Ah, I see that I misread. Somehow I had it in my head that you were talking about the question on the philpapers survey specifically about scientific realism. Probably because I've been teaching the realism debate in my philosophy of science course the last couple of weeks.
I am, however, going to disagree that I've given a too strong characterization of scientific realism. I did (stupidly and accidentally) drop the phrase "... is true or approximately true" from the end of the second commitment, but with that in place, the scientific realist real...
We do pretty well, actually (pdf). (Though I think this is a selection effect, not a positive effect of training.)
I'm guessing that you don't really know what anti-realism in philosophy of science looks like. I suspect that most of the non-specialist philosophers who responded also don't really know what the issues are, so this is hardly a knock against you. Scientific realism sounds like it should be right. But the issue is more complicated, I think.
Scientific realists commit to at least the following two theses:
(1) Semantic Realism. Read scientific theories literally. If one theory says that space-time is curved and there are no forces, while the other says that spa...
Ah, gotcha.
Are the meetings word of mouth at this point, then? When is the next meeting planned?
I have had some interest, but I never managed to attend any of the previous meetups. I don't know if I will find time for it in the future.
That question raises a bunch of interpretive difficulties. You will find the expression sine qua non, which literally means "without which not," in some medieval writings about causation. For example, Aquinas rejects mere sine qua non causality as an adequate account of how the sacraments effect grace. In legal contexts today, that same expression denotes a simple counterfactual test for causation -- the "but for" test. One might try to interpret the phrase as meaning "indispensable" when Aquinas and other medievals use it and...
I'll say it again: there is no point in criticising philosophy unless you have (1) a better way of (2) answering the same questions.
Criticism could come in the form of showing that the questions shouldn't be asked for one reason or another. Or criticism could come in the form of showing that the questions cannot be answered with the available tools. For example, if I ran into a bunch of people trying to trisect an arbitrary angle using compass and straight-edge, I might show them that their tools are inadequate for the task. In principle, I could do tha...
That is being generous to Hume, I think. The counterfactual account in Hume is an afterthought to the first of his two (incompatible) definitions of causation in the Enquiry:
Similar objects are always conjoined with similar. Of this we have experience. Suitably to this experience, therefore, we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.
As far as I know, this ...
Wow! Thanks for the Good Thinking link. Now I won't have to scan it myself.
Yes, that's the letter!
It might help if you told us which of the thousands of varieties of Bayesianism you have in mind with your question. (I would link to I.J. Good's letter on the 46656 Varieties of Bayesians, but the best I could come up with was the citation in Google Scholar, which does not make the actual text available.)
In terms of pure (or mostly pure) criticisms of frequentist interpretations of probability, you might look at two papers by Alan Hajek: fifteen arguments against finite frequentism and fifteen arguments against hypothetical frequentism.
In terms of Bayesia...
Oh, the under-specification! ;)
Seems to me that curing cancer swamps out everything else in the story. Supposing that World War 2 was entirely down to Hitler, the casualties came to about 60-80 million. By comparison, back of the envelope calculations suggest that around 1.7 million people die from cancer each year* in the U.S., E.U., and Japan taken together. See the CDC numbers and the Destatis numbers (via Google's public data explorer) for the numbers that I used to form a baseline for the 1.7 million figure.
That means that within a generation or two, the cancer guy would have saved...
Interesting piece. I was a bit bemused by this, though:
In fact Plato wrote to Archimedes, scolding him about messing around with real levers and ropes when any gentleman would have stayed in his study or possibly, in Archimedes’ case, his bath.
Problematically for the story, Plato died around 347 BCE, and Archimedes wasn't born until 287 BCE -- sixty years later.
I'm not sure what you count as violence, but if you look at the history of the suffrage movement in Britain, you will find that while the movement started out as non-violent, it escalated to include campaigns of window-breaking, arson, and other destruction of property. (Women were also involved in many violent confrontations with police, but it looks like the police always initiated the violence. To what degree women responded in kind and whether that would make their movement violent is unclear to me.) The historians usually describe the vandalism campai...
When a certain episode of Pokemon contained contained a pattern of red and blue flashes capable of inducing epilepsy, 685 children were taken to hospitals, most of whom had seen the pattern not on the original Pokemon episode but on news reports showing the episode which had induced epilepsy.
At the very least, this needs a citation or two, since the following sources cast doubt on the story as presented:
And CSI's account, which includes the following:
...At about 6:51, the flashing lights filled the screens. By 7
Do you have worked out numbers (in terms of community participation, support dollars, increased real-world violence, etc.) comparing the effect of having the censorship policy and the effect of allowing discussions that would be censored by the proposed policy? The request for "Consequences we haven't considered" is hard to meet until we know with sufficient detail what exactly you have considered.
My gut thinks it is unlikely that having a censorship policy has a smaller negative public relations effect than having occasional discussions that vio...
What is the evidence that 2 is out? Suppose there are five available effective means to some end. If I take away one of them, doesn't that reduce the availability of effective means to that end? Is the idea supposed to be that the various means are all so widely available that overall availability of means to the relevant end is not affected by eliminating (or greatly reducing) availability of one of them? Seems contentious to me. Moreover, what you say after the claim that 2 is out seems rather to support the claim that 2 is basically correct: poison, bom...
A more interesting number for the gun control debate is the percentage of households with guns. That number in the U.S. has been declining -- pdf, but it is still very high in comparison with other developed nations.
However, exact comparisons of gun ownership rates internationally are tricky. The data is often sparse or non-uniform in the way it is collected. The most consistent comparisons I could find -- and I'd love to see more recent data -- were from the 1989 and 1992 International Crime Surveys. The numbers are reported in this paper on gun ownership...
That's a good point. Looks like an oversight on my part. I was probably overly focused on the formal side that aims to describe normatively correct reasoning. (Even doing that, I missed some things, e.g. decision theory.) I hope to write up a more detailed, concrete, and positive proposal in the next couple of days. I will include at least one -- and probably two -- courses that look at failures of good reasoning in that recommendation.
I don't want to have a dispute about words. What I mean when I talk about the logic curriculum in my department, I have in mind the broader term. The entry-level course in logic does have some probability/statistics content, already. There isn't a sub-program in logic, like a minor or anything, that has a structural component for anyone to fight about. I would like to see more courses dedicated to probability and induction from a philosophical perspective. But if I get that, then I'm not going to fight about the word "logic." I'd be happy to take a more generic label, like CMU's logic, computation, and methodology.
Because I see those things as part of logic. As I see it, logic as typically taught in mathematics and philosophy departments from 1950 on dropped at least half of what logic is supposed to be about. People like Church taught philosophers to think that logic is about having a formal, deductive calculus, not about the norms of reasoning. I think that's a mistake. So, in reforming the logic curriculum, I think one goal should be to restore something that has been lost: interest in norms of reasoning across the board.
I definitely agree that evolutionary stories can become non-explanatory just-so stories. The point of my remark was not to give the mechanism in detail, though, but just to distinguish the following two ways of acquiring causal concepts:
(1) Blind luck plus selection based on fitness of some sort. (2) Reasoning from other concepts, goals, and experience.
I do not think that humans or proto-humans ever reasoned their way to causal cognition. Rather, we have causal concepts as part of our evolutionary heritage. Some reasons to think this is right include: the ...
That seems like a very different question than, say, how humans actually came by their tendency to attribute causation. For the question about human attributions, I would expect an evolutionary story: the world has causal structure, and organisms that correctly represent that structure are fitter than those that do not; we were lucky in that somewhere in our evolutionary history, we acquired capacities to observe and/or infer causal relations, just as we are lucky to be able to see colors, smell baking bread, and so on.
What you seem to be after is very dif...
When you ask (in your koan) how the process of attributing causation gets started, what exactly are you asking about? Are you asking how humans actually came by their tendency to attribute causation? Are you asking how an AI might do so? Are you asking about how causal attributions are ultimately justified? Or what?
What do you think about debates about which axioms or rules of inference to endorse? I'm thinking here about disputes between classical mathematicians and varieties of constructivist mathematicians), which sometime show themselves in which proofs are counted as legitimate.
I am tempted to back up a level and say that there is little or no dispute about conditional claims: if you give me these axioms and these rules of inference, then these are the provable claims. The constructivist might say, "Yes, that's a perfectly good non-constructive proof, but...
Though it doesn't yet exist, if such a course sounds as helpful to you as it does to me, then you could of course try to work with CFAR and other interested parties to try to develop such a course.
I am interested. Should I contact Julia directly or is there something else I should do in order to get involved?
Also, since you mention Alexander's book, let me make a shameless plug here: Justin Sytsma and I just finished a draft of our own introduction to experimental philosophy, which is under contract with Broadview and should be in print in the next year or so.
Good point.
I didn't realize the link I gave was not viewable: apologies for that. Also, wow. That PHYS 123 "page" is really embarrassingly bad.
I was going to say that the problem from the instructor's point of view is deciding whether the student really has the necessary background, but Desrtopa is probably right that some sort of testing system could be set up.
In one sense, I agree that there shouldn't be any gating. It is overly-paternalistic. Students should be allowed to risk taking advanced classes as long as they don't gripe about their failures later. But on the other hand, the actual result that I see in my classes is that many -- and here I mean maybe as many as half -- of the students i...
The content is informal logic: discourse analysis, informal fallacies (like ad hominem, ad populum, etc.). Depending on who teaches it, there might be some simple syllogistic logic or some translation problems.
I like the idea of requiring logic along with the intro course. I'll keep that one in mind.
I strongly agree with your comment. What concrete steps would you take to fix the problem? Are there specific classes you would add or things you would emphasize in existing classes? Are there specific classes that you would remove or things you would de-emphasize in existing classes?
You might be right that I'm reading too much into what you've written. However, I suspect (especially given the other comments in this thread and the comments on the reddit thread) that the reading "Philosophy is overwhelmingly bad and should be killed with fire," is the one that readers are most likely to actually give to what you've written. I don't know whether there is a good way to both (a) make the points you want to make about improving philosophy education and (b) make the stronger reading unlikely.
I'm curious: if you couldn't have your w...
The head of your dissertation committee was a co-author with Glymour on the work that Pearl built on with Causality.
I was, in fact, aware of that. ;)
In the grand scheme of things, I may have had an odd education. However, it's not like I'm the only student that Glymour, Spirtes, Machery, and many of my other teachers have had. Basically every student who went through Pitt HPS or CMU's Philosophy Department had the same or deeper exposure to psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, causal Bayes nets, confirmation theory, etc. Either that, or they got...
Provocative article. I agree that philosophers should be reading Pearl and Kahneman. I even agree that philosophers should spend more time with Pearl and Kahneman (and lots of other contemporary thinkers) than they do with Plato and Kant. But then, that pretty much describes my own graduate training in philosophy. And it describes the graduate training (at a very different school) received by many of the students in the department where I now teach. I recognize that my experience may be unusual, but I wonder if philosophy and philosophical training really ...
But then, that pretty much describes my own graduate training in philosophy.
You did indeed have an unusual philosophical training. In fact, the head of your dissertation committee was a co-author with Glymour on the work that Pearl built on with Causality.
You seem to think that philosophical training involves a lot of Aristotelian ideas
Not really. Term logic is my only mention of Aristotle, and I know that philosophy departments focus on first-order logic and not term logic these days. Your training was not unusual in this matter. First-order logic ...
Even that's not quite right. There is a tie for 5th place between Harvard and Pitt. The fact that Harvard is listed before Pitt appears to be due to lexicographical order.
That's an interesting point. How precise do you think we have to be with respect to feedbacks in the climate system if we are interested in an existential risk question? And do you have other uncertainties in mind or just uncertainties about feedbacks?
The first thing I thought on reading your reply was that insofar as the evidence supports positive feedbacks, the evidence also supports the claim that there is existential risk from climate change. But then I thought maybe we need to know more about how far away the next equilibrium is -- assuming there is o...
I really don't understand the row for climate change. What exactly is meant by "inference" in the data column? I don't know what you want to count as data, but it seems to me that the data with respect to climate change include increasingly good direct measurements of temperature and greenhouse gas concentrations over the last hundred years or so, whatever goes into the basis of relevant physical and chemical theories (like theories of heat transfer, cloud formation, solar dynamics, and so forth), and measurements of proxies for temperature and g...
Yeah, I still think you're talking past one another. Wasserman's point is that something being a 95% confidence interval deductively entails that it has the relevant kind of frequentist coverage. That can no more fail to be true than 2+2 can stop being 4. The null, then, ought to be simply that these are really 95% confidence intervals, and the data then tell against that null by undermining a logical consequence of the null. The data might be excellent evidence that these aren't 95% confidence intervals. Of course, figuring out exactly why they aren't is ...
I suspect you're talking past one another, but maybe I'm missing something. I skimmed the paper you linked and intend to come back to it in a few weeks, when I am less busy, but based on skimming, I would expect the frequentist to say something like, "You're showing me a finite collection of 95% confidence intervals for which it is not the case that 95% of them cover the truth, but the claim is that in the long run, 95% of them will cover the truth. And the claim about the long run is a mathematical fact."
I can see having worries that this doesn'...
The point depends on differences between confidence intervals and credible intervals.
Roughly, frequentist confidence intervals, but not Bayesian credible intervals, have the following coverage guarantee: if you repeat the sampling and analysis procedure over and over, in the long-run, the confidence intervals produced cover the truth some percentage of the time corresponding to the confidence level. If I set a 95% confidence level, then in the limit, 95% of the intervals I generate will cover the truth.
Bayesian credible intervals, on the other hand, tell u...
I don't see how this applies to ciphergoth's example. In the example under consideration, the person offering you the bet cannot make money, and the person offered the bet cannot lose money. The question is, "For which of two events would you like to be paid some set amount of money, say $5, in case it occurs?" One of the events is that a fair coin flip comes up heads. The other is an ordinary one-off occurrence, like the election of Obama in 2012 or the sun exploding tomorrow.
The goal is to elicit the degree of belief that the person has in the ...
The point applies well to evidentialists but not so well to personalists. If I am a personalist Bayesian -- the kind of Bayesian for which all of the nice coherence results apply -- then my priors just are my actual degrees of belief prior to conducting whatever experiment is at stake. If I do my elicitation correctly, then there is just no sense to saying that my prior is bullshit, regardless of whether it is calibrated well against whatever data someone else happens to think is relevant. Personalists simply don't accept any such calibration constraint...
I just want to know why he's only betting $50.
Because the stupider the prediction is that somebody is making, the harder it is to get them to put their money where their mouth is. The Bayesian is hoping that $50 is a price the other guy is willing to pay to signal his affiliation with the other non-Bayesians.
You could be right, but I am skeptical. I would like to see evidence -- preferably in the form of bibliometric analysis -- that practicing scientists who use frequentist statistical techniques (a) don't make use of background information, and (b) publish more successfully than comparable scientists who do make use of background information.
That depends heavily on what "the method" picks out. If you mean that the machinery of a null hypothesis significance test against a fixed-for-all-time significance level of 0.05, then I agree, the method doesn't promote good practice. But if we're talking about frequentism, then identifying the method with null hypothesis significance testing looks like attacking a straw man.
Fair? No. Funny? Yes!
The main thing that jumps out at me is that the strip plays on a caricature of frequentists as unable or unwilling to use background information. (Yes, the strip also caricatures Bayesians as ultimately concerned with betting, which isn't always true either, but the frequentist is clearly the butt of the joke.) Anyway, Deborah Mayo has been picking on the misconception about frequentists for a while now: see here and here, for examples. I read Mayo as saying, roughly, that of course frequentists make use of background information...
Rather than consulting Wikipedia, the SEP article on consequentialism is probably the best place to start for an overview.
I would love to have a conversation about this. Is the "tad" here hyperbole or do you actually have something mostly worked out that you just don't want to post? On a first reading (and admittedly without much serious thought -- it's been a long day), it seems to me that this... (read more)