like life, in hopes that the absence of human company would motivate me to seek friendship among the various cleaning supplies and use them to clean things just as God intended it to be. You all know just how much that happened.

Apartment roundup. The bad:

• Most electrical outlets are controlled by the light switches, which makes it an unsafe environment for computers and alarm clocks.


• Limited kitchen counter-space, poor outlet placement.


• I can't get the handle of the gas stove, even though I know gas is preferred by like, anyone who knows how to cook. That doesn't help me if I can't get the temperature anywhere in between off and inferno.


• The shower has the same deal. Tiny tiny range in between cold and scalding.

The ambiguous:

• Things aren't dilapidated, but they do have interesting geometrical properties. (If you're wondering, that was taken with the built in camera on my MacBook, which gives things a slight sepia-tinge even with three lights and three open windows, unless they are less than three inches from the screen. Also I suck with taking pictures.)

The good:

• I guess I like it here. It's relaxed, and spacious, and the roommate seems cool.

Disapparation

I move saturday, and this will completely destroy my ability to concentrate or exercise my willpower for the time being. So don't come here looking for posts. If I catch you checking for new posts, I will give you a stern talking-to. Sometime between saturday the 19th and monday the 21st, I will post something about Pittsburgh. Then and only then can you look at this blog. Got it?

Modern man defined

Guy on cell: I'm only calling because I have to walk ten blocks, and I can't stand to be alone with my own thoughts. overheardinnewyork

Japan and Kitsch meet, Kitsch “overwhelmed”

It sounds a bit like Busch Gardens.

Note: I am not that guy. I do not have a retarded fascination with Japan which centers around anime and guffawing over inventions such as shoes with umbrellas on them. These recent posts are just coincidences based on cute overload and gmail presenting me with links.

I endorse metaphysical realism about stupidity!

The Washington State Supreme Court case concerning gay marriage is not an unmitigated disaster if this bit from the Times is accurate:

The decision seemed to invite targeted constitutional challenges to the denial of equal treatment to homosexual couples.

Also intriguing is the Times's choice of quotations

“Limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples,” Justice Barbara A. Madsen wrote in that opinion, “furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents.”

While it's true that reading that probably won't embarass the people that it should, it's pretty embarassing, and all that really needs to be said is “do you really believe that?” I was couldn't decide whether the writer included that quote partially in order to make Madsen look stupid, but the article also relays that the dissenting judges described the majority opinion as relying “on speculation and circular reasoning to endorse discrimination.” No defense is given. Though that could be an accidental feature of the article, I'm inclined to read it as reflecting the opinion of the author that no credible defense to the charge has been offered.

If that's so, it's an interesting demonstration of what can be done within the limitations of journalistic objectivity—it doesn't even break the “he said, she said” mold that everyone sensible complains about. The difficulty is that I really don't know how to find out whether it's accidental or not. I suspect that my own opinions render me an unreliable reader when it comes to questions about intent such as this one.

Enlighten me?

Ultimate Cats: Fish-Carrying Contest

I'm not really exploiting the new media opportunities for instantaneous commentary about the breaking news that are afforded by blogging, as this story is already old. I might as well publish a newspaper as have a blog!

Anyway, watch the video. Toribia-no-Izumi, the Japanese trivia show (as if I can distinguish one Japanese trivia show from another), subjects a group of cats to ever more grueling tasks of fish-carrying in order to determine the maximum weight of fish that a cat can carry.

The excitable commentary by the judges and dramatic music is the best part. Also, I swear I heard one judge say 'sensei.' Since I don't speak Japanese, I can continue to hope that he was referring to the cat.

I'm sure you've all seen this

..but you really ought to visit the CSS Zen Garden. Despite my glee, I'm compelled to point out that the Mozart design is downright ugly.

Vernon Robinson

For people who know more than I do: does Vernon Robinson have a snowball's chance in hell of beating Brad Miller? I can't find any polls on the subject, and it would pretty much be an unmitigated disaster if Robinson was elected. So please, tell me what I need to hear in order to sleep at night.

Update: My parents, who I think are in the 13th district, have the attitude that Miller is safe, but while they're generally well-informed, they didn't hear about polls or anything similar.

It helps if you imagine this being said in Ros's voice

You're such a cute widdle Mac, oh yes you are oh yesh yesh you ARE! You're so pretty and new and I'm gonna hug you and squeeze you forever, oh yesh I AM! ...I love you, widdle Mac.

Actually, I'm really disoriented, as I've spent almost no time on a Mac since OS 7 or 8—long enough that I can't even remember the precise time frame. So I'm still doing ridiculous windows stuff like ejecting a disk while trying to hit page up, or forgetting that programs have to be quitted.

But any new Mac owner has to gush, and I shall not violate this rule.

Pangloss

I'm less sour on evolutionary psychology than I used to be, largely because of mild increases in my familiarity with it, but I still often run into something where it simply hurts me to read it. The latest is a model which purports to explain suicide (look for “Evolutionary Explanations” and apply all necessary disclaimers since Wikipedia is my source). Is there any more obvious time to stand up and yell “pleiotropism” or “spandrel?” Seriously, suicide is very heavily linked to severe mood disorders. Is there an explanation of them in terms of evolutionary psychology which doesn't treat them as spandrels?

Oh dear. They've done it. (No idea how reputable those folks are.)

Reflectiquivocation!

While in California, I represented the younger, newer, more hip generation to Jason and Jeanine, who quizzed me about my use of blogs. In particular, I had cause to reflect on the status of blogs run by graduate students and their probable effects on the reputation of those kids. If I were better at finding old things, I'd like to a post where many people who interact with job search committees concluded that it would probably hurt these kids. Instead, I'll just assure you that they said this.

I'm happy with most of what I write about non-philosophical topics on here. It's usually not too stupid, even though my writing style still fails to exist. But if this is to be my public face as a philosopher, I need to write better philosophy or less of it. So I think I'm taking the easy option. I'll try to take up the slack with personal posts, but unincriminating ones. So here's what you can expect from me in the future:

“Moved to Pittsburgh three months ago. It is very cold. I am eating Ramen.”

The summer is not going so well. I haven't even started studying logic in preparation for the exam I'll be taking at the beginning of next semester, nor have I done any work on the Brutal Composition paper, or my stab at Simples. I try to reason that it's the summer before I enter grad school, and that I can afford to postpone serious work until I arrive there, but it still makes me hate summer.

The Cost of Higher Education

A federal education committee has released a report of rather mixed content. To its credit, it notices that the public universities are not being given sufficient support by the state—a fact obvious to everyone paying attention as well as a minority of any given legislative body. It also makes the criticism that increases in financial aid have been tilted towards merit aid, so that unmet demonstrated financial need has grown rapidly.

Now for the bad news—the report claims that the increase in the cost of higher education is a result of inefficiencies within the university. This seems largely incorrect. First, the substantial decrease in state funding is accountable for a portion of the increase in tuition costs, rather than an underlying change in the cost of educating a student. If you take money away from one source, the university has to get more from the source it has control of. Second, what real changes in the cost of educating a student have happened (and there have been substantial ones) can largely be attributed to a simple economic reality. Two of the sectors of the economy which have seen prices increases which substantially outpace inflation are health care and education. The reason is simple: both are labor-intensive fields which have limited room for increases in productivity. The general formula for increasing productivity is to have each person spend less time on any given task—dealing with a patient or teaching one class to one student. But in education and healthcare, this formula is rightly perceived not as an increase in productivity, but a tradeoff between increased quantity at some loss of quality. Just like not seeing the doctor for any length of time, teaching classes of 200 students is seen as a bad thing.

As overall productivity increases, the amount of compensation it takes to get skilled labor increases. Most industries can easily compensate for that by creating more of the product in the same amount of time. That's not possible in healthcare and education, so prices increase. Salaries also decrease to some extent, as attested to by the decline in salaries for educators relative to other professions. Blaming inefficiency is really missing the point: there's an important and largely unavoidable economic process involved which leads to rising prices for higher education.

There's also a lot of objectionable things in there about accountability standards similar to those that have been implemented in K–12. Did I mention that one of the leaders of the report came from the accountability movement in Texas? But that bit of the report is just a bad idea, and one I have nothing new to say about.

Open Office

A quick look at my webcounter tells me you're all gone, but I think enough people read this to get an answer to the following question:

I am buying a laptop soon, and when the computer doesn't automatically include it, MSOffice is bloody expensive. What reason if any do I have to not just use OpenOffice?

A curious argument

Over at crookedtimber, Kieran Healy notes that the NSA's program of monitoring every phone call is actually quite familiar to a sociologist. That is, what the NSA is doing is very similar to the sociologists pipe-dream of having an infinte dataset, unconstrained by any practical considerations. The sociologists just lack the freedom from ethical prerogatives and monetary constraints that the NSA enjoys.

To me, this suggests an interesting argument: we don't let scientists collect ideal datasets in the way the NSA has done out of ethical considerations-we're happy to set up Institutional Review Boards which constrain the ways in which you can treat people you're researching. So why should the NSA be any different? There's a certain tug once you think about the topic. A little voice says "it's for national security*, we can do more to protect ourselves from attack than we can for the sake of science." Upon reflection, that's just wrong, though. National security is a fleeting and ephemeral thing which only benefits one nation, often at the expense of another. Science, on the other hand, is a progressive body of knowledge which is the shared property of humanity. Whatever case you can make for a measure being justified in terms of national security, you can make for it being justified for the sake of science.

I admit that I have some trouble seeing this in the case of sociology, probably because I don't know the field. But when I think about epidemiology, for instance, it just feels obvious that invading people's privacy to get good data would be far more useful than it would be for the NSA. Yet we still gladly live with these restrictions on epidemiological research. I think it's clear that in this case, it's the calmer reasoning employed in the normal case of scientific research that is worth heeding. Given the status quo, any inclination that people have to turn tail and accept the NSAs actions, or amend the law to make it legal in the future, is hysteria speaking.

Dolphins

In case you missed it, Dolphin communication incorporates names. Awesome!

Fish in a barrel pt 5

Someone insults Atlas Shrugged over at the Volokh conspiracy, and we get the following defense from a Randian:

Somebody thinks it's the worst, most pretentious, etc., but in polls it ranks second to the Bible as one of the most inspiring books ever written. Don't take a leftist's word for it. Read it and see what you think.

Oh my.

The bad news is that the thread started because there may be a movie in the works.

Prima-facie incompatibilities

In class last Tuesday, Bill Lycan was discussing the free will debate and the common thought that there is a prima facie incompatibility between free will and determinism. Bill made the following methodological point: prima facie, anything is compatible with anything. For two propositions to be incompatible, there has to be some deductive argument, with one as a premise and the negation of the other as a conclusion. So there should be no such thing as a prima facie incompatibility. Moreover, it's the proponent of the incompatibility who has to establish a necessary truth. So above and beyond the absence of any prima facie incompatibility, the burden of proof is always to prove the incompatibility.

Ignoring the burden of proof argument, I think that prima facie incompatibilities are much better off than Bill gives them credit for being. There's two ways to see this. First, as a psychological fact, you can often guess that you could formulate an argument for a given proposition, and these guesses are better than chance. But if the proposition in question is "the existence of free will entails the falsity of determinism" this guess just is a prima facie incompatibility. This isn't something deviant and isolated either. Much of philosophy (science, math, etc) works like this: you hear a statement and immediately think it's true or false. Then you search for an argument. We do revise our opinions--overturn our prima facie judgments--when the arguments fail to pan out, but that's why it's a prima facie judgment.

Second, most epistemologies compatible with our knowledge of necessary truths would license judgments of prima facie incompatibility. Both Bealer and Sosa's defenses of philosophical intuition hold that a necessary proposition can just seem true to you, and thereby confer justification on that proposition. So the proposition "necessarily not both p&q" can have a prima facie justification. This sort of seeming is prima facie because intuitions are fallible, the canonical example being that the naive comprehension axion of set theory seems true. Lycan's own epistemology endorses of a principle of credulity: at the outset, believe each thing which seems plausible to you. So if you find that you are inclined to think that free will and determinism are incompatible, you have a prima facie justification for believing that they're incompatible.

Patriotic Awesomeness

I read a recent NYTimes article concerning Bush's diplomatic meetings with China. Apparently, one of the major issues was China's growing demand for oil and American concerns that (1) China might enter into partnership with unsavory regimes in order to secure future supplies of oil and (2) If China would like to maintain its present rate of growth, it would have to rein in its consumption of oil.

Obviously one has to read between the lines and consult external sources to discover that China's ratio of GDP to petroleum consumption is half that of the United States'. China's GDP is ~8 trillion, the USA's is ~12 trillion, while the USA uses 3 times as much oil as China. This is another problem with the notion of objectivity in American journalism--neither one of the political parties has a genuine wish to be fair or truthful about the States' consumption of oil, so the mainstream press is even more free than usual to shrug off the truth.

Dennett as public intellectual

Over at leiter reports, they're debating the merits of philosophical specialization. There have been a flurry of posts on related subjects in the past few weeks, actually, so one might have a good time perusing the archives. One thing that caught my eye was the requisite mention of contemporary philosophers who have had roles as public intellectuals (the good guys that is, no evil ones like Derrida and only half credit for Habermas as a chaotic neutral). One fellow mentions Dennett and Nussbaum. I think Dennett is interesting, because his work bifurcates. The work of Dennett's that I find most interesting is exactly the stuff that hasn't become popular-The Intentional Stance and Consciousness Explained (I take the bestseller status of Consciousness Explained to be a weird anomaly--this is not a public intellectual's work). What has given him a place in the public culture are his books on Free Will and Evolution/Memes/Religion. I wish I'd paid more attention to these so that I could comment, but I'm sceptical whether this represents an important part of his philosophical thought. One claim that I've heard is that Dennett has given up philosophy for the limelight, and I think this might be the commonplace attitude.

This is all so much hand-waving. It's also not meant to be mean to Dennett-he's one of my philosophical heros. But I'd be less than shocked if it turned out that his serious work and the rest of it just split right down the middle.

What to say to a soldier?

Even saying "thank you" to a soldier carries a political message, since you wouldn't say: "thank you for the fact that our nation has abused you by sending you to fight a worthless and unjust war."

It's not as overt a political message as many of our other national fetishes, but it is an interesting conversational implicature.

Unfortunately, it's not clear what else one could say, and in the absence of an easy alternative, I see no reason why one couldn't just say "thank you." There is definitely a sense in which the troops deserve respect, even if you consider the majority of them to be victims, as I do. Sadly, our nation has again produced honest to god war criminals, but these are a minority, and though many of the rest support the war, that makes them no more culpable than our many friends and relatives who support it.

(This is prompted by a carolina support the troops organization which bills itself as non-partisan. My initial thought was "I have a bridge to sell these people," but their web presence and the articles about them really do make it appear that they are as non-partisan as a support the troops organization can be. Pointing out the presuppositions of saying "thank you" to the troops is the most loaded thing they do as far as I can tell).