Monthly Archives: March 2003

If you’re going to San Francisco…

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I wonder if it’s socially acceptable to use a blog as a form of mass mailing. I hope so.

To anyone who is (a) reading this, (b) going to the APA Pacific and (c) would like to go to a baseball game while there.

I got some tickets to the Friday night exhibition game b/w the Giants and the Texas Rangers at PacBell park. They’re fairly cheap centrefield seats, but the outfield bleachers are probably the best feature of PacBell, so I don’t regret sitting out there. The only reason I’m telling you all this is because I bought some extra tickets on the assumption that there would be other philosophers interested in coming along to the game. If you’re one of them, email me.

Exhibition games featuring the Giants are fun because there is so little motivation for the opposing side to intentionally walk Barry Bonds. The only Giants game I’ve seen live, he ended up 0-for-1 with 4 walks. Hopefully we can get to see him swing the bat this time. The seats I got are very close to where one of the fights broke out over a home run ball, so we know he can hit them there. But I doubt there will be fights over home run balls in the exhibition season.

One of the nice side-effects

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One of the nice side-effects of being on the road is that one has an excuse to read the print version of the New York Times. This is an especially nice luxury when travelling on Sunday, even if it means paying $4.75 for a newspaper. But it’s nice from time to time to see and feel articles in print, rather than always just on screen. And it’s nice to browse through articles, in a way that I never seem able to do with online papers. That could be a shortcoming of mine, rather than the medium’s, but until it’s fixed one way or t’other, I’ll have to occasionally pay for the print version.

This is all a rather roundabout way to note that one of the Times’s frequent contributors, one of the contributors I was reading yesterday between gumbo in Baton Rouge and simultaneous equations in coach class, Stanford prof Geoffrey Nunberg, has added this humble blog to his links list. So I cannot but return the favour. His site contains a mix of research papers and popular pieces, all of which are rewarding reading. There are few academic sites I could more strongly recommend.

And Painpill, formerly ‘counterfactual’ has added me to his blogroll. He says that he is not by nature an argumentative type, so maybe this isn’t the right place to be linking to, but linking it seems he is.

The philosophy papers blog has also been updated. I haven’t settled on a normal schedule since the Mardi Gras festivities, but maybe by tomorrow we will be back to normal.

UPDATE: If the links to these pages are not in the sidebar, it is Blogger’s fault, not mine – for some reason the template does not seem to be updating.

One of the nice side-effects

Posted on by

One of the nice side-effects of being on the road is that one has an excuse to read the print version of the New York Times. This is an especially nice luxury when travelling on Sunday, even if it means paying $4.75 for a newspaper. But it’s nice from time to time to see and feel articles in print, rather than always just on screen. And it’s nice to browse through articles, in a way that I never seem able to do with online papers. That could be a shortcoming of mine, rather than the medium’s, but until it’s fixed one way or t’other, I’ll have to occasionally pay for the print version.

This is all a rather roundabout way to note that one of the Times’s frequent contributors, one of the contributors I was reading yesterday between gumbo in Baton Rouge and simultaneous equations in coach class, Stanford prof Geoffrey Nunberg, has added this humble blog to his links list. So I cannot but return the favour. His site contains a mix of research papers and popular pieces, all of which are rewarding reading. There are few academic sites I could more strongly recommend.

And Painpill, formerly ‘counterfactual’ has added me to his blogroll. He says that he is not by nature an argumentative type, so maybe this isn’t the right place to be linking to, but linking it seems he is.

The philosophy papers blog has also been updated. I haven’t settled on a normal schedule since the Mardi Gras festivities, but maybe by tomorrow we will be back to normal.

UPDATE: If the links to these pages are not in the sidebar, it is Blogger’s fault, not mine – for some reason the template does not seem to be updating.

The comments seemed to again

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The comments seemed to again stop working, so I’m not using them any longer. Sooner or later this will switch to Movable Type I guess, at which stage I can use some slightly more sophisticated commenting system. Feel free to email me with questions/comments, and note if you want something posted to the site.

From Dave Chalmers, here is a list of many variants on Sleeping Beauty.

I have another, which has some slightly odd characteristics. There is an atom in an opaque box. It has a half-life of one hour. If it decays within the next hour, an epistemic duplicate of you shall be created at that moment, and kept in a state of being an epistemic duplicate of you until the hour is up. You shall not know of the duplicate’s existence, nor, naturally, it of yours.

Let p be the proposition that the atom decays within this hour (where that last phrase is a demonstrative, not a description, so p is a de dicto, not a de se, proposition).

According to the ‘thirder’ solution to Sleeping Beauty, you should (a) now have credence 1/3 in p, (b) have credence 2/3 in p at the end of the hour, and (c) have a constantly increasing credence in p as the hour progresses. This does seem odd.

I spent the flight from Atlanta to Boston working out what happens when there are two atoms in the box, with a duplicate to be created whenever a decay occurs. During the hour, there are 10 de se propositions that you need to keep track of in order to work out the credences in propositions like p, and to figure them out you have to solve 10 simultaneous equations. That is the kind of thing that I imagine is much easier to do in business class than coach.