New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Too many PhD's?

In the last couple of days, philosophy blogs have all been obsessing about the APA debacle of this year. The inclement weather was just the ‘coup de grace’ to an institution – the Eastern APA and the madness of the job interviews – that many feel is utterly absurd. As has also been noticed, the market this year is probably the toughest ever, given that, even though there are slightly more job openings than in previous years, there is a considerable backlog of candidates who did not manage to secure jobs in the last couple of years and who are thus still on the market, competing with the newcomers.

The harshness of the academic job market, in philosophy and elsewhere, also naturally leads to the thought that there may just be too many people with a PhD degree around. This opinion has been voiced at many places (I believe Leiter said something to this effect at some point), but it is not immediately obvious that the general economy of markets should regulate people’s individual choices and lives. If you really, really want to do a PhD, is it fair to let ‘the market’ tell you that you shouldn’t? I always felt that it should after all be a matter of individual choice, that is until I read the recent article on doctoral degrees at The Economist. The article presents some depressing data on how having a PhD degree hardly adds anything to your ‘value’ in the job market (that is, the non-academic job market) over ‘merely’ having a master’s degree, while of course entailing a considerable investment of time and often of money. It also offers some fresh data on how many PhD-holders are now without a job in different countries.

Gary Olson: Cuban Internationalism as Engaged Empathy

 

Gary Olson's ZNet page is here. The article is here. Excerpts:

Some twenty-five years ago I edited a textbook on international politics (Olson, 1984) and included a carefully researched contribution by Gordon Adams on Cuba’s military actions in Southern Africa. I included that chapter because, in part, it effectively refuted certain widely-held misconceptions about Cuban foreign policy, one of which was that Cuba was acting as a surrogate, a pawn for the Soviet Union. But at least as important, the piece served to convey something of the societal wide, organic, cultural ethos of empathy that motivated and continues to nurture and affirm Cuban internationalism. That is, claims on behalf of a global praxis of empathy that fail to explicitly critique and attempt to eradicate global structural violence must be treated with skepticism. Such assertions fall outside the borders of any serious discussion of the subject (Huish and Spiegel, 2008; Gould, 2010). 

Today we know more about both Cuban behavior from that era and about current policies. We also know considerably more about the evolution and dynamics of empathy. Given recent advances in cultural neuroscience and related disciplines, there is strong evidence pointing toward a bidirectional connection between brain development and culture. One consequence is that our biological, hard-wired moral intuition, our predisposition toward empathy, may be short circuited by the influence of unchecked hyper-individualism (Olson, 2010). For example, after decades of unrelenting exposure to neoliberal ideology’s ‘Gekkoisation’ of culture, it’s hardly surprising that American college students are 40 percent lower in empathy than their late 1970s’ counterparts (Konrath, 2010; Bone, 2009). But far beyond undergraduates, as the hegemonic ideology of our era, neoliberalism also serves, in Henry Giroux’s apt phrase, as “public pedagogy” that anesthetizes feelings of social solidarity throughout society. It has “become an all-encompassing cultural horizon for producing market identities, values, and practices” (Giroux, 2008, p.113).

By contrast, Cuban internationalism—initially more military and now medical missions—is the most compelling large-scale example we have of empathic solidarity.

Read the rest here. 

 

The American Philosophical Association

If the reports on Brian Leiter's website are to be trusted (and there is no reason to question veracity of these), the APA is performing miserably with weather and scheduling problems (Leiter's site has more strands). The APA's main website remains uninformative (and basically says 'we're closed due to the Eastern APA').

The annual eastern meeting of the APA is the main job-placement/recruitment meeting in philosophy; it is also the most important annual gathering of philosophers. It suffers from many problems (it is family unfriendly, there is still a kind of rampant sexism, and a general sense that status is more important than content--try being a candidate with, say, one or no interviews at the "smoker!"). It is not a good advertisement for professional philosophy.

What rarely happens, I think, in any discussions about the APA, is to point out that it is governed by fellow philosophers. These are elected by membership. I think most voters only judge the candidates on philosophic quality. But why not start holding our intellectual leaders, friends, and peers accountable for a job (not) well done?  So here follows the Governance Board of Officers 2010 - 2011.

Review of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender"

The review, by Ben Barres of Stanford Medical School, is here. (Link to publisher's page for Delusions of Gender is here). Excerpts from Barres's review: 

No one disputes that male and female brains are different or that males and females differ in their accomplishments. But are these two facts related? A few years ago Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that the answer is yes. He proposed that innate brain differences help to account for the dearth of successful women in science, provoking much heated debate. Reporters called it the story that would not die. Unlike most news stories that exhaust themselves after a few days, this story stayed in the news for months, and even years later continues to inspire debate. Apparently many of us think we already know the answer to this question—the subject of Cordelia Fine's highly readable and enjoyable new book Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference [1]. At least half of us—not just the men—seem to think the answer is yes whereas the other half say not so.

You all know where I stand on this issue. Based on my experiences as a neurobiologist and as a transgendered person, I have previously argued that innate sex differences in the brain are not relevant to real-world accomplishments [2],[3]. Without question, male and female brains have different circuits that help to control their different reproductive behaviors. So it has long seemed an easy step to believe that such anatomic changes also underlie supposed gender differences in cognitive abilities. Rather, in a theme that Fine elegantly expands on, it is the idea itself that women are innately less capable that may be the primary cause of differences in accomplishment. This idea Fine appropriately dubs “neurosexism.” This idea was long ago powerfully encapsulated in the concept of “stereotype threat,” the phenomenon in which members of a sex or race perform substantially worse on a test—and perhaps in real-world environments—when they are led to believe before the test that they are innately less capable [4].

I'm happy to say that Professor Fine will have an essay in Neurofeminism: Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Neuroscience, edited by Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson, and Heidi Maibom, forthcoming in 2011 in New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, a series with Palgrave Macmillan that I co-edit with Mike Wheeler of the University of Stirling. 

Kant and Wikileaks

Democracy Needs Publicity: Did Immanuel Kant dream of Wikileaks? 
The philosopher believed that radical publicity was a condition of peace.

By Julian Nida-Rümelin.*

In the days since the U.S. diplomatic correspondence was published by Wikileaks, two reactions dominate the public debate. On the one hand, it is suggested that one ought not to take the statements of the U.S. embassies too seriously. Horst Seehofer suggested that they were mere “party gossip,” while Hillary Clinton proposed that, “insofar as they were not falsified, they are by and large irrelevant for the foreign policy of the United States.” On the other hand, however, it is proposed that the damage for the praxis of diplomacy is immense, if those involved can no longer assume that their reports will remain confidential.

Both reactions are valid, but both miss the heart of the problem. To find it, one must look elsewhere. The agitated state of the political actors involved, which is only with great effort disguised with equanimity, and even indifference, points to the fact that even the political actors themselves understand this. 

It is Immanuel Kant who, in his late work On Perpetual Peace (1795), equips us with the necessary tools for understanding this problem. This short work establishes a theory of democratic peace, a theory that, at first, seems to be distant from any practical application, as Kant himself suggest with keen irony in the forward: “Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper’s sign, on which a church cemetery was painted, was meant for men in general, or especially for rulers, who are never weary of war, or rather only for the philosophers, who dream this sweet dream—one can set this question aside.” 

The New Yorker discussing scientific methodology

I was just reading Eric's post on the frail methodological grounds for evidence-based medicine, and was reminded of an article which appeared in last week's New Yorker, 'The truth wears off -- Is there something wrong with the scientific method?', by Jonah Lehrer. I have a lot of appreciation for the New Yorker, but it's not the kind of place one expects to find serious discussions on scientific methodology (notwithstanding its good track record for scientifically relevant pieces, such as the famous Piraha piece by Colapinto). Now, if even places such as the New Yorker are now bringing to the fore the methodological problems underlying a lot of our best statistics-based science, this tells me that the problem is so serious that it is overspilling even into such venues.

The bulk of the article focuses on what it describes as 'the decline effect': the fact that, when a new, compelling hypothesis is first tested for, it may yield through-the-roof results which then slowly but surely start decreasing as the experiment is repeated. This phenomenon has been observed in many cases, according to the article; in particular, so-called  second-generation antipsychotics, which appeared to have fantastic results when they were first investigated in the early 90's, now have seen their success decline steadily. According to the article, "a recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineties."

Depressions as opportunities as well as failures

There seems to be a major and minor key in discussing the reactions to the Global Financial Crisis.

The major key is exemplified by John Quiggin's Zombie Economics (Princeton, 2010), a Keynesian critique of the nexus of ideas and practices known as "neoliberalism," including the Great Moderation, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, and the interpretations of the Great Depression and the stagflation of the 1970s those ideas produce. This critique aims at the failures of theory and practice, which if corrected, could have either prevented the crisis or responded to it more effectively. Prevention: by not buying into the EMH's thesis that bubbles wouldn't occur in unregulated financial markets, and hence by properly regulating financial markets using the tools developed in the 1930s--for instance, in the US, the Glass-Steagall Act. Response: the resistance to the stimulus is seen as a hangover of failed ideas and policies, hence the "zombie" trope, which Paul Krugman picks up here. 

The minor key takes up class analysis, and this has itself two themes, a negative and a postive one. The negative theme is that capital is retrenching to avoid awakening the working class power that Keynesian remedies support. Richard Seymour expresses this well: 

The only plausible alternative to neoliberalism is to attack the wealth and power of the rich - to kill off the rentier, nationalise the banks and convert them into public utilities, redistribute wealth to support demand, engage in mass public housing projects (no more bonanzas from property speculation), and to strengthen the bargaining power of labour to support incomes and demands in the future. This is simply not something the CBI or the British Chambers of Commerce would ever be interested in, even if the alternative was to pull up the drawbridges and allow the economy to tank for a generation. The austerity agenda is thus not just a gamble on squeezing another few years of growth out of the neoliberal accumulation model, but a defensive project against the Left.

The positive theme of the class-based analysis of the minor key response claims that depressions are positively desired by the ruling classes. This is not a conspiracy theory about the origins of the crisis, but an interest-based analysis of the response. That is, certain elements of the ruling classes see depressions as opportunities (this is rougly speaking the Naomi Klein Shock Doctrine thesis).

Here I see two factors, one rationalist, the other involved with "political affect." First is the rationalist motive: depressions provide opportunities for bargain hunting, as depressed asset prices provide a field day for those with cash. This is symbolized in the saying attributed to Andrew Mellon that "in a depression assets return to their rightful owners," which Melinda Cooper cites here.

Here is Brad Delong on Hoover on Mellon: 

Herbert Hoover's Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon. In his memoirs Hoover was bitter toward many, but bitterest of all toward Mellon, whom he called the head of the "leave it alone liquidationists." Hoover quotes Mellon: "It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."

But I also think there is a political affect angle here: we shouldn't discount the existence of a positive desire on the part of the ruling classes to punish the working classes, to make them suffer. You don't have to be a full-blooded Nietzschean to hear that desire in all the "painful cuts" rhetoric. Nor to hear a debased Kantianism in Mellon's claim: "if it hurts, it must be moral." 

Adam Smith after Darwin

Some (genuine as opposed to diguised) self promotion: one of my papers "Reading Adam Smith after Darwin: On the evolution of propensities, institutions, and sentiments" just appeared in JEBO 77(1): 14-22!

evidence based medicine

In response to my blogging about dubious nature of statistical significance, a terrific young scholar, Lisa Herzog (Oxford), calls my attention to a neat piece in The Atlantic. My favorite line in the piece: “The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the [medical] research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone."

Much empirical research (in medicine and economics, as the piece rightly notes) is basically no more than data-mining. In the absence of well confirmed background theory (a rarity in all the sciences) this is nearly worthless. As I pointed out a while back, 'results' come too easily in modern social science. Evidence based medicine (which is the most important technical fad in medical science), is just most sophisticated form of data mining.

Weekly philo economics blog: risk-free assets, insurance, and uncertainty (again)

As I wrote three weeks ago and two week ago, by reading Ghislaine Idabouk's briliant dissertation on the mathematics of options pricing (Black, Scholes, Merton, etc) I have been inspired to do a weekly blog on philosophy of economics. This week I want to expand on one of her central points. Ghislaine nicely show how in the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing, the assumption of No Arbitrage (about which more in the future), or risk-neutral investment, a martingale measure could be linked to the existence of a pricing function. A market without the possibility of arbitrage (and a few other non trivial assumptions) is a perfect market. Now last week I explored the weird modal nature of a martingale. This week I want to call attention to the importance of the risk-free asset in the modern capital asset pricing edifice.

Most underrated philosopher of the week

This week's most underrated philosopher of the week is Brad Wray (anybody know what the "k" stands for?). While working in a teaching-intensive department far away from any metropolis, he has maintained an impressive frequency and quality of top-notch publications. Brad has resisted the trend toward ever increasing specialization in the philosophy of science, where narrow technical expertise is often the way toward high status. (In doing so, Brad fits the criteria for this weekly entry.) In fact, many of Brad's papers are an extended reflection on the nature as well as costs and benefits of specialization and collaboration. While I have grown ever more skeptical about so-called 'naturalizing' strategies (which tend to replace one set of arm-chair constraints with other arm-chair treatments of, say, causation, laws, etc), Brad  uses disarmingly simple empirical tests to scrutinize hallowed myths within the philosophy of science.

Maybe the truth isn’t out there after all (with update)

One of the latest stories coming from the Wikileaks cables has it that Michael Moore’s Sicko was banned in Cuba. It was banned, so the story goes, because it depicted the Cuban healthcare system so favorably that authorities feared showing the movie would provoke a backlash among a public well aware of the actual state of the system.

This is strange. All the references in Google news to the supposed banning of Sicko can be traced to a single piece, dated 6 or 8 Aug 2007, by a Cuban dissident, Dr. Darsi Ferrer. The piece does not in fact say that Sicko was banned. It says instead that “There is no doubt that the Cuban authorities will not allow the Cuban people the possibility of watching this documentary”. The relevant paragraph in the cable, which is dated 31 Jan 2008, looks like a paraphrase of Ferrer’s opening paragraph. So it is not independent testimony to the banning of the movie.

After trying to track down the truth in this matter, I am stymied. It’s worth remembering that the cables are no more trustworthy than the people who wrote them, and that those people have axes to grind too. That’s pretty clear in this case (remember that the FHSP who wrote this was hired or appointed by the Bush State Department).

That’s not to say that Moore didn’t misrepresent the condition of the Cuban health system, or that the cable doesn’t state the truth, but only that in this domain everything needs independent verification. Journalists generally are treating the cables as if they presented a behind-the-scenes unvarnished truth. We historians ought to know better. All our documents are merely evidence, sometimes good, sometimes not so good, for what happened. 

Update 19 December:

The Guardian has a followup story, still mostly in steno mode, in which Michael Moore’s response to the Wikileaks cable is paraphrased. The story casts as a he-said-she-said matter what is really a question of fact. It continues to report as fact statements from the cable even though the cable has been shown to be retailing propaganda on the question of the banning of Moore’s film.

"States seek to imprison the Anonymous protesters rather than official torturers and murderers."

This is a sane piece, and I don't say that often about anything appearing in the Guardian.

 

Foucault Studies, vol 10: Foucault and Agamben

Foucault Studies is pleased to announce the publication of issue 10

 A Special Issue on Foucault and Agamben
Guest Edited by Jeffrey Bussolini

Including five original articles and an interpretive review essay of recent publications by Agamben bearing on the work of Foucault.

The issue also includes a report from the Foucault Archives at Berkeley, a review essay of the recent translation of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983: The Government of Self and Others and seven new book reviews.

Link to the issue (all papers are open access).

 

Ghent University Job opening: three year post-doctoral research position

"Philosophy is dead"

The good news: philosophy is still worth bashing.

The bad news we get bashed with clichéd prose: Steven Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow claim that "philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge." (The Grand Design, p. 5; John Leslie's review called my attention to it.TLS, 12/10/2010, p.3) [In some other contexts, I call this kind of rhetoric, "Newton's Challenge." [a revised version of this will appear in first issue of HOPOS.])

Erik Curiel has already provided the needed counterblast "Against the Excesses of Quantum Gravity: A Plea for Modesty" Philosophy of Science 2001, 68(s1):S424—S441.

John Wilkins on Uexküll

Nice comment by John Wilkins over on his blog Evolving Thoughts, on Uexküll's book, which is now out in English (look for my review on NDPR in a few months). Here's a link to the  University of Minnesota Press page on the book. 

The fascist aesthetic of this photo

Is really quite apparent, isn't it? The subservient subject gazing up at the protector of law and order, the rectangular windows indicating everything in its proper place, the upbeat slogan interpellating you to work with the police for a "safer London" ...

Source: this Daily Telegraph piece, headlined "Police may ban future marches to prevent disorder. Police may ban anti-Government marches through central London to prevent further disorder and strain on officer numbers." Please read the piece, and tell me if "fascist" is too strong. Maybe I have an impoverished vocabulary, and "securitarian" is better here. But read the article and the photo together.

Photo is credited to "Getty Images." IANAL, but I'm claiming fair use for political commentary purposes. 

Open letter from Middlesex students and staff on Alfie Meadows and police brutality

You can read the entire letter here. 

We, current and former students and staff of Middlesex University, wish to make plain our disgust at the behaviour of the Metropolitan police at the demonstration against tuition fee rises in London on 9th December. A Middlesex student, Alfie Meadows, sustained life-threatening injuries and underwent brain surgery as a result of an attack by the police. Protesters wishing to leave the demonstration had been told by police to exit via Whitehall, where many were then kettled and attacked. At around 6pm, the police launched a series of unprovoked charges, using horses, truncheons and shields on protesters trapped in Whitehall. Hundreds of peaceful protesters were lined up on the south side of Whitehall and witnessed these attacks.

Over the last month, we have been witness numerous times to police attacks on young protesters, many of school age, with nothing to defend themselves but their passion, anger and sense of injustice. The spectacle of brute, armed force marshalled against the young holds up an unflattering mirror to the society that condones it.

Moved back to the top: What's the best philosophy book to have been published this year (2010)

What's the best philosophy book of the year? My motivation: few philosophy books got mentioned in TLS' annual roundup.

Groundrules: 1. The nominated book needs to have been published with 2010 date/copyright. 2. The Book needs to be written by a philosopher or about philosophy (these requirements may be interpreted liberally--we are an inclusive blog). 3. No self-nominations; 4. No anonymouys nominations. 5. No language restrictions (unless it is a private or fictional language). 6. No re-prints, but (first) translations into English are permitted. 7. Anthologies and collected essays are allowed. 8. Discussion is encouraged, but will be moderated for civility.

 

Update Dec. 27: we'll be on low-key blogging, so I decided to move this back up.

 

About MonoKL- "Friendhip of writing and writing of friendship"

MonoKL (Mono Kurgusuz Labirent- Mono Disorganized Labyrinth – www.monokl.net) is a network/journal of philosophy, literature and culture established in June 2006, based in Istanbul and published by a group of young intellectuals biannually. It is an independent cultural organization with no direct affiliation to any publisher or institution. The chief editor and the founder of the network/journal is Volkan Çelebi.

MonoKL aims at constructing a lively, rational and balanced relational framework between Turkish and world cultures, and to meet this end it contains bilingual essays whose number increases with each issue. Its special issues on contemporary thinkers also serve as companions and critical editions.

Discovery in the social sciences: Towards an empirically-informed philosophy of social science

University of Leuven, Belgium, March 22-23, 2011
Submission deadline for abstracts: 31 December, 2010.
Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2011.
Keynote speakers
Alison Wylie (University of Washington): "transformative criticism as a catalyst for discovery: Community Based Collaborative Practice in archaeology"
Jack Vromen (Erasmus University Rotterdam): TBA
website: http://www.hiw.kuleuven.be/ned/workshop/index.html

Report on workshop - Empirically-informed philosophy of logic

Last week I organized a workshop with the lengthy title 'From cognitive science and psychology to an empirically-informed philosophy of logic' (more like an abstract, really). I have written on the general approach before here at New APPS, and it then generated quite some interest. Since I had to write a report for the sponsors anyway, I thought I might as well post the report here too, in case anyone is interested. So here it is!

On December 7^th-9^th 2010, the workshop ‘From cognitive science and psychology to an empirically-informed philosophy of logic’ took place in Amsterdam. The goal was to bring together logicians, philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists to discuss the interface between cognitive science and psychology, on the one hand, and the philosophy of logic on the other hand. More specifically, the goal was to investigate the extent to which (if at all), and in what ways, experimental results from these fields may contribute to the formulation of an empirically-informed philosophy of logic, one that takes into account how human agents, logicians and non-logicians alike, in fact reason.

Weekly Philo economics blog: possible world semantics for financial markets?

As I wrote two weeks ago and last week, by reading Ghislaine Idabouk's briliant dissertation on the mathematics of options pricing (Black, Scholes, Merton, etc) I have been inspired to do a weekly blog on philosophy of economics. This week I am inspired by one of her central points about the development of the famous optionspricing formula. She shows nicely how in the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing, the assumption of No Arbitrage (about which more in the future), or risk-neutral investment, a martingale measure could be linked to the existence of a pricing function. A martingale is a stochistic process that defines (for example, a lot of) fair games. (For example, Brownian motion is a semimartingale.) Historically and empirically, the link results from the idea that stock markets are basically random walks in which no arbitrage is possible and that there is at least one asset that is risk-free and produces a predictable cash-flow (imagina a default free US Treasury). I am not a very good mathematician, so what follows is really the result of inspired conversations with Idabouk, my best former student, Gwyneth Harrison-Shermoen (who is getting a PhD in math at Berkeley), David M. Levy (an iconoclastic economist), and Ali M. Khan (an economist, who is a bit skeptical about what follows).

Anyway, the martingale helps define a trajectory of a stochastic process. And so we can ask an innocent seeming question: do the set/class of values that end up in the trajectory have special properties? As David Levy first reminded me, we know the answer is "yes" because it turns out some distributions (median distribution) come naturally, while others (e.g. mean distributions) not. (Even my arch-villain, Eugene Fama, comes close to seeing the significance of this.) So, this means that the modal property of the values that end up in the trajectory (i.e. really possible) is different from some of the values that could have ended up in the trajectory (merely possible), and those that never could end up in the trajectory (i.e., impossible). If we define prices in markets in this way (and recall that the financial apparatus offers a normative theory), the modal assumptions of our mathematical theories deserve more scrutinity. Maybe philosophy departments can grow rich with courses on possible world semantics for financial markets? (Brian Weatherson at Rutgers could probably teach a course like this in his sleep!)

James Clifford on the "Greater Humanities"

Aaron Bady has circulated this talk by James Clifford of UC Santa Cruz. I will have some posts in the next few days in reaction to it, but for now, here is the text [/JP]. 

By kind permission of James Clifford, this is the text of a talk he delivered at “The University We Are For,” a conference organized by David Theo Goldberg and Wendy Brown at UC Berkeley (11/5/10). The Berkeley forum is webcast here and the UC Irvine version can be viewed here.

“The University We Are For.” The context, created by David Theo Goldberg and Wendy Brown, exhorts us to look past our complaints about what’s happening to the University. No kvetching--something we’re all too good at, these days. We have permission to be un-ambivalently for something (more than just settling for what we can get): it’s OK to think big, to be utopian, for fifteen minutes. That’s how I see the assignment. I offer an immodest proposal. All the devils in the details can be left for later. There will be plenty of time for them. *

Not too long ago, I was the Humanities Divisional representative on a search committee for a new UCSC campus provost. One of our candidates—a dean from a big mid-western university who we interviewed at San Jose airport—spoke casually of the “five divisions of the university…and if you’re lucky enough to have professional schools, more.” He meant Nat. ScI, Engineering, Soc Sci, Arts and Humanities. He went on to talk about funding sources. The Humanities disappeared from the discussion. But I was stuck on the numbers. Naively shocked. When I entered graduate school, we were an Arts and Sciences university, worrying about C. P. Snow’s “two cultures.” Two! I felt I lived in half the landscape. Now, in the airport, I had become part of a thin and shrinking slice of the pie.

Statistical significance, data mining, and publication biases in human science

As regular readers of this blog may know I am critical of the cult of statistical significance in the human sciences. In the absence of solidly established background theory, it has allowed data-mining to create the illusion of "breakthrough results." A terrific article in the New Yorker highlights a lot of important issues in how science works in practice. Most notably, the article shows the signifiance (sic!) of journals' lack interest in lack of replication. The article focuses on psychology and biomedical science, but the problem shows up in economics, too. This piece by Robert Goldfarb is also thought provoking.

Most underrated philosopher of the week

We all know that there is a kind of bias in the discipline against (too much) "applied" work. Even so, sometimes applications can reveal theoretical fissures and promote creativity. The work of this week's most underrated philosopher, Heather Douglas, improves on standard philosophy of science by showing what science looks like when something is at stake in policy. She uses hard-won insight to create a more mature philosophy of science in a classic and widely cited article a decade ago. The book that develops the ideas more fully looks to have wide appeal within philosophy and the policy sciences. As (tacitly) enshrined in the rules for this series Professor Douglas works in more than one area. She writes with gusto about different sciences in different eras. Who said that relevance diminished philosophic subtlety?

Peter Hallward on police brutality at the 9 Dec fees protest demonstrations

Peter Hallward describes the events, and their political context, with characteristic clarity and precision at THE. Excerpts:

Last Thursday, the government passed one of the most reactionary and ill-conceived pieces of legislation in this country’s history.... Students and staff have mobilised in unprecedented numbers and unprecedented ways to oppose these disastrous education cuts. Unable to sustain let alone win the argument in public debate, unwilling to devote even minimal time for general consultation and discussion, the government has instead opted to quash our demonstrations with naked force, intimidation and collective punishment....

Attempts to portray the protests as “riots” provoked by a frenzied few are a clichéd evasion of the real issues at stake here... In reality, the great majority of the violence has been suffered rather than inflicted by the protesters. In reality, given the calamity that confronts us, protesters have acted with remarkable discipline and restraint. In reality, although police justify the use of “containment” as a means of preventing violence, most of what violence there was during Thursday’s rally began well after the vast kettling operation was set up.

You can comment here, of course, but comments are also welcome at the THE site.

Edu-Factory: "Campaign Against Debt"

Link. Many excellent essays on the page. Read them there.

And this manifesto, which you can read here! 

We, students, teachers, migrant and precarious workers, call for a debt abolition network to organize a global day of action against student debt.

We struggle everyday in movements all around the world against the privatization of the university, the precaritization of work, the new enclosures of our knowledges and for the reappropriation of our commonwealth.

We have identified debt as a primary component in all of these struggles.

Debt is the main instrument of enclosure of our social wealth: education, knowledge, access to healthy food, housing and healthcare. In nearly every aspect of our lives, the access to credit is necessary in order to live our lives.

Debt is a fundamental political question because it is a key component of control of our lives and bodies. This control is exercised as blackmail on an individual level as well as generalized social exploitation on a large scale.

Interview with the 21st Century Monads Part III

The third and final part of my interview with the 21st Century Monads. The first part is here, and the second part is here. If readers still have pressing questions which haven't been addressed by the interview, do write them in comments; the Monads might be willing to answer them too! (At least some of them are keeping track of what's going on here, I suspect...) Thanks again to all three Monads for agreeing to do the interview, it's been great fun!

 

Catarina:  Do you play live, all three together? It would be fantastic to have a Monads concert at an APA, for example; it would certainly lighten things up a bit…

Kris: We played together in the same room for the first time ever at the SPAWN metaphysics conference in Syracuse.  We were “unplugged”: two guitars and a piano.  We rehearsed together for the first time ever two nights before the performance.  Talk about nerve-wracking….

Carrie: I think you’ll find it was two guitars, a piano, a tambourine and a toy glockenspiel.  Plus a chorus of fans acting as back-up singers.  We love them.

Ben:  The odds of us playing at the APA are pretty small though.