New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Gendered atrocities

December 2012 will be remembered as the month when two horrific events took place: the Newtown shooting, which cost 26 lives (if I’m not mistaken), and a brutal gang-rape in New Delhi, which cost the victim’s life. (UPDATE: One of many, but for once the victims survived long enough to tell their story, and for once people listened.) In both cases, the events set in motion a wave of collective outrage, raising in particular the inevitable questions of how something like this could have happened, and what can be done to prevent similar atrocities in the future.

What do the two events have in common? One thing they have in common is the imperativeness of viewing both from the perspective of gender roles. With respect to the rape case, the gender dimension is immediately apparent, as rape is one of the most brutal and yet extremely widespread forms of male domination over women. But the mass shooting in Newtown, and in fact mass shootings in general in the USA, may (and should!) also be discussed against the background of gender roles. The fact is that virtually every mass shooting has been perpetrated by men (and in fact, mostly by white, middle to upper class males), and this is no coincidence.

The experiential problem of evil and theodicy

There is a recent interesting Prosblogion blogpost on the question of whether theodicy can ever be successful, and if so what success conditions a theodicy must meet. I want consider a related, yet distinct question: can theodicies be convincing in the light of specific instances of evil, and the immediate sense this provokes: "God, if he exists, would not have allowed this"? In the wake of the tragic shooting incident at Newtown, I have been thinking a lot about the problem of evil and classical theodicies and defenses, such as John Hick's soul building theodicy and various forms of free will theodicies/defenses (e.g., Plantinga's; Augustine's).

One way to approach the problem of evil is to look at it as an abstract puzzle to be solved. Wielding modal logic and other tools that analytic philosophy offers, we can argue that evil is unavoidable even for a loving, powerful and omniscient God, if he wishes specific goods like free will to obtain. A different option is to focus on concrete, vivid examples. William Rowe presented the case of a fawn, trapped in a forest fire that was caused by lightning, the fawn suffers horrible burns, and lies in dreadful agony for days until its death. A pointless instance of suffering that, Rowe argues, God could have prevented. Now for cases like Newtown we could invoke the free will defense, since - unlike the forest fire in Rowe's example - the incident was caused by a human agent, exercising his free will, and it was made possible by other instances of free will, such as American policies on gun ownership. But it still seems to me quite a different thing to argue in the face of particular, vivid instances like this that suffering is outweighed by the greater good of the unbridled exercise of free will by moral agents. When confronted with concrete evil like this, theodicy, or indeed any theistic response to the problem of evil, becomes a formidable task indeed.

#Idle No More and Settler Colonialism: We Are All Treaty People

A movement called #Idle No More is sweeping across Canada and into the United States.  First Nations from Haida Gwaii to Stephenville, Newfoundland, from Iqaluit to Windsor, Ontario – and Native Americans in New York, New Mexico, California, and many other states – have organized flash mobs in shopping malls and public squares to sing, drum, and perform traditional round dances.  Some First Nations have blockaded highways and railways.  Where did this movement come from, and where is it going?

Québec Cuts to Universities

As readers of this blog know, the erstwhile Liberal government in Québec attempted to increase university tuition fees a little over a year ago. This led to a long student strike and harsh police measures against student protest. Then the Liberal government was defeated in elections held in September, and the separatist Parti Québécois formed a new minority government. Given that it does not control the provincial parliament, it has been a remarkably aggressive government, introducing a number of highly visible nationalist measures, including a bill that would require businesses with more that 25 employees to operate internally in French. (Interestingly, the penalty for non-compliance would be inclusion on a name-and-shame website.)

More controversial still are the measures taken against universities. The above-mentioned tuition fee increase was cancelled along with the consequent revenue increase to universities. And the universities were presented with a retroactive cut of $126 million to their combined budgets. (McGill's share of the cut is about $20 million, just to give you an idea . . . eight months into the budget year, they have to fill this unanticipated hole in the current year's budget.)

It's a large cut, yet students and faculty seem oddly complaisant. At McGill, for example, the Principal, the Board, and non-academic staff have taken a strong stand, but as far as I can tell there has been little reaction from faculty or student groups. This marks a strange contrast with the enthusiastic support that the student protests found among faculty. Is it just the holidays?

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Taj Mahal' by Adriana Partimpim

Here’s a short BMoF, as by the time this goes online I’ll be enjoying a short city break in Brussels with my family. Now, one of the CDs we got for Xmas this year (obrigada, Malu!) is the latest by Adriana Partimpim, aka Adriana Calcanhotto. I’ve posted some of her songs before, and I love both her work for adults as well as her work for children (for which she adopts the Partimpim persona). This latest CD features old 'classics' as well as some of her own compositions; one of the classics in question is ‘Taj Mahal’ by Jorge Ben, which I’ve also posted at BMoF some time ago. So here is this new version of ‘Taj Mahal’ so different from the original and yet so true to its joyful spirit. (Btw, I very much recommend the whole CD; lots of beautiful songs for kids and grownups!)

Experimenting on Americans: Genetically modified salmon

The U.S. is poised to release genetically modified salmon – the first commercial genetically modified food animal – into the world: onto our tables and into our environment. I can't help but think that, like the other unlabeled genetically modified food that has infiltrated our diets, this amounts to a massive, uncontrolled experiment on U.S. citizens.

Here are some details:

A little over a week ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft Environmental Assessment  of AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon, dubbed AquAdvantage; they are calling for public comment through February 25, 2013.  (So, if you find this as concerning as I do, please use this opportunity to speak up). The FDA's preliminary finding is that an approval of AquaBounty's application would not have a significant impact on the U.S. environment. Oh, and as with other U.S. GMOs, AquAdvantage won't be labeled as a GMO.  Any salmon that one eats could be an AquAdvantage salmon.

Intimidation of public universities (Turkey & Flanders) and the Rectors that play along

Disturbing stories are ongoing in Turkey and in Flanders: university administrators are eager to accede to demands of the government  (Turkey) or powerful politicians (Flanders) to silence and intimidate student and faculty protests against government policies/proposals.  The more serious one is developing in Turkey, where a student protest turned violent. The linked report claims that ODTU/METU (confusingly, there are two acronyms for same university) students threw Molotov cocktails. However, my Turkish sources claim there is no evidence of that, and have linked to this (Turkish) video, which suggests unprovoked police attacks, although I cannot guarantee, of course, there was no editing. (Maybe some of the police were trained in California?) I should say that the Rector of ODTÜ/METU, one of the most prestigious universities in Turkey, is showing backbone and is meeting with the government today. There is petition to show support here.

In Flanders, the philosopher, Lieven De Cauter, wrote an ill-tempered, satirical (somewhat funny) attack  (it's in Dutch, but enough is in English to understand how silly it all is) on the leading Flemish nationalist politician, Bart De Wever, who has a tendency to name-drop once famous philosophers (e.g., Adorono) in his editorials (this one preparing the way for future cuts in art-subsidies).  Yeah, Europe really is different. De Wever responded in brief to De Cauter. (The email exchange is linked in Dutch.) But what De Wever didn't tell De Cauter is that he also wrote Mark Waer, the Rector of the Catholic University in Leuven (one of De Cauter's employers), who has a poor record defending academics under attack, to complain about De Cauter. Waer responded, meekly, criticizing (I am freely translating) De Cauter's lack of civility. But the sentence that caught my attention was Waer's insistence that "there is also such a thing as academic restraint,"["Maar er is ook zoiets als academische terughoudendheid,"] clearly suggesting De Cauter failed in this duty.

What makes these stories interesting is that (a) the political establishments of both Turkey and Flanders are eager to invest in higher education as a means toward prosperous futures; (b) in both places important democratically elected politicians lack warmth toward an open, critical society (and a university professoriat that they see aligned with a discarded establishment); (c) in both places important parts of the higher education establishment much prefer being at the technocratic core of industry-government investment rather than presiding the kind of creative fertility and tension that is the breeding ground for creative industries (and what passes for independent thought) .

Social integration and brain chemistry approaches to treating PTSD

This NYT article (h/t Greg Downey on FB; check out his Neuroanthropology blog) lays out research on the effects of social conditions (isolation vs integration) on PTSD. Greg excerpted this quote: 

It turns out that most trauma victims — even survivors of combat, torture or concentration camps — rebound to live full, normal lives. That has given rise to a more nuanced view of trauma — less a poison than an infectious agent, a challenge that most people overcome but that may defeat those weakened by past traumas, genetics or other factors. Now, a significant body of work suggests that even this view is too narrow — that the environment just after the event, particularly other people’s responses, may be just as crucial as the event itself.

I thought this one about Nepalese ex-child soldiers provided a good concrete example: 

But in villages that readily and happily reintegrated them (usually via rituals or conventions specifically designed to do so), they experienced no more mental distress than did peers who had never gone to war. The lasting harm of being a child soldier, it seemed, arose not from the war but from social isolation and conflict afterward.

Contrast* the social integration approach to an individual pathology approach, using cognitive behavioral therapy and / or SSRIs to handle symptoms or beta-blockers to intervene in memory formation (another h/t to Greg Downey for this link). 

The greatest Christmas basketball video evah

Okay, so it's a small category, but still, you gotta recognize! 

On homeless philosophical notions...

Edward Feser has responded to my  blog-posts (on mythic history of science, on Nagel's abuse of the PSR, on naturalism in analytical philosophy) about Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. His is a very long post, but makes for interesting Holiday reflections. (I hope to respond in depth when I return from holiday.)

For the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosopher, then, modern metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, etc. are in the same shape that Alasdair MacIntyre famously argued modern ethics is in. In the former cases no less than the latter, crucial philosophical notions have been ripped from the intellectual contexts that gave them their intelligibility and have become distorted as a result, and the range of theoretical options visible to the modern philosopher has shrunk drastically. Nagel’s proposals are bound to seem odd and ill-motivated, not only because they are inchoate, but because fully to work out their implications would require a far more extensive rethinking of current orthodoxy than Nagel himself probably realizes. (That is no doubt one reason why his ideas are inchoate.) Questions about PSR, teleology, etc. cannot properly be understood if they are treated as mere add-ons to a basically naturalistic-cum-scientistic picture of knowledge and reality, which leave that picture essentially intact. The picture as a whole needs to be rethought if any part of it is seriously to be rethought...

Post Newtown thoughts

Some quick thoughts on some of the post-Newtown massacre discussions that have been rattling around my brain.  Seems to me that they need more attention and discussion.

Some people seem to assume that anyone who would mass murder young children must be mentally ill in a way that is relevant to the act of murder.  Such assumptions seem to strip the murderer of moral culpability for his actions.  They also seem to imply that members of the KKK, Nazis, gang members, and others who have killed en masse were mentally ill, an implication I find implausible.  Is it time to bring the word "evil" back into common use, or some other word that expresses the extreme unethical behavior exhibited by such people? 

One important lesson of Newtown that I wished I heard more people emphasizing: even if only "good" people had guns (as though we could identify such people ahead of time), the person who owns the gun may not be the person who uses the gun.  The person who owns the gun may even be the person who is killed by the gun.  Any claim that we need more guns needs to address this issue head on or it's not even worth a moment's consideration.

The NRA wants armed security guards in the schools.  How about we take a scientific approach to this question?  How often have such guards prevented tragedies (not in Columbine) and how often have bystanders gotten hurt (as they did at the Empire State Building incident last August)?  And what are the educational impacts of having such guards around?

Very Big Crime in Canada

UPDATE Sunday 23 December: It has now emerged that had it not been for brilliant police work by the Sûreté du Québec, the world's Maple Syrup Reserve would have been seriously depleted. As it is, only two-thirds of the stolen commodity has been recovered. The Canadian dollar has slipped 1.5% in the week since the heist occured. 

From the Globe and Mail

 "Police have made a breakthrough in the headline-grabbing heist of millions of dollars’ worth of maple syrup from a warehouse in Quebec.

"Quebec provincial police said the three individuals are to appear in court in Trois-Rivières Tuesday in connection with the massive theft from a maple-syrup warehouse in St-Louis-de-Blandford.

"The Sûreté du Québec said they also seized vehicles suspected of having served to transport the stolen maple syrup as well as equipment. Some two-thirds of the lucrative condiment has been recovered, say police."

So there, you Americans.

Things We Learned Today

From the New York Times, 23/12/12:

From a story about three poor women who made it to college and then dropped out: “Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees . . . Now the gap is 45%. While both groups improved their odds of finishing college, the affluent improved much more, widening their sizable lead.”

From a story about planted review on Amazon.com: “The mystery novelist J. A. Konrath does not see anything wrong with an author indulging in chicanery. ‘Customer buys book because of fake review = zero harm,” he wrote on his blog.

Using the technology we have - a new format for books

I was chatting with Rebecca Kukla a couple weeks ago about things we would like to do with a second edition of Yo&Lo and the following general thought occurred to me.  When it comes to books that people are interested in, we have roughly two distinct media forms for philosophical interaction.  We have the printed book itself, and sometimes later printed articles and reviews.  And we have lots of discussions - in conferences, symposia, classes, etc.  The former are permanent, but fixed - non-dialogical.  The latter are interactive and dialogical, but ephemeral. Once they are over, they exist only in the memory of participants.  (And if we make a web-cast of the event, then it flips to the first category.  

A Foucaultian analysis of framing gun violence as a public health issue

Doug Henwood, author of the wonderful book Wall Street, editor of the Left Business Observer, and blogger at LBO-News, recently broadcast a phone interview with Mark Ames,  author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, on the history of rampage killings, up to and including the Newtown massacre. Toward the end of the interview Henwood claims that right wing anti-gun control fits explicitly into their coherent political philosophy of competitive / possessive individualism, but that neoliberal Democrats can't admit their neoliberalism (that is, their own competitive individualism) and so flounder about looking for a rationale for their gun control efforts.

The mention of neoliberalism reminded me that a week or two ago I briefly discussed Bernard Harcourt's seminar in which François Ewald, alongside Gary Becker himself, discussed Foucault's reading of Becker's human capital theory. Ewald is a specialist in social risk management and has written extensively on the history of insurance in France.

Bringing the two together I'm going to try to work out a Foucaultian reading of the strategy in which Democrats pose gun-control legislation under the rubric of handling public health or public safety risks.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Nouvelle Cuisine

The connections between Brazilian music (Bossa Nova in particular) and jazz are well known, but most Brazilian musicians following a more jazzy approach (as opposed to Brazilian folk music with light touches of jazz) are based abroad (e.g. Eliane Elias). Jazz is not exactly ‘music for the masses’ in Brazil. One interesting exception was a jazz band of the late 1980s, early 1990s: Nouvelle Cuisine. Their first album (1988) featured a collection of jazz standards such as ‘My funny valentine’, ‘Embraceable you’, ‘Lullaby of birdland’, which is something quite unusual for a Brazilian band (I am not aware of any other such albums). In later albums, they continued to record jazz classics but veered more and more towards the classic repertoire of Brazilian folk music.

I was a big fan of their first album already back in the day, and listening to it now, it strikes me how jazzy and yet how unconventional the arrangements are (for jazz standards, that is). I hadn’t thought of Nouvelle Cuisine at all for many years, but the other day I heard ‘Lullaby of birdland’ on the radio (the Ella F version), and had to think of my first acquaintance with this song thanks to Nouvelle Cuisine. So let me post here ‘Embraceable you’ (I love this version, but my very favorite version is probably Cleo Laine’s), ‘Lullaby of birdland’, and to illustrate what Nouvelle Cuisine did with classics of Brazilian folk music, ‘Flor de Lis’ (from a later album), the first hit of my beloved Djavan (for the sake of comparison, here is the original).

a voluntary contribution to the anonymity of journals

In response to Berit's post on whether journal refereeing is really anonymous, I offered a tentative suggestion that I'm here posting as a separate thread.

The complexity of poker

(A second in a series, drawn from joint work with K. Joseph Mourad.)
How do we measure the complexity of decision procedures in poker?  This is a question that is both complex and subtle, and seems to me interesting in thinking about the interplay between formal modeling of epistemological situations and more concrete strategic epistemic thinking.

Stand with Erik Loomis

Erik Loomis blogs at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. He wrote in the wake of the Newtown Massacre, "I was heartbroken in the first 20 mass murders. Now I want Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick." For this, he has been targeted by the bottom-feeders and outrage artists of the right-wing.

The folks at Crooked Timber sum up the reaction and our duty:

We must stand by Loomis’s side and speak up and out on his behalf, for he has become the target of a witch hunt, and as an untenured professor at the University of Rhode Island, he is vulnerable. Loomis needs our solidarity and support, and we must give it to him.

Below the fold, my letter to the President of the University of Rhode Island, who issued the following craven and misleading statement: 

The University of Rhode Island does not condone acts or threats of violence. These remarks do not reflect the views of the institution and Erik Loomis does not speak on behalf of the University. The University is committed to fostering a safe, inclusive and equitable culture that aspires to promote positive change.

I urge you to write to President David Dooley at [email protected], and to sign onto the Crooked Timber statement.

Are we living in an age where the naturalistic consensus will be shattered?

At his blog Edward Feser has been responding to Thomas Nagel's critics (no, not me (yet)!). In response to Sober's review he concludes with the following sociological remark:

That, I think, is precisely what is going on -- the “presuppositions that Nagel is trying to transcend” run so deep in contemporary academic philosophical culture that it is difficult for most philosophers to get any critical distance on them.  They lack, as Nietzsche might have said, the courage for an attack on their own convictions.  And yet the evidence that there is something deeply wrong with the naturalistic consensus is all around them even in “mainstream” academic philosophy -- in the work of renegade naturalists like Nagel, Searle, Fodor, McGinn, et al.; dualists like Chalmers, Brie Gertler, Howard Robinson, John Foster, et al.; and neo-Aristotelians like the “new essentialist” metaphysicians and philosophers of science (Cartwright, Ellis, Martin, Heil, Mumford, et al.) and the analytical Thomists (Oderberg, Klima, Haldane, et al.).  It’s psychologically easy (even if philosophically sleazy) to dismiss one or two of these thinkers as outliers who needn’t be taken seriously.  But as their ranks slowly grow, it will be, and ought to be, harder both psychologically and philosophically to dismiss them.

Which is no doubt why the more ideological naturalists would very dearly like to strangle this growing challenge to the consensus while it is still in its crib -- hence the un-philosophical nastiness with which Nagel’s views have been greeted in some quarters.  But Sober, to his credit, is not an ideologue, and is sober enough to acknowledge at least the possibility that Nagel is on to something.--Edward Feser.

The ‘stale PhD' issue and post-doc positions

Leiter has a post up on the issue of the ‘stale PhD', which remains an ongoing debate despite the unusually bad job market of the last years. The rationale seems to be that real ‘stars’ will land TT jobs straight out of graduate school, so if someone has been out of graduate school for some time and still does not have a TT job, search committees will infer that there is something ‘wrong’ with the candidate -- otherwise he or she would have already gotten a TT job. The vicious circularity of the process is patent: the reason why you don’t get a TT job is that you didn’t get a TT job in the first place. It is unfair, but yet one of these heuristics that people use to save time and effort in judging and decision-making processes.

My understanding is that the focus on TT job is predominantly a North-American phenomenon, as opposed to how the job market is organized in Europe (especially continental Europe). As some readers outside Europe may already know, academic research in Europe is heavily subsidized by research grants provided by funding agencies such as the European Research Council as well as national agencies (in the Netherlands, the almighty NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) – a structure that Eric Schliesser has voiced quite a few objections to, but one which I see as having many advantages as well. (And I must admit that these people have been pretty generous with me so far, so I can’t complain…)

The journal reviewing process isn’t anonymous. Did you really think it was? Think again!

You have worked on your paper on this extraordinarily complicated and remarkably interesting solution to the knowability paradox for four years. You finally got it right. After polishing the piece, vetting the ideas at department colloquium talks and workshops and incorporating feedback from cohorts, you submit to a top-ten mainstream journal. Then you patiently, very patiently, wait a year and a half and get a rejection. Hostile referee reports! They HATE the paper.

Seizing seizable moments

As professors, current events often provide "teachable moments."  For politicians, they provide what we might call "seizable moments."  President Obama seems to be faced with a few of them right now: an election-generated seizable moment whereby he ought to be able to resist calls to cut Social Security and continue tax cuts on the wealthy; a Sandy-generated seizable moment to take more serious action to curb global climate change; and a Newtown-generated seizable moment to do something about gun control.  Unfortunately, I'm only seeing movement on the third (a suggestion he will back Senator Diane Feinstein's bill to ban assault weapons); he seems to be backsliding on the first and mum on the second. Arguably, it is the third issue that seems to have the most people and emotion behind it.  So, we can blame Obama for not having a stronger spine to follow through on what he said he woudl do (and I do blame him for that).  Or, we can blame ourselves for not making more of a stink about the other two issues.   As philosophers, do we have a role to play?  Or are we too analytical to fire up an emotion-driven populace in order to spur the President to seize the seizable moments?

Mocking the "defense against tyranny" bit

As M.P. notes here in comments on Mohan's post, there is an undercurrent of thought (using the term lightly) that defends absolutist interpretations of the 2nd Amendment by claiming that widespread ownership of guns (sometimes specified as assault weapons) serves as a last line of defense against "tyranny." 

Below the fold, I mock a particular expression of this idea, which showed up at a blog I frequent, Lawyers, Guns, and Money. I also make a few serious points.

It's Weird, isn't it . . .

. . . that a country that violates the evident human rights of millions of travellers every day, by searching and scanning them, and which taps telephones and emails in order to avoid a human disaster on airplanes, can then tolerate the murder of children because it violates an entirely fictional right to bear arms.

Zoë Heller on Rushdie

I know that not everybody enjoys or appreciates Salman Rushdie, but he is without question one of the more important and influential novelists of the last thirty years. His prose resounds with the rhythms and mutlilingual allusions of the smarty-pants English that Indians speak; his themes are large and intellectually important. Some don't like his attitude, but few who know what he is talking about fail to appreciate the challenge.

Zoë Heller, a talented but slight novelist (Notes on a Scandal), has gained vicarious celebrity with her typically British put-down of Rushdie's exile memoir in the New York Review of Books, now touted for "hatchet-job of the year". (I am sorry I got around to reading my copy of NYRB so late.)

impredicativity in finite (empirical) contexts

(This will be the first in a series of posts designed to suggest that the mathematics of impredicativity - especially methods of definition that make use of revision-theoretic procedures - are relevant to empirical contexts.  Everything I say in these grows out of joint work with my math colleague Joe Mourad.)

Two basic points about the notion of impredicativity: first, it is much broader than what non-expert philosophers tend to think of under the rubric of paradoxes, vicious circularity, and the like.  Second, it is a property of definitions - or, more generally, procedures - not of concepts or sets, in the first instance.  Given an appreciation of these points, it is not hard to see that the general phenomenon can pose important epistemological issues in contexts in which there are no infinite totalities in play, indeed, in the context of various empirical discussions.  

Philosopher's Carnival #146

HERE. Lot's of fun and interesting discussion concerning the  role of intuitions, as well as other cool stuff, including a quote from one of our own:

When two self-perceived victims get together, you get a chorus of hurt.

Then, after sharing some of the lyrics:

My heart goes out to anybody who utters such a wail, knowing that he is himself held in precisely the same low esteem. My mind, however, remains steely and cold.

Ha! Mohan wins the internet.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Luiz Gonzaga, the king of baião

Yesterday was the centenary of birth of Luiz Gonzaga, without a doubt one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century in Brazil. Gonzaga popularized the music of the northern-eastern countryside of Brazil like no other, at a time when the rest of the country did not pay much attention to this poor, dry, forgotten region. The style almost singlehandedly brought to the rest of the country by Luiz Gonzaga is called baião, which is the original variant of the now very popular style forró, now enjoyed and danced by scores of young and not-so-young people of different social backgrounds and all over Brazil. (It is very popular among the youth of middle and upper classes in cities such as Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which according to some has led to a regrettable transformation of the original northern-eastern origins of the music.) Luiz Gonzaga was the one who defined the still now official instrumental composition of a forró band: accordion (Gonzaga himself was an accordionist), zabumba (bass drum, played standing) and metal triangle; he also composed all the great classics of the genre. Because of the accordion, baião and forró sound a bit like European folk music (say, Irish folk music), and also Cajun music.

More substantive advice to admissions committees

And hiring committees also.  It is this: the fact that x has received better training than y - gone to a better school, worked with more accomplished teachers, etc. - is a reason, cp, to prefer y to x.