The following puzzle is a cross between the Newcomb puzzle and the centipede game. You have to pick a number between 1 and 50, call that number u. A demon, who is exceptionally good at predictions, will try to predict what you pick and will pick a number d, between 1 and 50, that is …
One advantage of going to parties with mathematicians and physicists is that you can describe a problem to them, and sometimes they’ll get stuck thinking about it and come up with an interesting new approach to it, different from most of the standard ones. This happened to me over the past few months with Josh …
Because of Andy’s examples a lot of people have been thinking again about the Death in Damascus case in Gibbard and Harper’s causal decision theory paper. The story is famously an old story, but there has been some uncertainty about how old. Now Jordan Howard Sobel has written up notes on its origin. (Warning – …
In a nice paper in a recent Philosophical Review Alan Hajek argued that Pascal’s argument in the Wager fails because he doesn’t take account of mixed strategies. I’ve been spending too much of today wondering whether the same thing is true in other fields. (Not that I’m entirely convinced by Hajek’s argument, but the response …
There was a fair bit of back and forth in the previous thread on just what us stakes-sensitive folks were claiming to be stakes-sensitive. So I thought I’d list what I thought was stakes-sensitive, and perhaps others who thought there is stakes-sensitivity somewhere can chime in either in comments or on their blogs/sites.
There is a small symposium in the New York Times today about the recent trend in analytic philosophy towards experimental philosophy. As some of the contributors note, it’s easy to overstate the trend that’s going on here. It’s not that for the 20th Century, philosophers used only armchair methods, and with the dawning of the …
In The Logic of Decision, second edition, Richard Jeffrey endorsed a version of evidential decision theory supplemented with a principle of ratification. A decision is ratifiable iff, conditional on making that decision, the expected utility of carrying out the decision is at least as high as than the expected utility of doing something else. In …
Fourth Annual Formal Epistemology Workshops, FEW 2007 We are in the process of organizing the fourth annual formal epistemology workshop. The purpose of these workshops will be to bring together individuals, both faculty and graduate students, using mathematical methods in epistemology in small focused meetings. Topics treated will include but are not limited to: Ampliative …
The other night at dinner, Tim Schroeder asked me what exciting new philosophical ideas I’d heard recently. This was at the end of a long (and really very good) dinner with a few glasses of wine, so naturally I couldn’t think of anything. But it seems we should be able to answer a question like …
In lieu of my actually having something to say, here are a few announcements about things happening hereabouts. If you’re not interested in philosophical and/or musical events around Boston and Providence, skip over this post.