Allan Hazlett recommends replacing the current search procedures with an NFL style draft. He says one of the big advantages of this procedure is that we could replace all the costs of interviews etc with one big draft day extravaganza. But surely this is a mistake – the NFL draft has just as many expenses pre draft day as we have. The ‘exhibition’ games like the Senior Bowl, the combines, private workouts and so on are just as expensive as campus interviews etc.

That got me thinking, why don’t we have combines in philosophy? That is, why don’t we have somewhere where every student on the market can turn up and present a paper and field questions and generally show what they’re made of? Well, you might say, how could we arrange such a thing, and wouldn’t it be expensive and so on? Maybe, but I have an idea.

Why not replace all the papers, or at least all the colloquium papers, at the APA Eastern with papers by new candidates? One problem is that this would require making the conference a little bigger – or at least require more papers being on simultaneously. This year there were a little under 100 colloquium papers, but there are more than 100 new PhD students going on the market. Still, with only a small expansion of the colloquium program (and perhaps cutting back on the symposiums) we could give every new candidate a chance to present a paper. Ideally these would be commentator-free. Even more ideally the candidate would present a short summary of a pre-posted paper and the bulk of the hour could be spent responding to questions as at BSPC. This would mean hiring departments would have to send scouts as well as interviewers (if they are interviewing) but I think it could be really useful. For one thing, departments could have different scouts go to different papers and so get a chance to have a look in person at many more candidates than they do now.

Note this is not like my wild suggestion that the APA Central go unrefereed. That’s a good idea that I don’t think will ever happen. I think going the whole way and making the APA Eastern entirely a hiring conference, with the papers being hiring related just like everything else, really could happen. And I think it could be a good change.

This isn’t mean to be an endorsement of the draft idea. Allan’s 5th point, that drafts stop dynasties forming, strikes me as a really bad feature of the draft. I like dynasties. When I think about just how nasty good [insert name of department I’ll be in next year here] could be over the next few years, I start to …

Sorry. Got carried away there. It’s Superbowl week, it’s too easy to get excited. Too much time reading Bill Simmons’s Superbowl blog gives me too many big ideas. Back to normal now.

Allan Hazlett recommends replacing the current search procedures with an NFL style draft. He says one of the big advantages of this procedure is that we could replace all the costs of interviews etc with one big draft day extravaganza. But surely this is a mistake – the NFL draft has just as many expenses pre draft day as we have. The ‘exhibition’ games like the Senior Bowl, the combines, private workouts and so on are just as expensive as campus interviews etc.

That got me thinking, why don’t we have combines in philosophy? That is, why don’t we have somewhere where every student on the market can turn up and present a paper and field questions and generally show what they’re made of? Well, you might say, how could we arrange such a thing, and wouldn’t it be expensive and so on? Maybe, but I have an idea.

Why not replace all the papers, or at least all the colloquium papers, at the APA Eastern with papers by new candidates? One problem is that this would require making the conference a little bigger – or at least require more papers being on simultaneously. This year there were a little under 100 colloquium papers, but there are more than 100 new PhD students going on the market. Still, with only a small expansion of the colloquium program (and perhaps cutting back on the symposiums) we could give every new candidate a chance to present a paper. Ideally these would be commentator-free. Even more ideally the candidate would present a short summary of a pre-posted paper and the bulk of the hour could be spent responding to questions as at BSPC. This would mean hiring departments would have to send scouts as well as interviewers (if they are interviewing) but I think it could be really useful. For one thing, departments could have different scouts go to different papers and so get a chance to have a look in person at many more candidates than they do now.

Note this is not like my wild suggestion that the APA Central go unrefereed. That’s a good idea that I don’t think will ever happen. I think going the whole way and making the APA Eastern entirely a hiring conference, with the papers being hiring related just like everything else, really could happen. And I think it could be a good change.

This isn’t mean to be an endorsement of the draft idea. Allan’s 5th point, that drafts stop dynasties forming, strikes me as a really bad feature of the draft. I like dynasties. When I think about just how nasty good [insert name of department I’ll be in next year here] could be over the next few years, I start to …

Sorry. Got carried away there. It’s Superbowl week, it’s too easy to get excited. Too much time reading Bill Simmons’s Superbowl blog gives me too many big ideas. Back to normal now.

Will blogging help you finish your thesis? Watch Supacrush to find out. (Well, watch Supacrush to find out one data point that may or may not be anomolous.) In the meantime, will blogging help me read a pile of grad school applications, or prepare classes, or write papers, or decide where I’m going to live next year? Stay tuned…

UPDATE: Some of Kaye Trammell’s advice about secret blogging may (have been) relevant here. I have toyed with setting up a secret blog at various times, in recent times largely because I felt like writing down my job-choice-related deliberations. If I do I’ll have to keep various of these tips in mind.

Via CNN.

The state’s school superintendent has proposed striking the word evolution from Georgia’s science curriculum and replacing it with the phrase “biological changes over time.”

From the details it looks like this is repeating the Kansan tragedy as farce, and since the proposal has bipartisan opposition this farce probably won’t go far. But don’t you just love a country where scientific theories that are accepted universally within the relevant scientific community are the subject of partisan disagreements? If this were happening in a tiny unimportant country it would be the stuff of late-night comedy. Instead, well it probably is a little tragic.

Frank Arntzenius, Adam Elga and John Hawthorne have a paper up with that title on the PhilSci Archive. (I had not noticed this previously because my browser was still checking the 2003 PhilSci Archive. Must remember the new year changes things!) It’s well worth reading, though I still prefer my solution to the Banker’s Paradox.

By the way, for a pleasant little morning brain challenge, find a non-recursive definition of the payouts in their Bill Gates in St Petersburg game. It took me a little while to figure it out, but I think I know at least one simple answer now.

I’ve really got no idea how this happened, but Nedstat assures me that someone made it to TAR from this search. It doesn’t say how long that searcher stayed. I also got pinged via this search, which I guess is a little more relevant to TAR’s content.

That last post made me think about wanna, and now I’m a little confused. How grammatical do each of the following seem to you?

(3) a. I want to be adored
      b. I wanna be adored
(4) a. You want to be adored
      b. You wanna be adored
(5) a. He wants to be adored
      b. He wanna be adored
(6) a. She wants to be adored
      b. She wanna be adored
(7) a. They want to be adored
      b. They wanna be adored

My intuitive judgments are that all the a sentences are OK, while 5b and 6b are very bad, and 7b is pretty bad. It turns out Google agrees that 5b and 6b are much worse than 3b and 4b, but it also thinks 7b is bad. But all the forms are used widely enough that they seem kinda acceptable at least to some. Here are the counts for searching for pronoun followed by “want to” or “wanna”.

	want to	wanna	Ratio
I	10,600,000	2,390,000	4.4
You	16,400,000	1,510,000	10.9
He	1,760,000	11,800	149.2
She	816,000	16,500	49.5
They	4,030,000	79,400	50.8

79,400 is many more hits than I expected for a phrasing I regard as marginal, an 28,300 between ‘he’ and ‘she’ is way more than I expected for a phrasing I regard as clearly bad. At least the ratios were way down than from ‘I’ and ‘You’.

Europa Malynicz sent me the following case, which it turns out we have different intuitions about.

Brian is running for election on the Monster Raving Loony Party ticket. He did not want to win when he entered, because he’s just smart enough to know that Monster Raving Loonies are bad for government. But, being a bit of a Monster Raving Loony himself, he’s now forgotten that he’s in the contest. While watching nightly news he sees himself dressed up as a Teletubby disguised as a teacup campaigning for votes. Not recognising who he is, but being very impressed with the hat he’s wearing, he forms the desire that that guy wins the election. In this context, which of (1) and (2) are true?

(1) Brian wants Brian to win the election.
(2) Brian wants to win the election.

I think that (1) is probably true, although it might be misleading. But I think (2) is false. (Europa thinks it is also true but misleading, which is where the difference arises.) So the first reason I’m posting this is to check what your intuitions are. Could (2) really be true in this context? Could (1)?

The second reason I’m posting this is because I like drawing wild hypotheses on the basis of remarkably little data. Here’s two that look promising.

De Se Hypothesis
(2) is only true if Brian has a de se desire, a desire that is essentially self-directed. It’s false in the case described because he has a de re desire that that guy wins, a desire that is directed at the guy on TV, which just happens to be him.

PRO Hypothesis
It’s really hard to explain the difference between (1) and (2), i.e. that one of them is true and the other false, if there is a hidden pronoun PRO between ‘wants’ and ‘to’ in (2). So here’s some evidence that there isn’t one. (I make no claims to originality here – debates about hidden pronouns are very well worked over so I suspect someone has made this point before.)

A quick illustration of the fixity of clichéd expressions. H. R. Block (a tax return company) currently is running a promotion that if you don’t get the maximum possible tax return using them, the tax return is free. Here’s the slogan they use (at least on bus shelters in downtown Providence.)

Get every penny you deserve, or don’t pay a dime

I was sort of stunned to notice how much more natural that sounds, even to my foreign ears, than

Get every nickel you deserve, or don’t pay a quarter

While on this theme, a couple of Google spellchecks that don’t really help.

judgment: 8,190,000
judgement: 2,760,000

busses: 417,000
buses: 3,660,000

The last one of these amuses me every time I walk past the corner in downtown Providence where there are two signs opposite each other with a word for more than one bus, and no other word containing ‘s’, and five ‘s’s between them. (Disclaimer: At least there were such signs last I looked – they might have been replaced/repaired by now.)