I’ve been continuing to write my “decision theory notes”:http://brian.weatherson.org/424/DTBook.pdf for the decision theory course I’ve been doing this term. The course hasn’t ended up quite the way I expected. Because I wanted to go into more details on some of the fundamentals, and because I wanted to avoid heavy lifting in the mathematics, I’ve skipped anything to do with infinities. So that meant cutting countable additivity, the two-envelope problem, the St Petersburg Paradox, etc. But the flip side of that is that there’s more than originally intended on the nature of utility, and the most recent additions have been going quite slowly through the foundations of game theory.

One thing that I suspect is not news to many readers of this site, but which was very striking to me, was how much orthodox game theory resembles evidential decision theory. (Many people will be familiar with this because it is a point that Robert Stalnaker has made well. But writing the notes really drove home for me how true it is.)

It is really hard to offer a motivation for exclusively playing equilibrium strategies in one-shot zero-sum games that doesn’t look like a motivation for taking one-box in Newcomb’s problem. Since us causal decision theorists think taking one-box is irrational, this makes me very suspicious of the normative significance of equilibrium strategies in one-shot games. Of course, most real world games are not one-shot, and I can understand playing a mixed strategy in a repeated zero-sum game. But it is much harder to see why we should play a mixed strategy in a one-shot game.

The CEU Summer course in philosophy this year will be on conditionals. The faculty will include Barry Loewer, Jason Stanley, Dorothy Edgington, Alan Hajek, Angelika Kratzer and Robert Stalnaker. There is more information, including details on how to apply, is “here”:http://www.sun.ceu.hu/02-courses/course-sites/conditionals/index-condi.php. The application deadline is February 16, and it looks like it will be a great learning experience, so I encourage anyone interested to look it up!

I’ll repeat these announcements closer to the date, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up about two very big events we have planned at Rutgers for the spring.

Derek Parfit will be giving a series of three lectures on (among other things) naturalism. The talks are scheduled to be on March 26, April 6 and April 22, though those dates are subject to change.

And Rutgers will be hosting a forum on Darwinism featuring Phillip Kitcher and Jerry Fodor. Again the dates are subject to change, but it is currently scheduled for February 18.

Whether or not those dates change, I’ll repeat these announcements closer to the time, but I hope to see many people from the New York area at these events!

Three announcements related to Philosophy Compass.

• Blackwell is running an interdisciplinary conference next October called Breaking Down Barriers. The conference is run under the auspices of the various Compass journals, which now span much of the humanities and social sciences. The deadline for abstracts for papers is next January.
• The managers of Compass have written a very good Online Author’s Survival Guide (PDF). Some of what’s in it is specific to Compass, but a lot isn’t. One good suggestion: when you publish a paper, update the Wikipedia page on the topic of the paper with a note about your work, and, more importantly, a reference to your work in the bibliography.
• Some of the other Compass journals have attached blogs. Here, for instance, is the blog attached to Sociology Compass, Sociology Eye. I’m not sure a similar thing would work with Philosophy, but it is an interesting idea.

Hopefully now that the election is over there will be more philosophising. In the meantime, three links.

• The 2009 Formal Epistemology Workshop has been announced.
• The British Postgrad Philosophy Association has a philosophy blog aggregator. I sort of prefer using Google Reader for this sort of thing, but you might find it helpful.
• David Chalmers is looking at expanding his online philosophy domain, and is looking for taxonomic suggestions.
• I haven’t lived in New York long enough to notice any change, but it would be very good if some buildings were less lit up at night.

UPDATE: OBAMA IS THE PRESIDENT!.

Unlike the John McCain campaign, Arche sends it announcements out through the intertubes, not by “Betamax tape”:http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/20/republicans_betamax_media_stra.html. So I can happily announce this

*Call for Papers: Philosophical Methodology: 25-27 April*

The AHRC Project on ‘Intuitions and Methodology Project’ at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre will host a major Conference on Philosophical Methodology 25-27 April, 2009, at the University of St. Andrews.

_Invited keynote speakers_:
David Chalmers (Australian National University)
Jonathan Schaffer (Australian National University, Arché)
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)
Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale University)

The purpose of the conference is to explore questions about philosophical methodology. Potential topics include:

• The nature of philosophical intuitions
• The role of intuition in philosophical methodology
• The bearing of experimental philosophy on philosophical methodology
• Comparisons between approaches to methodology in various subfields of philosophy
• The subject matter of philosophy
• The significance of disagreement in philosophy
• Comparisons between philosophy and other disciplines
• Apriority
• The epistemology of modality
• Scepticism about philosophy
• The role of linguistics in philosophical inquiry

We hope to consider both methodological questions about philosophy at large and considerations specific to subfields of philosophy (e.g., metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of language, etc.).

_Submitted Papers_:
We now invite submissions for 40 minute talks on any area of philosophical methodology. Please send an abstract (400-word maximum) and a CV (1-page) via email to Jonathan Ichikawa by 1 January, 2009. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 1 February, 2009.

_Further Details_:
Contact Jonathan Ichikawa or Yuri Cath or visit the conference website.

Naturally, I’ll be getting to St Andrews about two weeks after this, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to go. But it looks like it should be a great conference.

Over at the Philosophy Job Market Blog, there’s <A href=http://philosophyjobmarket.blogspot.com/2008/10/ideal-job-ad.html>a discussion</a> about “how the JFP (in roughly something like its current form–print and online copies) could be more user-friendly and helpful for folks on the market.”  And apparently Kevin Timpe, one of the members of the relevant APA committee, is listening.  So if you have any suggestions for things that could be standardized about ads (or perhaps reasons why some of the suggested standardizations would be problematic), or thoughts about how the geographic and alphabetical ordering could be improved, or anything else <A href=http://philosophyjobmarket.blogspot.com/2008/10/ideal-job-ad.html>go over there to comment</a>.  I know it seems to be traditional there to leave comments completely anonymous, but I’m sure for something like this it might be useful for the APA committee to have an idea at least whether the person giving the suggestion is someone who’s tried to write a lot of these ads, someone who’s been spending lots of time lately trying to read these ads, or of a different sort of demographic category.

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.