A few random notes while I get back to coping with sunset being at 9 not 5.
There’s a couple of pages I should have linked to a while ago. H. E. Baber has papers up on welfare, theology and several other issues, as well as very well-developed websites for her courses on Logic and The Economics and Ethics of Gender in the Developing World. Carsten Korfmacher has an extensive webpage, with a blog on the home page, and a papers page. Both of these papers pages have been added to the list of pages being tracked on the papers blog.
Peter Milne has a newer and more dramatic version of Lewis’s triviality proof up on the Analysis site.
Before I started this blog I wrote about Marc Lange‘s "Baseball, Pessimistic Inductions, and the Turnover Fallacy". (I can’t find either my comment or Lange’s paper online, which sort of spoils the story to follow.) Lange pointed out that the Pessimistic Induction – All science has been wrong in the past, so probably it is wrong in the present – fails to note that current science is not exactly a random sample. Bad theories have a tendency to be refuted, and hence cease to be current. By way of illustration, he noted that while most managers in major league history have sub-.500 records, at any one time most managers have career above -.500 records. The analogy, obviously enough, is that even if most scientific theories are losers, even very weak selective pressure suggests that current theories may well be winners. It’s a neat idea, and you’d expect to find it applied not just to managers, but to players. And it seems that it does, even with the very poor decision making by some baseball administrators. Nate Silver shows that over the period 1973-1992, the correlation between quality and playing time holds up quite well, and makes the right statistical/philosophical point.
As Bill James pointed out during his Abstract days, the talent distribution in baseball is asymmetrical; the vast majority of players who appear at some point on a major league roster turn in a below-average performance, but the above-average players receive so much more playing time that the equilibrium is maintained.
Of course, scepticism about current science might be justified for slightly less crude reasons than inductive scepticism. On StarStuff, ABC NewsRadio’s Science Show, Brian Boyle noted that the cosmological constant is (a) not known to be constant, and (b) larger than theoretical calculations say it should be by 120 orders of magnitude. It’s very hard to imagine what it is to be out by 120 orders of magnitude, even the Bush budget estimates are not normally that bad. The interview is here, and starts about 8 minutes in. Before that is a story even more designed to make one worry about science – the ongoing and so far unsuccessful searches for the Higgs Boson particle, which unlike dark energy is predicted to exist by best theories, and also unlike dark energy do not show up very clearly in experimental results. (If all my physics is off in this paragraph, I blame the ABC, not my reliance on pop science sources.)
Negative polarity (in the linguistic, not the physical) sense is one of my favourite topics, but sadly there are few lock-solid examples of negative polarity in English. In modern English ‘ever’ is about the best example we have, as illustrated by the difference between these two cases.
No one has ever defeated Kasparov in a tournament.
*Someone has ever defeated Kasparov in a tournament.
In older dialects of English, ‘ever’ could be used to mean ‘always’. I think it is used in Shakespeare this way sometimes, but I’m a bit too lazy to look that up. But I was a little shocked to see it used in a modern-day sports story.
David Beckham has revealed he had offers from four clubs when it became clear that he was set to leave Manchester United this summer, but insists he was ever interested in joining Real Madrid.
I think that’s an error, maybe missing ‘only’ before ‘ever’, but if not it’s a very bizarre usage.
On bizarre facts, I thought I had a copy of the Harry Potter book waiting for me when I got back to the States, but in fact there were two copies. I don’t remember ordering two copies, but I suppose there are several things I’ve done that I don’t remember doing. Or perhaps Amazon messed up. Perhaps.