I hadn’t actually thought about this question before, until “Nate Charlow”:http://crapulae.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/double-spacing/ raised it

bq. Would someone do me the favor of explaining why, e.g., writing samples for job applications are generally expected to be double-spaced with one-inch margins? Is the implication that single-spaced documents with wide margins are difficult to read? Do these same people find articles in competently type-set journals difficult to read?

I didn’t even realise that was the expectation. I guess a lot of the samples I’ve read have been like this.

Here’s the thing though. We’re going to be getting writing samples on 8.5*11 paper. (Or, if we’re lucky, A4.) A full page of single spaced text on a page like that is actually difficult to read.

Now that isn’t Nate’s suggestion. His suggestion is that we have basically a journal type page in the middle of a sea of white. (If I’m reading it right, he’s suggesting the default LaTeX look.) But I’m not sure that’s much easier to read. I think I find double spaced easier to read than a journal, though of course it’s much less efficient paper-wise. (I think I personally prefer 1.5ish space to double space, but your mileage may vary.) So if people are sending in writing samples that are double spaced, I think that makes my (sometime) job as a writing sample reader somewhat easier. If everyone feels the same way as me, then double spacing is good for candidates to do.

So what does everyone think? If you’re reading writing samples, does it make a difference to you if they look like, say, journal submissions (double spaced, normal margins) rather than page proofs (single spaced, massive margins)?

I’m basically bedridden with some kind of seasonal, or at least mid-semester, illness. Hopefully it’s just a 24 hour bug. In the meantime, apologies to all those whose emails I’m not responding to, and here are a few interesting links.

* Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman are running a “Moral Sense Test”:http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/eric1/test/testP.html to, among other things, compare philosophers’ and non-philosohers’ responses to various moral questions, and they’d like as many people to take the test as possible.
* I think it’s a very bad idea to have “public safety announcements that look like parking tickets”:http://curbed.com/archives/2008/10/13/funny_tickets_in_the_burg.php.
* Oliver Sacks is doing the 2008 “Mason Welch Gross Memorial Lecture”:http://english.rutgers.edu/news_events/war/calendar/0809/sacks.html at Rutgers. It is scheduled for October 29. I assume coincidentally, he is also speaking at the “Autonomy Creativity Singularity”:http://asc.nhc.rtp.nc.us/ conference at UNC next month, along with such philosophical luminaries as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Jesse Prinz.
* If anyone wants to chip in more money, even just $10, to the Obama fundraiser here (and in the sidebar) it would be greatly appreciated!

I’ve occasionally read people complaining that it is too hard to get their universities to use more open-source software. I think any such people should be careful what they wish for. At Rutgers-New Brunswick, the course management software we’re forced to use is a terrible program called Sakai. The upside of Sakai, I guess, is that it is open-source and free.

The downsides are basically all of the downsides you’d expect with open-source software. If you use the software the way the makers intended, it works tolerably well. But it’s completely user-unfriendly, and has no error correction. One effect of this is that it is incredibly hard to navigate around, and find the various features that you might want to use. The interfaces have pretty clearly been designed by someone who knows just where to find all the features, so doesn’t have to worry about looking for them. One reason it is so unfriendly is that although it is web-based, it basically disables the use of the “Go Back” command. And it is really hard on screen to tell where to get back to where you came from. (Often there will be no single click that does so, or at least no apparent click, and “Back” doesn’t work.) So errant clicks can lead you down long dead ends.

And when you make a mistake, the program makes it impossible to make up easily. I just finished composing a long email to a group, but accidentally clicked the wrong group of users to send it to. The effect of this was that I was trying to send an email to an empty group. So rather than checking whether that’s what I really wanted, the program simply threw up an error screen. And of course from the error screen it’s impossible to get back to the email.

Happily at other Rutgers campuses they still use professional-quality course-management software, rather than the amateur hour product we have to use at New Brunswick. Hopefully New Brunswick can follow suit.

UPDATE: Oh, and Sakai thinks that various PDF files are really HTML files, so when you go to download uploaded PDFs, you get the raw source code of the PDF. Worst. Software. Ever.

I’m teaching an upper level decision theory course at Rutgers this semester, and I thought I’d try and write detailed notes for each of the classes I’m teaching. I’m not sure it’s been a great success so far – largely because I haven’t really had time to carefully edit the notes. But still I thought there might be some interest in these beyond just my class, so I’ll post them here.

These notes take us through the first 14 of 28 planned classes.

bq. Decision Theory Notes, Classes 1-14.

My university (Rutgers) is fairly actively encouraging students to register to vote. And I’ve occasionally done a bit to help, hosting students who do a spiel on voter registration and personally encouraging students to vote.

Now I think this is all a good thing. Voting is a good thing, and a healthy democracy requires a decent turnout of voters, so doing our little bit to help democracy is being on the side of the good. It’s not exactly related to the courses we’re teaching, but spending 45 seconds before class is officially scheduled to start encouraging voter registration, or putting voter registration ads on course management software as Rutgers has done, seems far from an abuse of official positions.

Still, voting isn’t the only good thing in the world. It seems to me that voting in the upcoming election for Obama/Biden over McCain/Palin is pretty close to a moral requirement. (For those who are eligible to so vote. I of course won’t be voting for Obama, because that would be illegal, and undemocratic.) But it seems it would be seriously wrong for either Rutgers, or for me, to use our positions of authority to promote voting for Obama. And I think this isn’t a particularly controversial position.

But it’s a little hard to say just exactly why it’s OK for Rutgers (and me) to do what we’re doing, and not do what we’re not doing. (Mike and Ross in the comments to the previous post were pushing just this question, which led to me trying to think about it a little.) Below the fold I have a few thoughts on this question.
Continue reading →

As you may be aware, there is an election coming up in the U.S. shortly. And I’ve tinkered with the blog a little bit.

On the non-partisan side, I’ve posted a link above to a U.S. vote registration site. I imagine most readers of this site who are eligible to vote in the U.S. are registered. But many of you probably teach students who are eligible and are not registered. And voter registration closes in a couple of weeks in most states. At Rutgers there is a large push on by the university to register as many students as possible. And I think it would be very good to encourage students to register to vote. While I think it would be irresponsible to use one’s position in a class to promote one particular candidate, I think promoting vote registration is a perfectly good thing to do, even in an official capacity.

But this blog isn’t a classroom, so I don’t have to be non-partisan. And I think that it’s pretty overdetermined who the better candidate is this election.

The last 8 years in America have been considerably worse than the previous 8. The country has been involved in unnecessary wars, wages have stagnated, the markets have been in a mess, and the legal foundations of the country, from the separation of powers to the prohibition on torture, have been undermined. There’s no reason to think that things will get better under McCain, and some reasons (his cavalier attitude towards getting involved in wars in Iran and Georgia, his Hooveresque insistence that the economy is fundamentally sound) that things will get worse.

Barack Obama’s plans, on the other hand, are, in my opinion, the most promising set of policies and priorities we’ve ever seen from a major American Presidential candidate. On “the environment”:http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy, on “healthcare”:http://www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/ and (dear to my heart) on “immigration”:http://www.barackobama.com/issues/immigration/, he’s pushed for sensible positions that, until recently, most Democrats would have been too scared to touch. So there’s a pretty stark difference between the candidates.

In any election campaign there’s a lot you can do. Due to the odd nature of the American electoral system, for many people there is no close campaign within 100, or even 500, miles. So it’s often hard to work on the ground. But you can donate money! There’s an interesting collective action problem here of course. But I think if everyone who wants Obama to win, especially everyone who has a decent income and can spare a few dollars, donates what they can spare, there’s a much better chance we’ll have a much better America in the next few years.

Note that while only citizens can vote in U.S. elections, permanent residents are allowed to donate money to the campaign. Indeed it’s one of the few ways that (non-naturalised) immigrants can be involved in the politics of the country they live in. So I’d certainly encourage all green card holders out there to help out.

I’ve posted a small donation link on the sidebar, and donations through TAR will be counted up there. Happy donating everyone, and even if you don’t want to donate, encouraging as many students as possible to register to vote will be helping democracy grow one student at a time!

I’ve been spending most of the last few weeks getting ready for term and fretting over elections, so blogging has been somewhat lighter than expected. There’s some possibility I’ll start using this blog as an outlet for fretting about the election over the next 7 weeks, so posting might get a little more frequent but less philosophical.

Anyway, today I just wanted to put in a brief plug for Manuel García-Carpintero and Max Kölbel’s edited collection “Relative Truth”:http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199234950. The OUP site says this is “The hottest topic in philosophy”, which sounds like slight hyperbole to me. But it is an important topic, and this is an excellent collection. The papers are largely from the Barcelona workshop on relative truth, which I thought was a great success. And anyone who is interested in the subject should pick up this collection.

I’m mostly just writing lecture notes for the upcoming term and paying more attention to vice-presidential rumours than baseball rumours. So some links to keep the blog moving.

• The situation for “philosophy at University of Melbourne”:http://consequently.org/news/2008/08/20/pain_stress_redundancies_another_day_at_the_office/index.php seems to be very unpleasant. The University of Melbourne is, or at least has been, a great university, and the excellent philosophers there deserve much better treatment from their administrators.
• “Andrej Bauer”:http://math.andrej.com/2008/08/13/intuitionistic-mathematics-for-physics/ on why physicsists should care about intuitionistic mathematics. (HT: “Greg Restall”:http://consequently.org/.)
• “Peter Railton and Don Loeb”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/13443 debate moral realism.
• I may not have put this up before, but here’s Wo’s feed of “Online Papers in Philosophy”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/opp.rss.
• Via that feed, Ross Cameron argues that “There are no things that are Musical Works”:http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phlrpc/There%20are%20no%20musical%20works.pdf, and Nico Kolodny discusses a puzzles about “Ifs and Oughts”:http://johnmacfarlane.net/ifs-and-oughts.pdf.
• Richard Price emailed to tell me about “Academia.edu”:http://www.academia.edu/, which could be a useful way of keeping up with academics, and more importantly their work, throughout the world.
• Finally, as much as it pains me to write this, congratulations to the British Olympic team for identifying the valuable intersection of “complex demonstratives and rowing”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/aug/07/olympics.acernethercottinterview, and of “running and taboo vocabulary”:http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=509.

At least since Robert Cummins’s paper “Reflections on Reflective Equilibrium”:http://books.google.com/books?id=kOjtQwQ0XmkC&pg=PA113&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=0_0&sig=ACfU3U3tRJ9Pv34k2FDeD3emET6VzxcK2g in “Rethinking Intuition”:http://books.google.com/books?id=kOjtQwQ0XmkC, a lot of people have worried that intuition, that old staple of philosophical argument, is unreliable. This is fairly important to the epistemology of philosophy, especially to intuition-based epistemologies of philosophy, so I think it’s worth considering.

(Worries about intuition obviously don’t start 10 years ago, but the particular worry about reliability does become pronounced in Cummins. I suspect, though I don’t have the relevant papers in front of me, that there are related worries in earlier work by Stich. Note that this post is strictly about reliability, not a general defence of intuition in philosophy.)

The happy new is that there’s a simple argument that intuition isn’t unreliable. I think it isn’t clear whether intuition simply is reliable, or whether there’s no fact of the matter about how reliable it is. (Or, perhaps, that there is no such thing as intuition.) But we can be sure that it is not unreliable.

Start with a fact that may point towards the unreliability of intuitions. Some truths are counter-intuitive. That’s to say, intuition suggests the opposite of the truth. I’m told it’s true that eating celery takes more calories than there is in the celery, so you can’t gain weight by eating it. If true, that’s pretty counterintuitive. And just about everything about “counter-steering”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersteering strikes me as counterintuitive. So those are some poor marks against intuition.

But now think of all the falsehoods that would be even more counterintuitive if true. If you couldn’t gain weight by eating steak, that would be really counterintuitive. Intuitively, steak eating is bad for your waistline. And that’s true! Intuitively, you have less control of a motorbike at very high speeds than at moderate speeds. And that’s true too! It would be really counterintuitive if remains from older civilisations were generally closer to the surface and easier to find than remains from more recent civilisations. And that’s false – the counterintuitive claim is false here.

In fact almost everywhere you look, from archeology to zoology, you can find falsehoods that would be very counterintuitive if true. That’s to say, intuition strongly supports the falsehood of these actual falsehood. That’s to say, intuition gets these right.

To be sure, most of these cases are boring. That’s because, to repeat a familiar point, we’re less interested in cases where common sense is correct. And here intuition overlaps common sense. But that doesn’t mean intuition is unreliable; it’s just that we don’t care about it’s great successes.

There are so many of these successes, so many falsehoods that would be extremely counterintuitive if true, that intuition can hardly be unreliable. But maybe it’s not actually reliable either. I can think of two reasons why we might think that.

First, there may be no fact of the matter about how reliable intuition is.

It’s counterintuitive that there can be proper subsets of a set that are equinumerous with that set. And that’s true, so bad news for intuition. It would be really counterintuitive if there could be proper subsets of a set of cardinality 7 that are also of cardinality 7. But there can’t be, so good news for intuition. And the same for cardinality 8, 9, etc. So there are infinitely many successes for intuition! A similar trick can probably be used to find infinitely many failures. So there’s no such thing as the ratio of successes to failure, so no such thing as how reliable intuition is.

On the other hand, perhaps we’re counting wrongly. Perhaps there is one intuition that covers all of these cases. Perhaps, though it isn’t clear. It isn’t clear, that is, how to individuate intuitions. Arguably our concept of an intuition isn’t that precise to give clean rules about individuation. But if that’s right, there again won’t be any fact of the matter about how reliable intuition is.

This isn’t, I think, bad news for using intuition in philosophy. Similar arguments can be used to suggest there is no fact of the matter in how reliable vision is, or memory is. But it would be absurd on this ground to say that vision, or memory, is epistemologically suspect. So this doesn’t make intuition epistemologically suspect.

Second, there might be no single such thing as intuition. (I’m indebted here to conversations with Jonathan Schaffer, though I’m not sure he’d endorse anything as simple-minded as any of the sides presented below.)

It would be counterintuitive if steak eating didn’t lead to weight gain. It would be counterintuitive if Gettiered subjects have knowledge. In both cases intuition seems to be correct. But perhaps this is just a play on words. Perhaps there is no psychologically or epistemologically interesting state that is common to this view about steak and this view about knowledge.

If that’s so, then perhaps, just perhaps, one of the states in question will be unreliable.

I doubt that will turn out to be the case though. Even if there are distinct states, it will still turn out that each of them gets a lot of easy successes. Let’s just restrict our attention to philosophical intuition. We’ll still get the same results as above.

It would be counterintuitive if torturing babies for fun and profit was morally required. And, as it turns out, torturing babies for fun and profit is not morally required. Score one for intution! It would be counterintuitive if I knew a lot about civilisations on causally isolated planets. And I don’t know a lot about civilisations on causally isolated planets. Score two for intuition! It would be counterintuitive if it were metaphysically impossible for me to put off serious work by writing blog posts. And it is metaphysically possible for me to put off serious work by writing blog posts. 3-0, intuition! I think we can keep running up the score this way quite easily, even if we restrict our attention to philosophy.

The real worry, and this might be a worry for the epistemological significance of intuition, is that the individuation of state types here is too fuzzy to ground any epistemological theory. For once any kind of intuition (philosophical, epistemological, moral, etc) is isolated, it should be clear that it has too many successes to possibly be unreliable.

The following puzzle is a cross between the “Newcomb puzzle”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb’s_paradox and the “centipede game”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_game.

You have to pick a number between 1 and 50, call that number _u_. A demon, who is exceptionally good at predictions, will try to predict what you pick and will pick a number _d_, between 1 and 50, that is 1 less than _u_. If she predicts _u_ is 1, then she can’t do this, so she’ll pick 1 as well. The demon’s choice is made before your choice is made, but only revealed after your choice is made. (If the demon predicts that you’ll use a mixed strategy to choose _u_, she’ll set _d_ equal to 1 less than the lowest number that you have some probability of choosing.)

Depending on what numbers the two of you pick, you’ll get a reward by the formula below.

If _u_ is less than or equal to _d_, your reward will be 2u.
If _u_ is greater than _d_, your reward will be 2d – 1.

For an evidential decision theorist, it’s clear enough what you should do. Almost certainly, your payout will be 2u – 3, so you should maximise _u_, so you should pick 50, and get a payout of 97.

For a causal decision theorist, it’s clear enough what you should not do. We know that the demon won’t pick 50. If the demon won’t pick 50, then picking 49 has a return that’s better than picking 50 if _d_ = 49, and as good as picking 50 in all other circumstances. So picking 49 dominates picking 50, so 50 shouldn’t be picked.

Now the interesting question. What *should* you pick if you’re a causal decision theorist. I know of three arguments that you should pick 1, but none of them sound completely convincing.

_Backwards Induction_
The demon knows you’re a causal decision theorist. So the demon knows that you won’t pick 50. So the demon won’t pick 49; she’ll pick at most 48. If it is given that the demon will pick at most 48, then picking 48 dominates picking 49. So you should pick at most 48. But the demon knows this, so she’ll pick at most 47, and given that, picking 47 dominates picking 48. Repeating this pattern several times gives us an argument for picking 1.

I’m suspicious of this because it’s similar to the bad backwards induction arguments that have been criticised effectively by Stalnaker, and by Pettit & Sugden. But it’s not quite the same as the arguments that they criticised, and perhaps it is successful.

_Two Kinds of Conditionals_
In his very interesting “The Ethics of Morphing”:http://web.mit.edu/~casparh/www/Papers/CJHareMorphing.pdf, Caspar Hare appears to suggest that causal decision theorists should be sympathetic to something like the following principle. (Caspar stays neutral between evidential and causal decision theory, so it isn’t his principle. And the principle might be slightly stronger than even what he attributes to the causal decision theorist, since I’m not sure the translation from his lingo to mine is entirely accurate. Be that as it may, this idea was inspired by what he said, so I wanted to note the credit.)

Say an option is unhappy if, supposing you’ll take it, there is another option that would have been better to take, and an option is happy if, supposing you take it, it would have been worse to have taken other options. Then if one option is happy, and the others all unhappy, you should take the happy option.

Every option but picking 1 is unhappy. Supposing you pick n, greater than 1, the demon will pick n-1, and given that you would have been better off picking n-1. But picking 1 is happy. Supposing that, the demon will pick 1, and you would have been worse off picking anything else.

There’s something to the _pick happy options_ principle, so this argument is somewhat attractive. But this does seem like a bad consequence of the principle.

_Stable Probability_
In Lewis’s version of causal decision theory, we have to look at the probability of various counterfactuals of the form _If I were to pick n, I would get k dollars_. But we aren’t really told where those probabilities come from. In the Newcomb problem that doesn’t matter; whatever probabilities we assign, two boxing comes out best. But the probabilities matter a lot here.

Now it isn’t clear what constrains the probabilities in question, but I think the following sounds like a sensible constraint. If you pick n, the probability the demon picks n-1 (or n if n=1) should be very high. That’s relevant, because the counterfactuals in question (what would I have got had I picked something else) are determined by what the demon picks.

Here’s a constraint that seems plausible. Say an option is Lewis-stable if, conditional on your picking it, it has the highest “causally expected utility”. (“Causally expected utility” is my term for the value that Lewis thinks we should try to maximise.) Then the constraint is that if there’s exactly one Lewis-stable option, you should pick it.

Again, it isn’t too hard to see that only 1 is Lewis-stable. So you should pick it.

_Summary_
It seems intuitively wrong to me to pick 1. It doesn’t dominate the other options. Indeed, unless the demon picks 1, it is the worst option of all. And I like causal decision theory. So I’d like a good argument that the causal decision theorist should pick something other than 1. But I’m worried (a) that causal decision theory recommends taking 1, and (b) that if that isn’t true, it makes no recommendation at all. I’m not sure either is a particularly happy result.