So I was a little sick earlier this week, which for various reasons meant I didn’t get to the LSA. So you can imagine how happy it made me to be told how wonderful it was. As we say around these parts, there’s always next year.

There’s one point about Rosanne’s report that I’d like to expand upon, because it is becoming a pet peeve. She notes that it’s worth getting to papers early because that’s the only way to get handouts, and handouts are crucial to following most talks. But this should be unnecessary. Speakers should bring more than enough handouts. Unless you do the photocopying at the hotel, the marginal cost of an extra handout is virtually zero and the the marginal cost of having one too few is enormous. The trick is to make a reasonable guess about how many people will turn up (and don’t be modest – you will have a big crowd – you’re good enough, you’re smart enough and gosh darn it people like you) and then make many many more handouts than that. (Be sure to use recycled paper if you are really make millions of copies though.)

Brian Leiter has two interesting posts up (one two) on the question of whether academics should be able to claim scholarly credit for blogging. It is fairly clear that good blogging should count as service. Indeed in all my recent self-promoting activities I’ve been plugging my work on various blogs as a service both to the public and the profession. But whether this counts as scholarly work is a tougher question.

I’m mostly in agreement with Brian’s position that the standards in the blogosphere are too loose to justify calling our posts scholarship. One reason this is not likely to change anytime soon is that the posts reflect the lack of standards. Most of what I write for blogs barely deserves to be called a first draft. Others I know are more careful, but I suspect there are very few bloggers who take as much care over their blog posts as they would over passages in a journal article.

On the other hand, it’s certainly possible that scholarship is advanced by our efforts on blogs, especially when blogs are used to trial genuinely new ideas. And if anyone wants to give me a pay raise on the basis of blog work, I won’t let my principles get in the way! But it will be a long time before I start listing any especially good blogposts on my CV.

A 3-part post on the model of the 3-chapter dissertation.

1. When people post a co-written paper to their papers page, most people note up front the existence of co-authors. But I’ve noticed two occasions in recent days where the link to a co-written paper did not include any such notice, so it appeared the papers were the sole property of the owner of the website on which they were linked. In one case it wasn’t immediately clear from looking at the PDF that the paper was co-authored. I think this is a very bad practice. Co-authored papers should be labelled as such wherever they are referenced, and certainly in front of any link to them. The vast bulk of pages I look at follow this principle, so I was a little shocked to see it broken twice in a few days.

2. The comments thread on the decision theory post immediately below has been really interesting. If you haven’t read it, do so. And keep the good comments coming.

3. GO PATS! Or, as Boston Dirt Dog said, “Eskimo Up!”

This is a follow up to my pre-Christmas rant on the two-envelope paradox. A pretty large chunk of what I’ll say is basically transcribed from a conversation with Matt Weiner at the APA, but since Matt stubbornly refuses to start a blog I feel like someone may as well write up his ideas. And the rest of the good ideas are stolen from a conversation with Chris Meacham and Maya Eddon. (First disclaimer: Both of these conversations happened in the presence of impressively large amounts of alcohol, so it’s possible I’m radically mistranscribing ideas here. Second disclaimer: I’m writing this from a NyQuil-induced haze, so anything could happen. Third disclaimer: Because of the first two disclaimers, what was intended to be one big post will be serialised. Today’s installment is a pair of puzzles that motivates the problem I’m thinking about.)

God, being a generous sort, offers you the following sort of St Petersburg gift. He’ll toss a fair coin repeatedly until it lands heads. Letting n be the number of tosses it takes, he’ll then write you a check for 2ⁿ utils.

If you don’t believe in utils, as well you might not, all that matters here is that the gift structure God sets up is such that for any n, right now you’re indifferent between getting the gift he’ll give you if it takes n tosses, and a 1/2 chance of getting the gift he’ll give you if it takes n+1 tosses, and all of these gifts are worth more to you than nothing.

After God has done the coin tosses, but before he reveals the gift, God offers you the following deal. If you give him a dollar now, he’ll give you the gift he had planned plus two dollars. Two questions.

Should you make the deal?

If your answer is yes, can you give a coherent argument (or at least a valid argument using only plausible, consistent premises) for that conclusion?

I think those questions are quite hard. The second puzzle is just like the first, except that the coin is no longer perfectly fair – it has a 51% bias towards heads. Now ask the same two questions. Note that in the second case the expected utility of God’s gift is defined, and this might make a difference in how the two questions get answered.

Here’s my life right now. I have to convert my 14,500 word vagueness paper to a little-over-8000 word paper for the volume it’s intended for. I have to convert my 14,000 word fiction paper to a 1 hour talk to do at UC Davis next Friday. I have to convert my 8500 word (and in need of serious expansion) scepticism paper to a 5000 word paper for the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference. And I have to deal with some (very good) referee’s comments on my luminosity paper. And I have to do this all before I leave for Davis next Thursday. I enjoy making philosophy papers bigger much more than I enjoy making them smaller.

I’m shooting for most obnoxious blogpost ever here, so let’s switch from self-pity to self-congratulations. I had to write my annual self-evaluation yesterday. As noted yesterday, people tend to be rather excessive in their self-judgments. But I almost ended up erring the other side. I was trying to remember which things I’d done in the past year, and most everything on the CV looked like stuff I’d done in the distant past. It was only when I pulled out a CV from January 03 I realised how much had got done this past year. (7 papers, an encyclopedia entry, handful of book reviews, conference appearances, refereeing, etc.) I think running the blog has moved my time horizon for the distant past up to something much less than 12 months.

Once I had the facts, I rather enjoyed writing the report. It’s a good thing I didn’t go into marketing fulltime, because I’m not that good at it, but parttime marketing is kinda fun. So despite the rather evident fact that most of my papers fall stillborn from the presses, I spent half the afternoon conjuring up all sorts of images of what impact they could have on the profession. I think I described no more than 2 papers as potentially being launching pads for new fields of philosophical inquiry, but some others may also have been described as revolutionary. In the circumstances I’m pretty sure this report will play very little role in my overall evaluation, so swinging for the fences is just a bit of harmless fun.

I was rereading Adam Elga’s paper on On overrating oneself… and knowing it, and it gave me a thought about some possible challenge trades in the NFL.

I think there’s plenty of pairs of teams that, going into the start of the season, each think they are better than the other member of the pair. (Some of the things Adam says suggest that he thinks one or other of them must be irrational, but I think this could be perfectly rational.) So from each team’s perspective, they expect to be better off having the other team’s draft picks. Hence there’s a possible win-win trade with the teams simply swapping all their draft picks with each other.

I guess there’s some rules against this kind of trade, but I imagine they could be circumvented. E.g. during training camp next year the Redskins trade a couple of guys about to be cut and all their 2005 draft picks to the Giants in exchange for a couple of guys about to be cut and all their 2005 draft picks. This would undermine the purpose of the draft, but I think it would be great seeing which teams make the most ridiculous overestimations. (“Yes Mr Bidwell, I think there’s a great chance the Cardinals could finish with a better record than the Patriots next year.”)

Make sure to check out Geoff Pullum’s post on ordinary language philosophy.

I was thinking it was now the 50th anniversary of Russell’s The Cult of Common Usage, but it’s now 2004, not 2003, so I could say that the post is a suitable anniversary celebration post, but it doesn’t need to be to be worth reading.

From a purely selfish point of view, one of the exciting things about Sally Haslanger’s Persistence Through Time is that it gave me an opening to talk about one of my old pet theories. In current terminology, I claimed that there is no one theory of persistence, rather there are different theories of what it is to have a past and what it is to have a future. This could get long, so it’s going in the extended entry.

Continue reading →

Here’s Wolf Blitzer’s current poll question

Do you think any of the Democratic candidates for president can beat George W. Bush?

I honestly don’t know what this means, so I figure I’d throw it over to the LazyWeb. It seems to me that if I answer ‘Yes’, I’m implying that I believe that any of the Democratic candidates for president can beat George W. Bush. And that’s false since I know Sharpton and Kucinich can’t. (At least if we ignore distant possible worlds they can’t.) But if I answer ‘No’ I’m implying that I don’t believe that any of the Democratic candidates for president can beat George W. Bush. And that’s false since I know Dean, Clark, Kerry etc can all handily whip Bush.

The problem is that ‘any’ behaves differently in positive and negative environments. Maybe this is just a presupposition failure, as in “Have you stopped voting Republican?” but I don’t remember seeing it discussed before.

I found that Sally Haslanger’s excellent comments at the APA Eastern were largely (but not entirely) drawn from her forthcoming paper Persistence Through Time. There’s lots to talk about in this paper, so lets take it one step at a time.

Why is the problem of temporary intrinsics a problem? Here are three possible answers.

First, we might have a brute ‘metaphysical intuition’ (as Ted puts it) that shapes are intrinsic, not relational. But this looks like a hopeless line. Sure shapes simpliciter are intrinsic. What aren’t intrinsics are shapes-of-the-cross-section-determined-by-T, where T is some external object. (E.g. the hyper-plane of space-time points simultaneous with me according to my reference frame.) But the allegedly intrinsic properties that generate the problem of temporary intrinsics are not shapes simpliciter but shapes of cross-sections with the hyper-plane of simultaneous points etc. So this is no good. This is just obviously relational, and hence it is reasonable to assume it is extrinsic.

Second, we might worry that with no temporary intrinsics we’ll be left with bare particulars, and they’re bad. As Haslanger points out (on page 16), this won’t do either, because we’ll still have permanent intrinsics to clothe our particulars. That seems right to me.

Third, we might worry that no temporary intrinsics means no change. Haslanger seems prepared to temporarily concede this for the sake of the argument, but I don’t think she need even have done that. It’s pretty clear (as I’ve argued before) that we can have real change without change in intrinsic properties.

I’m tempted to conclude that there’s no metaphysical problem of temporary intrinsics. I still think that what Ted calls ‘semantic’ intuitions about intrinsicness could be important for settling semantic disputes between four-dimensionalists. But I don’t think we can use this club to bash three-dimensionalists with.