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 … Continue reading
One advantage of going to parties with mathematicians and physicists is that you can describe a problem to them, and sometimes they’ll get stuck thinking about it and come up with an interesting new approach to it, different from most … Continue reading
Because of “Andy’s examples”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/NoCDT.pdf a lot of people have been thinking again about the _Death in Damascus_ case in Gibbard and Harper’s causal decision theory paper. The story is famously an old story, but there has been some uncertainty about … Continue reading
In a nice paper in a recent _Philosophical Review_ Alan Hajek argued that Pascal’s argument in the Wager fails because he doesn’t take account of mixed strategies. I’ve been spending too much of today wondering whether the same thing is … Continue reading
There was a fair bit of back and forth in the “previous thread”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2010/08/20/philosophy-in-the-new-york-times/ on just what us stakes-sensitive folks were claiming to be stakes-sensitive. So I thought I’d list what *I* thought was stakes-sensitive, and perhaps others who thought there … Continue reading
There is a small symposium in the New York Times today about the recent trend in analytic philosophy towards “experimental philosophy”:http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/8/19/x-phis-new-take-on-old-problems/unconvincing-results. As some of the contributors note, it’s easy to overstate the trend that’s going on here. It’s not that … Continue reading
In The Logic of Decision, second edition, Richard Jeffrey endorsed a version of evidential decision theory supplemented with a principle of ratification. A decision is ratifiable iff, conditional on making that decision, the expected utility of carrying out the decision … Continue reading
Fourth Annual Formal Epistemology Workshops, FEW 2007 We are in the process of organizing the fourth annual formal epistemology workshop. The purpose of these workshops will be to bring together individuals, both faculty and graduate students, using mathematical methods in … Continue reading
The other night at dinner, Tim Schroeder asked me what exciting new philosophical ideas I’d heard recently. This was at the end of a long (and really very good) dinner with a few glasses of wine, so naturally I couldn’t … Continue reading
In lieu of my actually having something to say, here are a few announcements about things happening hereabouts. If you’re not interested in philosophical and/or musical events around Boston and Providence, skip over this post.