Brad DeLong has been blogging about Newcomb’s
Problem and the Two-Envelope
Paradox. There really is philosophy in the blogworld 🙂

Sadly by the time I got there I didn’t have much to
add. There’s some pretty well-informed back and forth in the Newcomb thread,
but the Two-Envelope thread doesn’t really take off. That’s sort of because
Brad said that it isn’t a serious puzzle because we know that the person
putting the money in the envelopes has a finite amount of money, and that means
we should sometimes take the facts about what’s in our envelope to be evidence
that we got the smaller envelope. That’s all true (and it’s what Jackson, Oppy
and Smith kinda boringly say about the paradox in Analysis a
whiles back) but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the puzzle.

Anyway, go there now, read the threads and leave
more comments. The blogworld is too full of boring discussions about
unimportant things like whether we’re about to start a war for no apparent
reason, or whether KKK membership will soon become necessary and/or sufficient
for a federal judgeship to pass up the opportunity to talk about philosophy.

UPDATE: For those who don’t know what the
Two-Envelope Paradox is, or why it is paradoxical, or what I was talking about
in the middle paragraph above, you might try Dave Chalmers
paper on it. Not that that will help much with interpreting me…