These are my links for August 17th through August 20th: Mark Colyvan, A topological sorites | PhilPapers – This paper considers a generalisation of the sorites paradox, in which only topological notions are employed. We argue that by increasing the level of abstraction in this way, we see the sorites paradox in a new, more revealing light—a light that forces attention on cut-off points of vague predicates. The generalised sorites paradox presented here also gives rise to a new, more tractable definition of vagueness. Vincent F. Hendricks, The Bain of two truths | PhilPapers – A view among methodologists is […]
John L. Taylor
177 posts
These are my links for July 29th through August 16th: Bayes, Jeffreys, prior distributions, and the philosophy of statistics – In this brief discussion I will argue the following: (1) in thinking about prior distributions, we should go beyond Jeffreys’s principles and move toward weakly informative priors; (2) it is natural for those of us who work in social and computational sciences to favor complex models, contra Jeffreys’s preference for simplicity; and (3) a key generalization of Jeffreys’s ideas is to explicitly include model checking in the process of data analysis. Does Confirmation Work the Same at Every Level of […]
These are my links for July 8th through July 29th: Should Copyright Of Academic Works Be Abolished? – The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by […]
 Reading a life of Alexander the Great, Alexander whose rough father, Philip, hired Aristotle to tutor the young scion and warrior, to put some polish on his smooth shoulders. Alexander who, later on the campaign trail into Persia, carried a copy of The Iliad in a velvet-lined box, he loved that book so much. He loved to fight and drink, too. I came to that place in the life where Alexander, after a long night of carousing, a wine-drunk (the worst kind of drunk– hangovers you don’t forget), threw the first brand to start a fire that burned Persepolis, […]
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)
(Via Brian Leiter; Crossposted to What’s Distracting Us?)