Philosophy
purepedantry | May 12, 2008Recently, there were a set of posts arguing for different models of the effects of the minimum wage on employment. Megan McArdle argues that perfect competition models of the effects of minimum wage on the labor market implies that increases in the minimum wage will raise unemployment. Kathy G at Crooked Timber disagrees. She argues that a more accurate model of the minimum wage is a monopsony model. Monopsony is the opposite of monopoly meaning that there is one buyer -- in this case one employer. (Feel free to ignore the very bloggeresque sniping.)
Basically the core disagreement seems…
jstemwedel | April 27, 2008Via Crooked Timber, I see that philosopher Simon Blackburn would like to dispel some myths. (He does this in the inaugural article of a Times Higher Education series "in which academics range beyond their area of expertise".) Of the ten myths Blackburn identifies for busting, the one that caught my attention was "the myth of the scientist":
This claims that there is an expertise, science, and that people who are good at it deserve a lot of attention. This is almost wholly false. There is no such thing as a scientist, and it is a shame that William Whewell, a rather patchy philosopher (…
jstemwedel | April 20, 2008Neil Sinhababu (aka the Ethical Werewolf) lays out one approach to making an impression in a job interview teaching demo:
Before giving my job talk, N[ational] U[niversity of] S[ingapore] had me give an hour-long presentation to the graduate students and advanced undergraduates to prepare them for the talk and also evaluate my teaching abilities. Since my talk was on the Humean theory of motivation, I taught them about the puzzle involving cognitivism, internalism, and the Humean theory -- if you accept all three, you end up having to say that humans can't make moral judgments, so you'd…
mixingmemory | April 14, 2008Zombies have invaded the philosophy blogosphere, and Brandon of Siris, in providing links to all the other stuff, made some pretty strong claims that I was hoping he'd expand upon. And fortunately he has, in a follow up post that's a must-read for those who are interested in this sort of thing. The post is here. Here's an excerpt:
The zombie argument gets its plausibility not from anything about the argument itself but from a variety of positions pre-argument that give it an antecedent probability. The best thing to do is not to play the zombie game at all; where argument is needed, attack…
jstemwedel | April 8, 2008In case those readers trained in analytic philosophy managed to miss it, this comment at A Philosophy Job Market Blog gave me the giggles while striking me as an entirely appropriate response (given the audience) to a lazy reliance on speculative evolutionary psychology to justify the status quo (in this case, the lopsided gender split of folks pursuing philosophy in their studies and as a career). The italicized portion is quoted from the earlier (ev-psych-loving) commenter:
Maybe, just maybe, philosophy is something "inherently more valuable" to men qua hunters
Because chasing down those…
jstemwedel | April 7, 2008Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf has written a post on the relative merits of "correct" and "interesting", at least as far as science is concerned. Quoth PhysioProf:
It is essential that one's experiments be "correct" in the sense that performing the same experiment in the same way leads to the same result no matter when the experiment is performed or who performs it. In other words, the data need to be valid.
But it is not at all important that one's interpretation of the data--from the standpoint of posing a hypothesis that is consistent with the data--turns out to be correct or not. All…
jstemwedel | March 24, 2008Given that in my last post I identified myself as playing for Team Science, this seems to be as good a time as any to note that not everyone on the team agrees about every little thing. Indeed, there are some big disagreements -- but I don't think these undermine our shared commitment to scientific methodology as a really good way of understanding our world.
I'm jumping into the fray of one of the big disagreements with this repost of an essay I wrote for the dear departed WAAGNFNP blog.
There's a rumor afoot that serious scientists must abandon what, in the common parlance, is referred to…
clock | March 16, 2008John Wilkins is in Arizona attending a Philosophy of Biology conference (another one of those "I wish I could be there" things) and liveblogging the whole thing:
When philosophers really embarrass themselves
Liveblogging the conference: Mishler
Liveblogging the conference: Piotrowski
Liveblogging the conference: Jim Griesemer
Liveblogging the conference: Bill Wimsatt
Liveblogging the conference: Stephen Peck
Liveblogging the conference: Jay Odenbaugh
Liveblogging the conference: Julia Clarke and Todd Grantham
Liveblogging the conference: Jon Seger
Liveblogging the conference: Roberta…
jstemwedel | February 22, 2008Seen in a comment on A Philosophy Job Market Blog:
... instead of writing "QED" at the end of proofs, I think we should all start writing "pwned." I want this change to be my legacy to philosophy.
jstemwedel | February 12, 2008
"What is a disease?"
It would be nice to think that this is the kind of question where there are clear-cut, fact-based answers to be had. "Disease" is a term that seems to pick out a category of biological conditions, and biologists are pretty good with categorization.
A disease might be a particular physiological state that is incompatible with the proper functioning of an organism (say, because that state interferes with extracting nutrients from food, or expelling waste products, or oxygenating blood and moving it around the body). Or, from the geneticist's point of view, a disease…
razib | January 29, 2008...Das Kapital! So says Bora:
Forget Dennett's strawmen destruction - read Gould carefully for what GOULD is trying to say. The Big Book is 'Das Kapitaal' of the 21st century biology - someone now needs to write a shorter, simpler Manifesto for the masses to read and understand....and we can go from there.
Go from there? Jerry Coyne better watch out! Genetic roaders are going to be swept away by the vanguard of the scientific revolution!1 Now, in all seriousness Das Kapital is an important book, a significant book. And there is truth in it as well; my understanding is that Karl Marx was…
clock | January 26, 2008Olivia Judson wrote a blog post on her NYTimes blog that has many people rattled. Why? Because she used the term "Hopeful Monster" and this term makes many biologists go berserk, foaming at the mouth. And they will not, with their eye-sight fogged by rage, notice her disclaimer:
Note, however, that few modern biologists use the term. Instead, most people speak of large morphological changes due to mutations acting on single genes that influence embryonic development.
So, was Olivia Judson right or wrong in her article? Both. Essentially she is correct, but she picked some bad examples,…
clock | January 22, 2008From Sage Ross, via John Lynch come exciting news about a new Open Access Journal - Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science
Spontaneous Generations is a new online academic journal published by graduate students at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. The journal aims to establish a platform for interdisciplinary discussion and debate about issues that concern the community of scholars in HPS and related fields.
Apart from selecting peer reviewed articles, the journal encourages a direct dialogue…
clock | January 8, 2008Thanks to John Wilkins, I want to point you to an excellent review on the current state of research (both scientific and philosophical) in Animal Cognition.
jstemwedel | December 31, 2007Over at Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott has an essay questioning the wisdom of the "convention interview" in the academic hiring process. As he notes, it is a fairly standard practice for philosophy departments to schedule a round of preliminary interviews for job candidates -- those who make the "long list" of applicants still in the running for the position -- at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting. Among other things, scheduling interviews at the APA means that the job candidates are getting themselves to the conference on their own dime, and that there's some…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2007If I say that X has probability p, what does that mean? What sort of thing is X, and what does the number p represent?
Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink on this question, with no clear answer emerging. Instead there are a handful of major schools of thought on the issue. Each school captures an important aspect of what we mean when we talk about probability, but none seems to provide a comprehensive account.
One possibility is the so-called classical interpretation. It is classical because it shows up in the earliest formal treatments of probability, for example in the work of…
clock | December 22, 2007First: the difference between theory and practice.
Second: the theory.
Third: still to come, I hope, a YouTube video of Steinn demonstrating the practice of parallel parking.
purepedantry | December 11, 2007This Kant attack ad is awesome:
1) I love the "I'll make his picture get all blurry to make you think that his ideas are blurry" theme. It taps into the visually blurry = morally relative circuit that appears to be innate to the human species.
2) It is secondarily awesome because I get to go on a little Kant-related rant.
Why does everybody have to hate on Kant? (Yes, I realize that there is a certain element of hypocrisy in this because I rather like Ayn Rand, and she absolutely loathed Kant.)
But here is my deal: Kant's recognition that human beings have sensory apparatus -- and that…
razib | December 9, 2007A few months ago I saw a paper which showed that small average differences across societies on a microeconomc parameter can result in massive variance in macroeconomic trends. Small differences in average trustworthiness or patience across societies (or, more precisely, small differences in the distribution of the psychological trait) can map onto to enormous between society variation in macroeconomic indices which one might adduce derive from the minor individual differences. I was struck by this because it formally and clearly elucidated a major issue I've noted across many domains of the…
jstemwedel | December 3, 2007A friend of mine in a philosophy department at an Ivy League school asked for my advice in helping students on the market for academic jobs prepare for their interviews:
One of the things our students asked us about was preparing for interviews at schools quite different than this one (e.g., state schools, liberal arts schools, satellite campus, etc.). In particular, they want to know what kinds of questions to be prepared for. The first question one student was asked last year, for example, was "Can you tell us what you think about the ideal teacher/student relationship?" This is not what…