I had thought that the idea that the sunk costs fallacy is really a fallcy was as close a thing as there was to a consensus amongst philosophers. But now I see that “Tom Kelly”:http://www.nd.edu/~tkelly6/projects.html has a paper forthcoming (in __No{u^}s__) saying that “honouring sunk costs can be rational”:http://www.nd.edu/~tkelly6/NousSunk.htm. Like a few other people in the New England area, whenever I think of the sunk costs fallacy I think of the Red Sox continuing to play “Tony Clark”:http://www.baseball-reference.com/c/clarkto02.shtml long after he showed he wouldn’t justify his $5,000,000 salary, so I’m not exactly positively disposed to the fallacy. But Tom’s paper makes several interesting points, even if it doesn’t do anything to redeem the Sox management __circa__ 2002.
Posts by author:
Brian
The NY Times reports that my department just acquired a new fictional graduate.
bq. “Orders Come From a Talking Lion (Made of Wax)”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/arts/television/X12HEFF.html?ex=1394514000&en=0d7f1ed9316e4d01&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
bq. Jaye [the main character in __Wonderfalls__] lives in a tricked-out trailer, which makes her seem resourceful; she also has a degree in philosophy from Brown. And in the second episode we learn that she can write.
I would like to think that when we learn she has a degree in philosophy from Brown, we thereby learn she can write, but I’m not sufficiently down with the requisite fictional conventions to tell for sure. I do think it’s cute that saying a character is a Brown grad is a way of placing them in American fiction. I don’t know how exactly many other schools have fictional stereotypes associated with them, though obviously there are a few.
“Caoine”:http://caoine.org/mt/archives/2004_03.php#002966 is feeling remarkably generous. She has decided to donate her 2004 Amazon referrals income to a charity, but can’t decide which one. This seems like a good opportunity to ask blog readers who might know something about this, which charities do provide good value for your donated dollar? I’ve always thought Oxfam was good value, but my evidence for that isn’t entirely overwhelming. (I remember “Peter Unger”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/unger/ did some investigations and decided they were worth supporting, so that’s some evidence, but that was one data point several years ago.) If anyone has any better suggestions, or reasons why Oxfam isn’t really as good as I’ve always thought, I’d be happy to hear them.
I rather liked the discussion that followed from John’s “earlier post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001450.html on voting systems. So just for fun I thought I’d try a more complicated version of an example I brought up in the comments there, to see what people’s opinions are.
Some of the most charmingly pointless controversies on “my other blog”:http://brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/ have been about just what region is denoted by ‘Midwest’. (For prior installments, see “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/001580.html, “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/001568.html and “here”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002519.html.) I think those are fun, but we seem to have run out of things to say on that word. So it’s time for something new. Just which parts of New York State are denoted by ‘upstate’?
The post below, which arose out of some discussion in my philosophy seminar last week, is a fair bit less topical than most posts on CT, but since it touches on some topics in philosophy of science and economics some people here might find it interesting. Plus I get to bash Milton Friedman a bit, but not for the reasons you might expect.
Over on my other blog, a discussion started up about whether it is valuable to do a terminal MA before starting a PhD. My impression is that in philosophy, the answer is sometimes yes. The obvious costs are that you spend longer in grad school, and may have to move once more often. The benefits are that you may get into a better PhD program after an MA than after a BA, that you’ll be better prepared for the PhD, and you’ll have an opportunity to tell whether you want to be in grad school before making a serious commitment. I think that if you don’t get into a top PhD program, and you do get into a top MA program[1] on balance it probably is better to do the MA. Is this true across the humanities in America? Is it true even in philosophy? The structure of graduate degrees in the UK and Australia is quite different to America, so I’m not sure how well this would generalise across the oceans.
fn1. Assuming these exist in all fields. In philosophy a few schools offer highly respected terminal MA programs, and many of the graduates of those programs are placed in top PhD programs. The most prominent examples are Tufts and Arizona State, but there are several other such programs.
This is what I need more of – theoretical justifications for __not__ reading things.
bq. “Neil Levy”:http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/cappe/STAFF/Neil.html, “Open-Mindedness and the Duty to Gather Evidence; Or, Reflections Upon Not Reading the Volokh Conspiracy (For Instance)”:http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/cappe/STAFF/open_mindedness.pdf (PDF)
At times Neil comes perilously close to endorsing Kripke’s paradox. Assume __p__ is something I know. So any evidence against __p__ is evidence for something false. Evidence for something false is misleading evidence. It’s bad to attend to misleading evidence. So I shouldn’t attend to evidence against __p__. So more generally I should ignore evidence that tells against things I know.
But Neil’s main point is more subtle than that. It’s that it can be a bad idea to approach a topic as an expert when in fact you’re not one. And that seems like good advice, even if you really should be reading “the Volokh Conspiracy”:http://www.volokh.com (for instance).
I’ve never understood a lot of the attraction behind game theory. In particular, I’ve never heard a convincing argument for why Nash equilibria should be considered especially interesting. The only argument I know of for choosing your side of a Nas equilibria in a one-shot game involves assuming, while deciding what to do, that the other guy knows what decision you will make. This doesn’t even make sense as an idealisation. There’s a better chance of defending the importance of Nash equilibria in repeated games, and I think this is what evolutionary game theorists make a living from. But even there it doesn’t make a lot of sense. In the most famous game of all, Prisoner’s Dilemma, we know that the best strategy in repeated games is __not__ to choose the equilbrium option, but instead to uphold mutual cooperation for as long as possible.
The only time Nash equilibria even look like being important is in repeated zero-sum games. In that case I can almost understand the argument for choosing an equilibrium option. (At least, I can see why that’s a not altogether ridiculous heuristic.) One of the many benefits of the existence of professional sports is that we get a large sample of repeated zero-sum games. And in one relatively easy to model game, penalty kicks, it turns out players really do act like they are playing their side of the equilibrium position, even in surprising ways.
bq. Testing Mixed Strategy Equilibria When Players Are Heterogeneous: The Case of Penalty Kicks in Soccer (P.A. Chiappori, S. Levitt, T. Groseclose). (paper, tables) (Hat tip: Tangotiger)
Some of you will have seen this before, because it was published in __American Economic Review__, but I think it will be news to enough people to post here. The results are interesting, but mostly I’m just jealous that those guys got to spend research time talking to footballers and watching game video. I haven’t heard any work that sounded less like research since I heard about that UC Davis prof whose research consists in part of making porn movies.
I usually agree with Mark Kleiman’s posts, even in cases where I wouldn’t have agreed before reading them. But I think he’s seriously mistaken about the Guantanamo detainees.
Context can be so crucial in figuring out what a sentence means, even in subconscious processing. When I first scanned this I thought Ed Gillespie shouldn’t be so candid in front of reporters.
bq. In prepared remarks, Gillespie attacked Kerry and other Democrats, saying they are readying “the dirtiest campaign in modern presidential politics.” (From CNN)
I bet our Republican readers did not read it that way!
Looks like being an election official in Florida just got easier.
bq. The Department of State has notified elections supervisors that touchscreen ballots don’t have to be included during manual recounts because there is no question about how voters intended to vote.
bq. While touchscreen ballot images can be printed, there is no need and elections supervisors aren’t authorized to do so, Division of Elections Director Ed Kast wrote in a letter to Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning.
So we’re just going to trust the computers. Given how reliable we all know computers to be, this is about as democratic as selecting candidates by lots. (Just for the record, I think it’s an interesting theoretical question about how democratic that is. It’s how we pick juries after all, and they are often considered an important part of the democratic process.)
Counting votes is a very hard business, so you can see why they’d want to speed it up. In Australia, with roughly the same population as Florida, spread over a much larger area, with I think twice as many voters, and a more complicated voting system, we manage to count every ballot by hand in 3 or 4 hours. To be sure, we don’t have as many elections at once as Floridians do, but you’d think for top-line elections they could try for a change running elections as well as we do. (Hat tip: kos.)
I hadn’t noticed this before, but Mark Kleiman has on his website a fun collection of aphorisms he co-collated with David Chu-wen Hsia. I normally stay away from aphorisms because they remind me of Wittgenstein and anything that reminds me of Wittgenstein makes me irritated, but there’s some good stuff here. What I really wanted to comment on though was the following.
bq. Masculine pronouns, and “man” for “human being,” occur throughout. English needs neuter personal pronouns, but currently lacks them. We can’t do much about that now without great loss of force. (Those who doubt this sad fact are urged to try their hands at gender-neutralizing “Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.”) Our apologies to those offended.
That’s not the hardest challenge I’ve seen today. This isn’t a perfect translation into gender-neutral language, but it’s pretty close.
bq. No person has greater love than to lay down their life for their friends.
People who think ‘they’ is invariably a plural pronoun won’t like this, but they’re wrong for both etymological and ordinary language reasons.
I have a higher opinion of Peter Singer than many philosophers, but I still think this is a bad idea.
bq. The President of Good and Evil: The Convenient Ethics of George W. Bush by Peter Singer
The APA (American Philosophical Association) is looking for stories about how valuable philosophical training has been to people other than professional, full-time philosophers.