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19611.434775
Sometimes, stakes are high. Plausible examples include:
Climate change could be very bad (and very likely will be significantly bad—well worth mitigating, even on relatively optimistic forecasts). As longtermists rightly point out, astronomical opportunity costs would make human extinction the worst thing ever, so it’s very well worth investing in reasonable precautions regarding AI, biosecurity, nuclear diplomacy, etc. …
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30825.434878
It's now possible, with the right set of training data, for anyone to create a digital copy of anyone. Some people have already done this as part of research projects, and employers are proposing to do it for employees. …
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69953.434898
Poverty has traditionally been conceived of as a state of deprivation. To be poor is to lack something essential to human flourishing. How that something is understood—in terms of welfare, resources, or capabilities—and how it is measured—in absolute terms or relative to a social standard—has been the subject of much debate within the development literature. In this paper, I put forward an account of poverty rooted in the philosophy of action. I argue that poverty essentially involves being in a context in which a reasonable agent’s future-directed agency is systemically undermined. Centering this dimension of poverty allows us to attend to aspects of poverty that are easily overlooked on existing accounts.
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99305.43491
It is the duty of good people, always and everywhere, to condemn, reject, and disavow the use of political violence. Even or especially when evildoers would celebrate the use of political violence against us. …
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139512.43492
It’s hard to believe, with daily news of fevered disagreement and of actual fighting, but human beings excel at cooperation. We mostly trust each other to do our part. Thomas Hobbes wrote, in Leviathan, that the state of nature was a war of all against all, exited only when our ancestors signed a social contract, waived their rights to take what they could, and authorized a King’s enforcement of their pledge. …
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207401.434929
Preliminary note: This essay is the last one before my summer break. The newsletter will not stop completely, though. See at the end of the post for more information. A couple of weeks ago, Eric Schliesser published an essay on Gerald Gaus’s criticism of Isaiah Berlin’s account of value pluralism. …
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240229.43494
Here’s an interesting set of cases that I haven’t seen a philosophical discussion of. To get some item B, you need to affirm that you did A (e.g., took some precautions, read some text, etc.) But to permissibly affirm that you did A, you need to do A. …
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243274.43495
How to compute the probability distribution of a detection time, i.e., of the time which a detector registers as the arrival time of a quantum particle, is a long-debated problem. In this regard, Bohmian mechanics provides in a straightforward way the distribution of the time at which the particle actually does arrive at a given surface in 3-space in the absence of detectors. However, as we discuss here, since the presence of detectors can change the evolution of the wave function and thus the particle trajectories, it cannot be taken for granted that the arrival time of the Bohmian trajectories in the absence of detectors agrees with the one in the presence of detectors, and even less with the detection time. In particular, we explain why certain distributions that Das and Durr [7] presented as the distribution of the detection time in a case with spin, based on assuming that all three times mentioned coincide, are actually not what Bohmian mechanics predicts. Key words: Bohmian mechanics; POVM.
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243311.43496
For the one-dimensional Facilitated Exclusion Process with initial state a product measure of density ρ = 1/2− δ, δ ≥ 0, there exists an infinite-time limiting state νρ in which all particles are isolated and hence cannot move. We study the variance V (L), under νρ, of the number of particles in an interval of L sites. Under ν /2 either all odd or all even sites are occupied, so that V (L) = 0 for L even and V (L) = 1/4 for L odd: the state is hyperuniform [21], since V (L) grows more slowly than L. We prove that for densities approaching 1/2 from below there exist three regimes in L, in which the variance grows at different rates: for L ≫ δ , V (L) ≃ ρ(1 − ρ)L, just as in the initial state; for A(δ) ≪ L ≪ δ , with A(δ) = δ− /3 p and A(δ) = 1 for L even, V (L) ≃ CL3/2 with C = 2 for L odd 2/π/3; and for L ≪ δ−2/3 with L odd, V (L) ≃ 1/4. The analysis is based on a careful study of a renewal process with a long tail. Our study is motivated by simulation results showing similar behavior in higher dimensions; we discuss this background briefly.
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261357.43497
This question does not ask for the maximal number of eggs that is sufficient for baking this cake. Instead, Beck & Rullmann proposed a more sophisticated maximal informativity account, according to which (1) asks for the most informative number n such that n eggs are sufficient for the cake. This will in fact be the minimum number eggs needed. Along the way, Beck & Rullmann discussed the notion of sufficiency, proposing ideas that had not been made explicit before. They did this not because sufficiency is a primary target of their investigation but to make sure that the technical implementation of their theory of maximal informativity of questions is explicit and plausible.
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261415.43498
Imagination is often celebrated for its freedom. Hume, for example, famously claimed that nothing is more free than human imagination. Yet as expansive as imagination might be, its freedom is not entirely without bounds. In fact, even in the course of celebrating the freedom of imagination, Hume himself pointed to one limit: imagination “cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses” (Hume 1748/1977: 31). On Hume’s view, the freedom of imagination consists in its “unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing” the ideas of the senses (Hume 1748/1977: 31). But even if Hume is right that imagination operates without limits on the material with which it is provided, when that material itself is impoverished, then so too is imagination.
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261507.434993
How is essence related to laws and explanation? A number of things could be meant by this question. One issue concerns the role of essences qua explanantia, i.e. the ability of facts about essence to explain certain other facts. This potential role of essence is discussed in many other chapters of this collection (see, for example, the contributions of Scarpati on persistence and individuations, Nye on persons, Brigandt on biological species, and Vaidya and Wallner, Griffith, Passinsky, Rosario, and Mallon on various aspects of social ontology). A different question is whether essences underlie any distinctive type of explanation. That is, do essences play any role in explanations not qua explanantia (that which explains) but as the link that connects some explanantia to an explanandum (see Schaffer 2017 and Kappes 2021 for this distinction)? But here, too, we can ask at least two different questions. One concerns the role of essences in scientific explanation. Various aspects of this issue occupy other chapters of this volume (see the contributions of Tahko on natural kinds essentialism, Dumsday on scientific essentialism, and Lam on dispositional essentialism; and in the special sciences, Brigandt on biological species and Brown on psychology and psychiatry). The present chapter’s main focus will be the role of essence in metaphysical explanation: the kind of explanation that philosophers often appeal to when making non-causal “in virtue of” and “because”-claims.
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296664.435003
Chairman of the KPA Group;
Senior Research Fellow, the Samuel Neaman Institute, Technion, Haifa;
Chairman, Data Science Society, Israel
What’s happening in statistical practice since the “abandon statistical significance” call
This is a retrospective view from experience gained by applying statistics to a wide range of problems, with an emphasis on the past few years. …
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315019.435016
Preparing general relativity for quantization in the Hamiltonian approach leads to the ‘problem of time,’ rendering the world fundamentally timeless. One proposed solution is the ‘thermal time hypothesis,’ which defines time in terms of states representing systems in thermal equilibrium. On this view, time is supposed to emerge thermodynamically even in a fundamentally timeless context. Here, I develop the worry that the thermal time hypothesis requires dynamics – and hence time – to get off the ground, thereby running into worries of circularity.
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318074.435028
Perhaps like the poor current President of the United States, I can feel myself fading, my memory and verbal facility and attention to detail failing me, even while there’s so much left to do to battle the nonsense in the world. …
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346206.435038
I consider two possible evidentialist responses to Schmidt. According to the first, all of the reason-giving work in the relevant cases is being done by evidence. According to the second, even if the ‘incoherence fact’ sometimes provides a reason, what it provides a reason for is not a doxastic attitude, or at least not one that is an alternative to belief. I argue that the first response is not satisfying, but the second is defensible.
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365122.435048
Whether p is evidence for q will often depend on one’s background beliefs. This is a well-known phenomenon. But here’s an interesting fact that I hadn’t noticed before: sometimes whether p is evidence for q depends on how confident one is in q. …
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430309.435059
This correspondence marks the return of physicists Richard C. Tolman and Percy W. Bridgman to the topic of dimensional analysis. In the preceding decades Tolman and Bridgman were at the center of debates concerning the methodological and metaphysical commitments of dimensional reasoning, beginning with Tolman’s controversial proposal that a “principle of similitude”—a principle asserting that global scale transformations of length quantities are dynamical and empirical symmetries—ought to be the foundational principle of dimensional analysis. Bridgman, inspired to clear up the mass of confusion he saw in the ensuing debate, wrote the first book in English on the topic: Dimensional Analysis (originally published 1922, with a revised edition published in 1931), which coined what is now the standard name for the method. This correspondence has yet to have been published or referred to in the literature on dimensional analysis and its history. With its publication I include this editorial introduction and some exegetical and contextualizing notes. This correspondence is not only significant because it clarifies some of the—largely metaphysical—issues left unsettled by the original debate between Tolman, Bridgman, and others, but it also highlights the practical significance of these issues for physicists in the early 20th century who were working to standardize the unit system used in the teaching and practices of physics and engineering—especially with respect to electromagnetic units. A Richard Chace Tolman (1881-1948) was Professor of Physical Chemistry and Mathematical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Besides being one of the central figures in debates regarding the foundations of dimensional analysis, he was one of the first disseminators of relativity theory in the United States and served as a scientific advisor for the Manhattan Project. Tolman in fact first suggested the implosion method that used in the “Fat Man” bomb on Nagasaki (Monk 2014, 364).
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430332.43507
I argue that dimensional analysis provides an answer to a skeptical challenge to the theory of model mediated measurement. The problem arises when considering the task of calibrating a novel measurement procedure, with greater range, to the results of a prior measurement procedure. The skeptical worry is that the agreement of the novel and prior measurement procedures in their shared range may only be apparent due to the emergence of systematic error in the exclusive range of the novel measurement procedure. Alternatively: what if the two measurement procedures are not in fact measuring the same quantity? The theory of model mediated measurement can only say that we assume that there is a common quantity. In contrast, I show that the satisfaction of dimensional homogeneity across the metrological extension is independent evidence for the so-called assumption. This is illustrated by the use of dimensional analysis in high pressure experiments. This results in an extension of the theory of model mediated measurement, in which a common quantity in metrological extension is no longer assumed, but hypothesized.
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430359.43508
This paper recovers an important, century-old debate regarding the methodological and metaphysical foundations of dimensional analysis. Consideration of Richard Tolman’s failed attempt to install the principle of similitude—the relativity of size—as the founding principle of dimensional analysis both clarifies the method of dimensional analysis and articulates two metaphysical positions regarding quantity dimensions. Tolman’s position is quantity dimension fundamentalism. This is a commitment to dimensional realism and a set of fundamental dimensions which ground all further dimensions. The opposing position, developed primarily by Bridgman, is quantity dimension conventionalism. Conventionalism is an anti-realism regarding dimensional structure, holding our non-representational dimensional systems have basic quantity dimensions fixed only by convention. This metaphysical dispute was left somewhat unsettled. It is shown here that both of these positions face serious problems: fundamentalists are committed to surplus dimensional structure; conventionalists cannot account for empirical constraints on our dimensional systems nor the empirical success of dimensional analysis. It is shown that an alternative position is available which saves what is right in both: quantity dimension functionalism.
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451213.435091
I was recently a co-author on a paper about anticipatory governance and genome editing. The lead author was Jon Rueda, and the others were Seppe Segers, Jeroen Hopster, Belén Liedo, and Samuela Marchiori. …
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469286.435103
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is said to pose many risks, be they catastrophic, existential and otherwise. This paper discusses whether the notion of risk can apply to AGI, both descriptively and in the current regulatory framework. The paper argues that current definitions of risk are ill-suited to capture supposed AGI existential risks, and that the risk-based framework of the EU AI Act is inadequate to deal with truly general, agential systems.
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537942.435113
In May, I had a fantastic dialogue with Peter Boghossian, best-known for his role in the Grievance Studies expose. The conversation focuses on open borders. Boghossian is plainly skeptical, but he’s such a deliberate, methodical thinker that we make a surprising amount of progress on this infamously intractable issue. …
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589530.435123
We consider the fluctuations in the number of particles in a box of size L in Z , d ⩾ 1, in the (infinite volume) translation invariant stationary states of the facilitated exclusion process, also called the conserved lattice gas model. When started in a Bernoulli (product) measure at density ρ, these systems approach, as t → ∞, a ‘frozen’ state for ⩽ c, with c 1 2 for d 1 and ρc < 1/2 for d ⩾ 2. At ρ= ρc the limiting state is, as observed by Hexner and Levine, hyperuniform, that is, the variance of the number of particles in the box grows slower than L . We give a general description of how the variances at different scales of L behave as ρ ↗ c. On the largest scale, L≫ L , the fluctuations are normal (in fact the same as in the original product measure), while in a region L1 ≪ L ≪ L2, with both L1 and L2 going to infinity as ↗ c, the variance grows faster than normal. For 1≪ L ≪ L1 the variance is the same as in the hyperuniform system. (All results discussed are rigorous for d = 1 and based on simulations for d ⩾ 2.)
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590185.435131
This paper seeks to determine a rational agent’s evidential constraints given her beliefs. Rationality is here construed as adherence to a principle of entropy maximisation. I determine the rational agent’s set of probability efunctions compatible with the evidence, ? , given the maximum entropy function and given some constraints on the shape of ? . I also consider agents employing a centre of mass approach to form their beliefs rather than entropy maximisation.
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602581.43514
In Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having opened the book for over a decade. …
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603312.435149
Different species of realism have been proposed in the scientific and philosophical literature. Two of these species are direct realism and causal pattern realism. Direct realism is a form of perceptual realism proposed by ecological psychologists within cognitive science. Causal pattern realism has been proposed within the philosophy of model-based science. Both species are able to accommodate some of the main tenets and motivations of instrumentalism. The main aim of this paper is to explore the conceptual moves that make both direct realism and causal pattern realism tenable realist positions able to accommodate an instrumentalist stance. Such conceptual moves are (i) the rejection of veritism and (ii) the re-structuring of the phenomena of interest. We will then show that these conceptual moves are instances of the ones of a common realist genus we name pragmatist realism.
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603334.435161
In any standard reference text on expected utility theory one will find representation theorems (for example, [27], [13], [35]). These theorems link expected utility maximization to a qualitative description of an agent’s choice behavior. Typically an agent’s choice behavior is captured by a preference relation ⪯ on the set of decisions they face (in our above example this is the set of gambles, but preferences might instead be defined on acts which have no intrinsic probabilities). We say that P ⪯ Q if and only if the agent deems Q to be at least as desirable as P . We then prove something of the form: the preference relation satisfies a given set of axioms if and only if there exists a utility function (and, in some cases, a probability measure) such that the agent prefers gambles with greater expected utility ([32], [42]). The most prominent instances of such representation theorems are due to von Neumann and Morgenstern ([38]), Anscombe and Aumann ([1]), and Savage ([35]).1
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603358.435182
We investigate a model of becoming – Classical Sequential Growth (CSG) – that has been proposed within the framework of causal sets (causets), with the latter defined as order types of certain partial orderings. To investigate how causets grow, we introduce special sequences of causets, which we call “csg-paths”. We prove a number of results concerning relations between csg-paths and causets. These results paint a highly non-trivial picture of csg-paths. There are uncountably many csg-paths, all of them sharing the same beginning, after which they branch. Every infinite csg-path achieves in the limit an infinite causet, and vice versa, every infinite causet is achieved in the limit by an infinite csg-path. However, coalescing csg-paths, i.e., ones that achieve the same causet even after forking off at some point, are ubiquitous.
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603381.435193
Journalists are often the adult public’s central source of scientific information, which means that their reporting shapes the relationship the public has with science. Yet philosophers of science largely ignore journalistic communication in their inquiries about trust in science. This paper aims to help fill this gap in research by comparing journalistic norm conflicts that arose when reporting on COVID-19 and tobacco, among other policy-relevant scientific topics. I argue that the public’s image of scientists – as depositories of indisputable, value-free facts, trustworthy only when in consensus – makes it particularly difficult for journalists to ethically communicate policy-relevant science rife with disagreement. In doing so, I show how journalists, like scientists, face the problem of inductive risk in such cases. To overcome this problem, I sketch a model of trust in science that is grounded in an alternative image of scientists – what I call the responsiveness model of trust in science. By highlighting the process of science over its product, the responsiveness model requires scientists to respond to empirical evidence and the public’s values to warrant the public’s trust. I then show why this model requires journalists to be the public’s watchdogs by verifying and communicating whether scientists are being properly responsive both epistemically and non-epistemically.