New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

We look anyway!

On Friday my old classmate, painter Harm van den Berg, gave me a private tour of the exhibit, Door Schildersogen (officially translated as From a Painter's Perspective, but I like "Through Painter's Eyes" better),  he co-curated at Arti et Amicitae. (The show includes a painting by him.) The exhibit, which closes soon, presents a painter's selection of thirty-two contemporary painters that work or are trained in the Netherlands.  The exhibit is a self-conscious step away from conceptual art, spectacle, and the recent fascination with disaster tourism (recall here and here). Even Holland's master-disaster-artist-tourist-guide, Ronald Ophuis, is presented with a more standard portrait. (Unsurprisingly, some critics have called the exhibit, which includes a mixture of very abstract and more representational art, "boring.") In this post I focus on two of the cityscape paintings in the exhibit:

Jaring Lokhorst's NYC:

Patricia Spoelder - Flat:

Brandom's Stick vs Kripke's Baptism

If "it is in the Internal Revenue Code, it is collected by the IRS on April 15th," then you can name it anything you want. [HT Neil McArthur.]

Interview with Keith Stenning in The Reasoner

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

The latest issue of The Reasoner is out, and among other interesting features, it has an interview with the cognitive scientist Keith Stenning, conducted by me. Keith is (in my opinion) the sharpest, most interesting researcher currently working on reasoning, so everyone should be thoroughly familiar with his work! He has two fairly recent can't-miss books, Seeing Reason and (with Michiel van Lambalgen) Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science. In the interview, he talks about the status of cognitive science and psychology as disciplines, his interdisciplinary professional trajectory, and his recent collaboration with Michiel van Lambalgen tracking down the inherent component of defeasibility in human reasoning.

Do check it out if reasoning is one of your hobby horses!

Did the WSJ Editorialists notice something interesting, or are they inventing a fake storyline?

One telling note is that the dissent refers repeatedly to "Justice Ginsburg's dissent" and "the dissent" on the mandate, but of course they should be referring to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's concurrence. This wording and other sources suggest that there was originally a 5-4 majority striking down at least part of ObamaCare, but then the Chief Justice changed his mind.

The Justices may never confirm this informed speculation. But if it is true, this is far more damaging to the Court's institutional integrity that the Chief Justice is known to revere than any ruling against ObamaCare. The political class and legal left conducted an extraordinary campaign to define such a decision as partisan and illegitimate. If the Chief Justice capitulated to this pressure, it shows the Court can be intimidated and swayed from its constitutional duties.--WSJ, June 28, 2012,

The phrase "Justice Ginsburg's dissent" occurs by my count three times (see here). But, of course, Ginsburg did dissent to parts of the ruling, and by my lights the three occurrences all refer to Judge Ginsburg's insistence that the ACA would have been legal under the Commerce Clause.

Ah Espresso! Bravo Achille!

To pay homage to Italian supremacy, here's a super article on the invention of the espresso.

The essential points: the definition of espresso:

A jet of hot water at 88°-93°C passes under a pressure of nine or more atmospheres through a seven-gram (.25 oz) cake-like layer of ground and tamped coffee.

And: "The man to finally surpass the two-bar brewing barrier was Milanese café owner Achille Gaggia."

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Alegria alegria'

This morning I had to go to Rotterdam to renew my Brazilian passport at the consulate. It's a bit of a drag, as the only time I use my Brazilian passport is to enter Brazil – I am obliged by law to use the Brazilian passport if I have one. So all the bureaucratic annoyance got me thinking of this über-classic by Caetano Veloso, 'Alegria alegria', one of the first Tropicália songs (1967):

Walking against the wind,

No handkerchief, no ID papers [yes!!]

In the almost-December sun

Here I go

I know some people complain that I post too many Caetano Veloso songs, but hey, it’s been at least a month! So here is your monthly Caetano Veloso dose.

Share the birthday celebrations!

On my father's actual 74th birthday perhaps Judge Scalia will join us in wishing Jean-Jacques Rousseau a happy 300th birthday! [HT Ryan Hanley]

WOW: Obamacare upheld under the Tax Clause!

Did anybody predict that the Court (here's the opinion--HT Lucas Thorpe) would uphold Obamacare under the Tax Clause?

Actually, Yes. [HT James Kreines] as well as prominent political theorist, Jacob Levy.

I think the bottom line can be characterized as follows: Congress can explicitly deny that a statue is a tax; if it is a tax, Congress can tax.

Doesn't this open the door to a national, uniform welfare state?

Anyway, I bet among our readers are more informed views.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Mary Wollstonecraft and Adam Smith on Private Virtue, Public Happiness

"A truly benevolent legislator always endeavours to make it the interest of each individual to be virtuous; and thus private virtue becoming the cement of public happiness, an orderly whole is consolidated by the tendency of all the parts towards a common centre."--Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chapter 9.

The main point of Wollstonecraft's Vindication is, of course, to argue that "to render [women's] private virtue a public benefit," women must be granted (equal) civil rights.  But she does so with a vocabulary that is clearly meant to echo and rebuke Mandeville's 'private vices, public benefits.' Wollstonecraft insists that a wise legislator can create the proper institutional framework in which all of humankind can sensibly and  successfully pursue their interests in virtue and consequently serve the greater (and orderly not to say happy) good. Here I leave aside how much ongoing calibration ("always"?) a Wollstonecraftian legislative craftswoman must be asked to perform, and do some history of ideas on the sources of these ideas in Adam Smith.

Russian Orthodox Collusion with Putin Regime...

As the case of the Pussy Riot Three suggests, the Russian Orthodox Church seems a bit too eager to call on the Putin regime to silence opponents. [H/T Peter Momtchiloff on Facebook.] To note this is not to deny that these three brave women infringed on the right to peaceful worship.

Should Linus Pauling’s erroneous 1953 model of DNA be retracted?

Our friends at Retraction Watch ask: should scientific papers that are known to be very wrong (and that continue to be cited) be retracted?

My view is that evidence of “hurry and hubris” should stay on the books. What do you think?

please let's not do a victory dance

There must be a natural language containing a word denoting bad people engineering reality so as to get otherwise sensible people to celebrate their own immiseration.

Tonight it occurs to me that if one were writing a dictionary for that langauage, then a picture of Teresa A. Sullivan would show up next to that word:

To the contrary, Sullivan embraced the principles of change demanded by the board that hired her. She oversaw years of no raises and a 2-percent raise pool distributed unevenly. She stonewalled hunger-striking students who wanted economic justice for the numerous on-campus employees of its vendors of outsourced services. She moved immediately upon arrival to implement a version of the responsibility-centered management championed over a decade earlier by her University of Michigan mentor James Duderstadt.

Often described as “every tub on its own bottom,” RCM financial models encourage resource-maximizing, perma-temping, and outsourcing, and strongly tend to over-reward and subsidize already-wealthy units and programs with access to external revenue in the form of grants, while under-acknowledging and poaching the revenue generated by undergraduate teaching.

In short, Sullivan has been a great president–for the Visitors. She is a largely conventional executive with a mostly conventional administrative vision. She was winning the battle that her board wanted waged on campus–and making the faculty like it too.

For the cool-headed among the Visitors, the smart play is easy: rehire Sullivan and calculate that the hoi polloi will retreat from the carnival celebration declaring victory–while continuing in their thralldom.

Full story from Marc Bousquet HERE. All I have to say is feh.

Philo of Economics: non market, non state solutions

A brief follow-up on my too brief post about the great economist, Elinor Ostrom. In the wake of her writings smart, informed Libertarians have moved away from advocating strict property rights and have started to embrace an appreciation of of non-market, non-state solutions. If wise anarchists can join forces with wise Libertarians, it may be possible to develop ideological alternatives to rent-seeking bureaucrats and capitalists and their Conservative allies. For example, Sandy Ikeda writes,

"In those instances the nonstate, nonmarket institutions she studied were, when successful, conventions that the users of common-pool resources agreed to and used sometimes for centuries. They were made voluntarily and evolved over time, but they were not market outcomes, at least in the narrow sense, because no one “owned” the resource in question and it was not bought and sold. Ostrom added:

"The central question of this study is how a group of principals who are in an independent situation can organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically.""--Governing the Commons,

The opinion of epistemic superiors as evidence for/against theism?

[X-posted at Prosblogion] A few months ago, I met a grad student who has a prominent philosopher of religion (X) in his department. The graduate student was a theist when he started grad school, but soon realized that this is a minority position in philosophy. Disparaging remarks about theists (and specifically Christians) fueled his insecurity. Although there are no longitudinal surveys on this, it seems that atheism increases as people climb the academic ladder. For example according to the PhilPapers survey, in philosophy, only 14.6% of philosophy faculty believe in God. When postdocs are included, this percentage rises to 16.3%. Graduate students have the highest percentage of theists, 20.8%. So it seems plausible to me that at least some graduate students lose their faith as a result of the majority opinion in academia.

As the graduate student and I discussed X and what a brilliant scholar she is, the graduate student said that one important reason he is still a theist is the fact that X is a theist. He said "X is one of the smartest academics I know. The fact that X is a theist, even though she considered counterevidence carefully (like the problem of evil), constitutes strong evidence for theism for me, and for me it's a good enough reason to remain a theist". Is the graduate student rational?

Minds on Monday: Is Molyneux's Problem About Spatial Perception?

Molyneux's Problem is whether a newly sighted man who is visually presented a cube and globe could “distinguish and tell which is the globe, and which the cube.” This seems to be about the perception of space. (Or so I have always thought.) Since the visual, tactile, and motor representations of space are different, the anti-nativist says that all correlations between them must therefore be learned. The problem for the newly sighted person is to compare the distribution of points in a visual representation of space with one in tactile or in motor space. How can he do this if he has had no prior experience of visual representation of space itself?

This, at any rate, was Diderot’s take on the problem.

Why some men resist the Gendered Conference Campaign (and similar initiatives)

We are having an interesting debate on the ins and outs of the Gendered Conference Campaign in this thread. I must confess that I sometimes do not even know where to begin, when I hear for the nth time that “it’s about the quality of the program, not about gender!” and similar arguments; but then I just try to run the usual replies for the nth time the best way I can (along the lines of how implicit biases make it so that judgments of quality are never ‘only’ about quality etc.).

This got me thinking: why do we still encounter so much resistance in some men (and women!) to the idea that something like the Gendered Conference Campaign is important? Two posts that I read today over at the Feministe blog may offer partial answers. The first one is about a study among top managers in the corporate world, and in particular how their private situation at home shapes how they view women in their professional environments: “Men with stay-at-home wives are more likely to be sexist in the workplace”. Here is a passage from the abstract of the article in question (‘traditional marriages’ is defined as marriages where the female spouse does not work outside of the home):

Alan Turing's birthday

Today the whole of the internet seems to be celebrating Alan Turing's 100th birthday -- and rightly so, of course. Google in particular has one of its amazing doodles, depicting an interactive Turing machine. Here's a video on how to solve the doodle:

 

 

For those looking for more Turing-related material, check out the links assembled by Luca Baptista, which directed me to the video above.

The history of philosophy, graphically represented

Via Massimo Pugliucci on G+ I came across an interesting post with a node-network graph depicting the history of philosophy in terms of who influenced who. The dataset used are the items 'influenced by' in the different Wikipedia pages for each philosopher. Intuitively, the picture may seem to be basically correct, with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche as the big nodes. But unsurprisingly, medieval philosophers for example don't stand out, which reflects the usual neglect of the period in traditional historiography of philosophy (where the hell is Aquinas?). At any rate, obviously the graph will only be as good as the initial dataset permits, but the general idea of such graphical representations is quite interesting.

Below the fold is the whole graph where only the big nodes are discernible, but the original post has a couple of close-ups well worth looking into:

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Eu sambo mesmo'

I'm still operating on overdrive here, but to see if I can get at least myself to relax a bit, today I'm posting the classic 'Eu sambo mesmo', a delicious, swingy samba. It is a composition dating back to the 1940s, and for 'youngsters' such as myself (all is relative in life...), it is mostly known on the João Gilberto versions (here in a live version). I'm also posting a more recent version by the very talented young singer Roberta Sá.

As the song says: "A minority says they don't like [samba], but in fact they do." And as another classic says: "Whoever doesn't like samba is not a nice person: either bad in the head, or ill in the feet." ('O samba da minha terra') I agree entirely.

Deductive proofs: transferability and the 'built-in opponent'

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

This week I read an extremely interesting paper by Kenny Easwaran, ‘Probabilistic proofs and transferability’, which appeared in Philosophia Mathematica in 2009. Kenny had heard me speak at the Formal Epistemology Workshop in Munich a few weeks ago, and thought (correctly!) that there were interesting connections between the concept of transferability that he develops in the paper and my ‘built-in opponent’ conception of logic and deductive proofs; so he kindly drew my attention to his paper. Because I believe Kenny is really on to something deep about mathematics in his paper, I thought it would be a good idea to elaborate a bit on these connections in a blog post, hoping that it will be of interest to a number of people besides the two of us!

Justin E. Smith on the history of orgasm

Justin E. Smith has an interesting post today on the history of orgasm, or in any case the history of conceptualizations of orgasm, going back to the early modern period. The short story is: when orgasm was viewed as a not-particularly-venerable bodily reaction, comparable to sneezing, it was a 'female thing'; when it began to be viewed as something 'cool', it was promptly associated with maleness. Somehow, I'm not surprised... But do go check out the whole post!

Female minds, after all

A few months ago, I had a post on a philosophy of mind conference in Bochum, criticizing their 100% male lineup of speakers (an otherwise very impressive lineup!). Today an announcement for the same conference was sent around, but now with two female speakers added to the program. I do not want to presume that the change was in any way prompted by my post, but whatever the cause, this is a good outcome!

(I also think that conference organizers who work towards redressing the gender imbalance of their conferences at a later stage deserve credit for their courage to do so; they are not afraid of being seen as ‘caving in’.)

fricking awesome

There are only thirty-something registers here, but it's still fantastic.

From this video one can imagine a Lego centipede beast extended to any arbitrary register of n length, thus computing anything that can be computed.

If this is true, then what you are viewing now as you read this is nothing more than some extraordinarily long  (possibly longer than our actual universe) Lego millipede doing its thing.

For some of us, this is a comforting thought.

When Reviews Are Not At "Arm's Length"

I just got through reading The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. It is regularly described as a “novel”. It is not. It took me not quite all of an afternoon to read; it is perhaps 30,000 words long; it shows no interest in characters that don’t move the plot along; it has no description of social or political matters outside of the personal (e.g., sexual mores in the sixties). It is a novella. (On Chesil Beach is the same, by the way.) I didn’t know that they gave the Man Booker Prize to novellas.

As a novella, it is a brilliant. It is a reflection on the suicide of a clever young existentialist philosopher, Adrian, by the narrator, who had hero-worshipped him in school. We get three explanations of the suicide, each deeper and more poignant than the last, and each implicating the narrator himself in a progressively more disturbing way.

Under what conditions should you decline an invitation to review a tenure file?

At Leiter Reports there have been two discussions that touch on this (HERE and HERE).  Reading and participating in these led me to wonder about the following question.

Under what conditions should one decline to review a tenure case?

Obviously if you are too busy to do a good job. And I think obviously if you think that your animus against the person or their work would hinder objectivity. But things are more complicated than this.

The Discovery of Time Perception

In mental imagery, time often represents itself. This is clearest in perception, where experience of duration is duration of experience. You experience the interval of time that a play or symphony occupies by the length of time it takes to experience it. Much the same is true of recollection or anticipation.  Mentally to experience the length of a sequence of events is to have a mental experience of it playing in “real time.” In the absence of real-time imagery, you have an experience of temporal sequence, but not an experience of duration. For example, you can replay Hamlet in the theatre of your mind, but you can’t experience its duration without running each scene at its actual pace.  There is no scaling in time perception or time imagery. (Time is special in this way. You don’t experience size by the size of your experience. Or, mutatis mutandis, anything else. A question: is this just a trivial fact about time, or does it say something about how we experience duration?)

How do animals understand their names?

My husband and I are making revision on a paper that mentions, at some point, briefly, Leibniz. We read the paper aloud to see if it sounds alright. As I am reading, our cat, who happens to be called Leibniz (photo), comes expectantly into the house from the garden. But what, if anything, does he understand by his own name? He also recognizes other designators, such as "cat" (in English and Dutch).

Father's Day in the Summer of Lobster

According to Sam Sifton, this is the tenth consecutive year of record lobster catches in Maine. Here in Canada, we think Maine lobster is the bland version of the supreme Maritime lobster, which lives in the cold waters of the Newfoundland current, rather than the warm Gulf stream of Maine. (OK, fact-checkers, come and get me.) Lobster is selling at $7 per pound here in Toronto.

Sifton may be challenged in where he buys lobster, but he has a superb recipe. As almost everybody knows, shellfish MUST be spicy, piquante spicy (Indian-hot, as they say in Toronto). And Sifton, with impeccable taste, offers us Singapore Chili Lobster, a recipe true to that great city and its great Tamil culture, but unknown there (though only because lobster is).

The Sir Isaac Newton Action Movie

For those of us working on Isaac Newton, our scholarly niche may be about to get a lot more media exposure. The full story here. [HT to Jacky Taylor.]

Philo of Economics: Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012)

The workshop on Sympathy that I hosted earlier in the week was saddened by the announcement by Vernon Smith that Elinor Ostrom had passed away. (For Prof. Smith's comments on her together with a useful interview with her and her husband, see here.) She co-won a Nobel in economics in 2009, even though many economists knew little of her work (weirdly this is the main focus of the NYT obituary devoted to her); recall Levitt's comments. It is difficult not to reduce her life's work to symbolism: she is the first and only woman to win the Nobel in economics; she used (anthropological) field work in combination with historical methods in her research; she had basic faith in the capacities of ordinary people to solve their problems without resorting to state violence or corporate control; she promoted collaborative methods; she re-invented development economics, and in a field dominated by journal articles, she published some of her most important ideas in books. (For a good introduction to the significance of her work, see here and, especially Pete Boettke, here.) One day, I hope economists and the policy-makers they advice will move beyond the now tired opposition between Keynes vs Friedman (or Hayek), and will explore the Ostroms' ideas on the institutions that can make self-government possible. Her research, which is a grand contribution to political economy, is the foundation for any responsible work in political anarchism and libertarianism.