New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Does taking pictures sully our memories?

I live very close to Port Meadow, one of the largest meadows of open common land in the UK, already in existence in the 10th century, and mentioned in the Domesday book in 1086. I saw my first-ever live, wild oriole there. The land has been never ploughed, so it is possible to discern outlines of older archaeological remains, some going back to the Bronze Age. The consistent management of the land makes the changes predictable: it turns into a lake in winter, is sprinkled with buttercups this time of year (see pictures below the fold - both are taken at about the same place, but one in May and the other in November), and looks mysterious and misty in the fall. Whenever I walk on Port Meadow I take my camera, anxious to preserve any beautiful view that falls on my retina, to preserve it for future memories. And, like many other parents, I take dozens of pictures of my growing children. Recently, I saw an NPR piece (no author given) that took issue with this tendency to want to preserve pictures for future memory.

The article launches a two-pronged attack against pictures. First, by worrying about capturing the moment, we lose the transience and beauty of the moment and enjoy it less. Second, the article cites psychological evidence that shows that people actually remember fewer objects during a museum visit if they were allowed to take photos of them, compared to when they only were allowed to observe them. The phenomenon is known as the photo-taking-impairment effect. Linda Henkel, who discovered the effect, says: "Any time…we count on these external memory devices, we're taking away from the kind of mental cognitive processing that might help us actually remember that stuff on our own." 

APA prizes announced

here

(thanks to Amy Ferrer for the heads-up!) 

Congratulations to Andrew Bacon, Sally Haslanger, William Lycan, Larry May, and my co-editor, Elisabeth Lloyd!

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'City of Samba'

Thanks to fellow Brazilian logician Valeria de Paiva, I cam across this amazing video, ‘City of Samba’, created by the multimedia artists Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutit. The city of samba is, of course, Rio de Janeiro, a city that is perennially beautiful no matter how you look at it; but through the tilt shift lenses of the artists, it becomes frankly supernatural. The music is also specially composed by Jarbas Agnelli, using non-percussion instruments to recreate the magical drumming of a samba school. (Here is a video where he explains the creative process.)

Many of you may by now be a bit fed-up with the World Cup-induced Brazil frenzy, but I assure you that this video will blow your mind even if you are suffering from Brazil-fatigue.

Job Placement 2011-2014: Overview on Gender

I have data on 715 candidates who have been placed in tenure-track, postdoctoral, VAP, or instructor positions between late 2011 and mid 2014 (ending today), drawn from ProPhilosophy (2011-2012 and 2012-2013) and PhilAppointments (2013-2014). I aim to make the spreadsheet with this data available by around July 1st (I will add any new data available by that date). Until then, I will report some initial findings, starting with gender.

164th Philosopher's Carnival

Philosophers' Carnival #164 is HERE.

 

Lots of cool links presented in a fun way by Eric Schwitzgebel.

What are the bounds of toleration in a academic institution? (Sam Clark comments)

In the thread about the Nietzsche club affair, Sam Clark of Lancaster University posted a comment that I think is worthy of discussion:

------------

Let me disclaim any ambition to adjudicate this particular case, about which I know next to nothing, and focus on the issues of principle that might apply to it.

[Let's call PL the position]  that harm or the threat of harm is a necessary condition of our using power to interfere with speech, discussion, public meeting, political organization, or political recruitment.

I have three objections to PL:

1) PL is politically naive. If you don't interfere until there are blackshirts on the street beating people up, you've probably left it too late.

2) PL assumes a contentious definition of 'harm'. The 'who gets to decide?' question is a problem for everyone, not just for me: in particular, [the defender of PL] is claiming the right to decide (a) that a discussion seriously entertaining the idea that some historically and systematically oppressed kinds of people are inferior and should be subjected to hierarchical authority does not do or threaten harm; and that (b) preventing a group from using institutional capital (meeting rooms, communication networks, attention) to facilitate that discussion is or does.

3) PL takes as settled what should be subject to democratic deliberation: the bounds of toleration.

----

Most readers seemed to be squarely in the "PL" camp.   How do they respond to these points?

Eleven years, one million dead, and $2 Trillion later, Iraq is slowly falling under the control of al Qaeda

story here and here.   None of this is good for even the most cynical defenders of American geopolotical  and economic interests.    Its certainly no good for American security against "terrorism."   Even from the most cynical 'Merika-owns-the-world point of view possible, this a greater failure than even the most strident opponents of the Iraq war  predicted.  

Williamson on David Lewis

This summer I'm trying to get a little bit up to speed on modality issues by doing an independent study with some students.* I've started looking ahead to Williamson's recent magnum opus and this little bit of the preface weirded me out:

Since cosmological theories in physics are naturally understood as embodying no restriction of their purview to exclude Lewis's multiple spatiotemporal systems, many of which are supposed to violate their laws, his cosmology is inconsistent with physicists', and so in competition with them as a theory of total spatiotemporal reality. On such matters, physicists may be felt to speak with more authority than metaphysicians. The effect of Lewis's influential and ingenious system-building was to keep centre stage a view that imposed Quine's puritan standards on modality long after Quine's own eliminativist application of those standards have been marginalized (Williamson 2013, xii)

I don't get this at all.

The connection between Lewisian Genuine Realism and Quine's eliminativism is a promissory note that I assume he'll cash in later, but the first bit just makes no sense to me. In On the Plurality of Worlds, Lewis explicitly says that the nomologically possible worlds will be a subset of all possible worlds and he discusses physically impossible forms of space time in this context. He has to do this, since possible worlds are individuated by the space-time which each world shares with itself. But nowhere does he make claims about which class of worlds will be the nomologically possible ones.

Postdoctoral, VAP, and Instructor Placement Data

Yesterday I posted data for tenure-track placement from this past year. The data below include postdoctoral, VAP, and instructor hires sourced from PhilAppointments. Please check the data and make corrections in comments or by email (cjennings3 at ucmerced dot edu).

Sexual assault: 'few' perpetrators, many victims

Anyone who spends a modicum of time on the internet will have been exposed to the recent hashtag battle opposing #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen, so I don’t need to rehearse the details here. What I think is significant is that there may well be a sense in which both camps are right: it may well be the case that the proportion of men engaging in the more extreme forms of sexism and violence against women – the limit cases being sexual assault and rape – is relatively small, while the proportion of women being victims of these assaults is very high. There is no contradiction between the two.

Indeed, a 2002 study mentioned in this recent Slate article (which Eric W also linked to in a recent post – btw, it’s Eric’s post that got me thinking about this issue) on the sexual histories of college men found that ‘only’ 6% of those interviewed had attempted or successfully raped someone. But the catch is that there was an average of 6 rape attempts per perpetrator. So the math is simple: in a population of 100 college men and 100 college women, if 6 men are rapists but each engage in rape attempts 6 times during their college years, then it is perfectly possible that 36 of the 100 women, so more than a third of them, will have been the victims of successful or attempted rapes. (Naturally, there may also be cases of men sexually assaulting other men, but it seems that, in the college population in particular (as opposed to the prison population, or among younger male victims), the wide majority of cases is of male perpetrator and female victim.)

In case anyone has fallen for the media hype about the Turing Test having been "passed"

Here is a nice antidote.

(h/t Benny Goldberg)

Tuition and the Privatization of College Education

Thomas Frank has a nice analysis up on Salon.com on college tuition and debts.  In it, he points out that the crisis is of long duration, and people have been asking for more than a generation when the “college bubble” will burst.  Along the way, he shows that a number of standard explanations (overpaid professors, insatiable student demand for gymnasiums, etc.) don’t make any sense, at least not on their own.  His concluding point, though, seems vitally important.  Here’s a good-sized chunk of text (with significant ellipses); I’ll follow with a couple of additional thoughts:

Are American Colleges and Universities making a bad compromise when it comes to sexual assaults and misconduct?

There is a lot of controversy and protest among the students at Stanford University concerning what many are calling the mild punishment of a male undergraduate, found by a university committee to have been guilty of sexual misconduct and sexual assault using force.   The student will receive a five-quarter suspension, which will begin after he graduates, and he will be allowed to enroll at Stanford as a graduate student (he had already been admitted) after taking a “gap year.”

In this article about the events at Stanford, the Huffington Post details some disturbing statistics about the punishments doled out to sexual assailants at some of Stanford’s “peer institutions”.   It appears to be Stanford’s policy, for example, to allow such assailants to return to campus once their victims have graduated.   Since the victim in this case is graduating this year, the suspension is very short.  (And, inter alia, since 20% of U.S. college women have suffered some form of sexual assault by a male student, but around 5% of male college students sexually assault women, allowing students to return to campus to repeat offend seems like a terrible idea.)

 

The Future of the European Polity I: Overview

I originally intended Europe after Habermas and the Populist Surge,  to be a stand alone post and did not have any thoughts about promoting my own tentative views of European politics, and the appropriate theoretical references for discussion. It was just intended to be a timely account of the limitation of one approach to Europe and an indication of the role of one kind of theory in that approach.

I have been challenged to put forward my own views on the political and theoretical issues, and I do not think I can decently fail to respond, as clearly it is easy to take shots at someone else's point of view that put forward an alternative, which might become a target itself, and might disappoint some people who agree with my critical remarks. Another aspect of putting forward your own views is that it requires more space then defining weaknesses in another point of view, and this process is going to take more than one post. The present post will set up an overview and will be followed by posts dealing with institutions, policies, and theory. 

Tenure-Track Placement Data

Last year I posted some statistics on tenure-track, postdoctoral, and VAP placements between 2011 and 2013. I aim to continue these analyses for a third year. Along the way, I will post progress on data collection, in the case that corrections are in order. The data below include tenure-track or equivalent hires sourced from PhilAppointments (I will provide a new post with postdoctoral and VAP data soon). Please check the data and make corrections in comments or by email (cjennings3 at ucmerced dot edu).

The UCL Student Union ban is on 'Traditionalism' rather than Nietzsche

Philosophers on social media, blogs, and other platforms have been increasingly  discussing the Student Union ban on the Nietzsche Club at University College London  in the last day or so. Sorry I'm not providing links, because I'm not looking for an online rumble, but here are some links to news stories. The first thing to say is that this ban is horrendous and the second is that it has been lifted pending legal advice. What also needs to be understood is that the student union decision was not an attempt to ban discussion of Nietzsche, though it certainly circumscribes discussion of Nietzsche in UCL student union facilities.

The ban was in reaction to a poster of the 'Nietzsche Club' advertising discussion of Alain de Benoist and Julius Evola, alongside Heidegger and Nietzsche. Benoist is the founding and presiding figure of the 'Nouvelle Droite' (New Right, but not to be confused with the Anglosphere free market New Right of the 1980s) in France, which is anti-globalist and anti-free market, also opposing cultural pluralism within nations. Julius Evola (1898-1974) was a writer on southern Asian religion and spirituality, and known to some only in that role. He was also an advocate of authoritarianism, hierarchy and 'tradition',  with tradition to be understood as inherently anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and anti-modern. Like Benoist now, he liked to present

Brazilian music on Fridays: National Anthem

In less than a week from now, the opening match of the World Cup will take place, between Brazil and Croatia. Inevitably, the World Cup exposes spectators to a variety of national anthems from around the world – many of which we’d be just as well not having to listen to. To be honest, the Brazilian national anthem is not particularly beautiful, especially as the lyrics contain the usual dose of chauvinism; but in an instrumental version, here with the virtuoso mandolin player Hamilton de Holanda, it actually sounds surprisingly good.

Top Ten Reasons philosophers of science should post their papers to PhilSci-Archive

10. You can get an accepted but-not-yet-published paper read right away, without waiting for those sometimes lengthy publication times.

9. You can increase the visibility of your work because
    a) PhilSci-Archive articles score highly in Google searches and
    b) sites like PhilPapers scan PhilSci-Archive and will include links to your papers automatically.

8. You can get feedback on a work-in-progress from a wider audience than just the couple of people you can think to email.

7. Your work can be read, for free, by anyone, even those without institutional library access.  

6. Work that was presented, but never published, can be made accessible.

5. Papers in those harder-to-obtain volumes will be more widely accessible.

4. If you are in an underrepresented area of philosophy of science or are an author in an underrepresented group in philosophy of science, you can help to increase the visibility of your area or your group.  [Right now, the papers are disproportionately in philosophy of physics – you can help change that].

3. PhilSci-Archive is a non-profit organization – like PhilPapers, but unlike, say, Academia.edu or Research Gate. You can feel good about contributing to its flourishing.

2. After posting your articles, you can linger a bit and check out some of the good work that is there already, including conference papers and (in a new venture) open source journals.  Or you can sign up for an email subscription, the Twitter feed, or the Facebook page.

1. It's cool, and all the cool kids are doing it.  You can be cool, too.

Verrry interesting

Eric Schwitzgebel recently took up the question of whether an infinitely extended life must be boring. The discussion ended (when I looked at it) with Eric’s fruitfully suggesting that we look at various cognitive architectures and their capacities for boredom over the long run.

No doubt there are many kinds of minds. Let’s radically simplify the problem, in hopes of arriving at a precise answer for at least one case. (After all, if a mind without much to think about can escape boredom, then presumably a more amply stocked mind can too.) The mind I want consider thinks only of natural numbers and number theory (algebraic and analytic). Its “perceptions” consist in presentations of random natural numbers. Will it be bored?

A Theory of Jerks, and a Query about the Term "Idiot"

I have a new theory of the jerk, just out in Aeon.

The piece uses the term "idiot" in several places to characterize how the jerk sees the world: "I'm important, and I'm surrounded by idiots!" In light of Shelley Tremain's remarks to me about the history of the word "idiot", I'm wondering whether I should have avoided it. I'd be interested in the thoughts of NewAPPS folks about this. In my mind, it is exactly the sort of word the jerk is prone to use, and how he is prone to think of people -- and of course he thinks of people in offensive ways and won't be bothered by offensive terms unless that's his particular moral high horse. So there's a conflict now between my desire to capture the worldview of the jerk with phenomenological accuracy and my newly heightened sensitivity to the historical associations of that particular word.

[illustration by Paul Blow]

Zaretsky's list of things academics should never do (hat-tip Rod Dreher)

At the CHE, with discussion, here:

1. Never give copies of your books to friends and family.
2. Never call students by their first names.
3. Never try to be cool.
4. Never lament the building of new football stadiums rather than new library wings.
5. Never become an administrator.
6. Never allow the Internet in the classroom.
7. Never teach a class outdoors.
8. Never refer to yourself by the title "Dr."—unless you are a real doctor.
9. Never confuse a syllabus with reality.
10. Never turn down a plum administrative position.

Rod Dreher is soliciting additions to the list. I would add: (11) Never become visibly angry in the classroom, and (12) Never try to influence your students' political beliefs.

Europe after Habermas and the Populist Surge

Shortly after elections to the European Parliament, and in the midst of political jostling over the name of the next President of the Commision, is a timing that makes a post on European politics and  the idea of Europe  timely, though the issues are constantly with us and I suspect that problems in the European Union will keep it constantly in the news. What looks like serious legitimacy problems for the European Union also has the consequence of creating a European public opinion of a kind, in that Europe is in the news across the nations of the continent. 

One theoretical approach to Europe seems to me very much questioned  though advocates presumably will not think so. That is the approach of Habermas, who has become the uncrowned philosophical prince of the European Union. The radical egalitarian who makes some claims to some continuity with Marxism is invited to speak events with the highest EU dignitaries present and so appears to be de facto accepted by the European centre right as well as the more left inclined, as the philosophical voice of the European project. His version of Neo-Marxism, Post-Marxism, Liberal-Marxist fusionism,  or however else his thought is best described, is an interesting case of apparent radical critique becoming part of the self-understanding of an elite. His emphasis on the rationality and ethics of political discourse evidently has some appeal to those who make a living from the European Union, and researchers close to that world. The thinking of such people (and I have been personally acquainted with some) is very much along the lines that the EU institutions represent reason and informed decisions making, while strong criticism reflects 'populist' ignorance, stereotyping, and scapegoating.

Canonical report on financialization of higher education

Very nice report from the folks at Debt and Society here about higher ed's tango with Wall Street. Lot's of distressing stuff, including the change from old fashioned bonds to newer, more risky types of debt:

Private and public colleges in the past more commonly issued municipal bonds that would be repaid using only tax revenue or revenue from a particular project like a dormitory. Investment banking houses like JP Morgan and Barclays today have helped some higher education institutions to issue general revenue bonds that collateralize all college revenue in exchange for lower interest rates. Such bonds pledge state appropriations, project revenue, and even future tuition increases if necessary to repay bonds. Other institutions have gone a step further, adding variable rate bonds to their debt mix. Other institutions still, from Harvard to the Peralta Community College district have securitized these variable rate bond offerings with derivatives known as interest rate swaps. For-profit institutions, on the other hand can turn to corporate bonds, stock offerings, and private equity capital.

There is also a nice history of higher education financing, describing how and why student and institutional indebtedness has exploded recently. In one decade alone the amount of institutional debt has tripled, much of it spent on new buildings and things related to athletics programs. It's a vicious circle. Colleges take out loans to expand amenities to attract students who will pay higher tuition, which requires raising tuition to pay off the debt, which requires expanding amenities, which requires taking out loans to expand amenities. . .*

It's a very weird thing to have happened right after the financial crisis that caused the current recession.** Maybe not that weird though. . . If history teaches anything it's that very smart people can collectively do very stupid things.

[*Also remember that, as recounted here, universities with the highest paid administrators and coaches also are the worst at larding their students up with debt and adjunctifying the faculty.

**Also, check out Ed's piece from March here, which has a nice discussion of how the expanded institutional indebtedness ends up dictating administrative policy.]