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    • Nice Marcus Arvan (Philosophers Cocoon) on the academic culture of fear.

      Lots of nice reflections here about how fear undermines our vocation. Though much of it is (appropriately) scary, there's some optimism too. Arvan's post ends with:

      The only final thing I would suggest–following Zombie's remarks above as well as my experience with the Cocoon–is that whatever risks you take, whether they are blogging or whatever, commit yourself to pursuing those risks kindly, and helpfully. As I mentioned above, early in my career I found the discipline to be a rather scary place, full of judgmental people. Part of this, I think, was just my fear talking (I "saw" judgmentalism everywhere). But it was not all fear talking: there are judgmental people here and there. But, what I will say is this: if you commit yourself to pursuing your career–your "risks"–kindly, you may be surprised just how many people of good will are out there. In my experience running the Cocoon, there are a ton of people out there looking for more kindness in the discipline. Be among them, and be among those who contribute kindness. If you do, you have little to fear.

      This is an important thing to remember. There are so many kind and helpful people studying and teaching philosophy. Their kindness usually (though not always) precludes them from being that great at tooting their own horns, but if you stay in the biz long enough you'll be humbled by the amount of supererogation you run into. This is really pronounced with respect to people who agree to write letters for tenure files. The letter writers get nothing out of it. It's just a lot of work, and you don't get any money for it and it doesn't go on your CV. But at this point I've witnessed dozens of philosophers give up a month or so of their summer to charitably assess one of my colleague's works and then explain it in a way that is accessible to LSU administrators. It's one of the most inspiring things I've experienced. And some non-trivial amount of journal reviewers put in a lot of extra work giving the author helpful advice about how to rewrite the paper. Twice when I was not tenured I got new paper ideas from the reviewers' comments. I couldn't thank the person by name because it was anonymous.

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    • On Future Placement Data

      I applaud Brian Leiter's efforts to examine placement data in the past few days *Update 6/13/14: I have removed these links because I think that Brian Leiter's posts have the potential to mislead students. See my new post here*, as well as the efforts of David Marshall Miller and Andy Carson over the past few years. All of this is effort to improve the profession and deserves recognition as such. I plan to continue reporting placement data next year and will likely post the report to an independent website. Below is a list of features that I take to be essential to an ideal report on placement, together with some ideas for improvement on my own work. Please comment below!

      1) the original data: as far as I know this is missing from both Brian Leiter and Andy Carson's efforts. This is important because it keeps the analyses honest by opening them up to public scrutiny. I have provided links to my data and will continue to do so. Recommendations on format are welcome here. 

      2) the methods: key information is missing in Brian Leiter's presentation, such as the criteria for determining which placements are to "research universities and selective liberal arts colleges," but as far as I can tell David Marshall Miller and Andy Carson are clear and up front about their methods. I have tried to be clear about my methods, but I have received some emails that reveal shortcomings here. Recommendations welcome. 

      3) completeness: Brian Leiter's efforts, as of this moment, include only a few departments (that were not selected at random). An ideal report should include all the philosophy departments that have made placements of the type in question, which is something David Marshall Miller, Andy Carson, and myself have all tried to do. What is missing from all of our reports is complete placement data. PhilAppointments is not a complete source, for example, but neither are placement pages. Further, placement pages are often missing key data points on placement (such as names, which help to identify duplicate candidates). Next year I aim to cross-reference PhilAppointments with individual placement pages. Recommendations on how to efficiently improve completeness are welcome. 

      4) recency: since these efforts are in their infancy, it is currently unknown what time frames are relevant. Recent data are ideal, so long as recency is balanced with completeness. Brian Leiter chose a 5-year time frame between 2005 and 2010, which I see as a drawback of his report. Although David Marshall Miller, Andy Carson, and myself have all used the most up-to-date data, David Marshall Miller also looked at different time frames. In the future, with more data, the use of time frames should help us to determine how recent our data needs to be. Recommendations on how to proceed with time frames is welcome here, since next year the data set I have will be in its fourth year (2011-2015).

      5) neutrality: Those collecting, analyzing, and reporting the data should be as neutral as possible with respect to hypotheses and results. I have concerns about this with respect to Brian Leiter's report, especially given the absence of 1 and 2. The fact that David Marshall Miller, Andy Carson, and I have performed this work on our own is also potentially problematic, even with the inclusion of the original data and methods. Over the next year I plan to form a task force to work on placement data, composed of several people who have reached out to me over the past week or so (but others are welcome). Having more people on the project should help with neutrality. Recommendations on this point are welcome.

    • We should have anonymous book manuscript review

      To my knowledge, full book manuscripts are never reviewed anonymously. Given that the double anonymity of peer review is implemented to decrease biases, and presumably, thereby increase the focus on the quality of the writing, this is puzzling. David Chalmers wrote, in a very helpful comment on how to publish a book "Most book refereeing is not blind, unlike journal refereeing. And when what's being reviewed is a proposal rather than a full manuscript, reputation of the author make a huge difference in reviewers' and editors' confidence that the proposal will be fleshed out well to a book." 

      While I can see that the reputation or renown of an author can relevantly play a role at the proposal stage in assessing the competence of the prospective author in writing a full manuscript, I don't see why it should play a role when the full manuscript is reviewed. This will inevitably happen when review of full manuscripts is non-anonymous. It would be hard not to be influenced if the author of one's manuscript happened to work at high-ranking institution, is very senior, and already has an excellent track record (I declined to review a book for a major press for this reason), or conversely, if the author is relatively junior, working at a teaching-focused or obscure place. 

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    • The Gordon Ramsay Hunger Games (and why the world should be more like Iron Chef and Professional Wrestling)

      I don't own a television (one of many area men I approximate), but with the advent of Hulu now my wife and I watch an episode of some reality cooking show nearly every evening after the kids go to bed. I've seen nearly every episode of the Gordon Ramsay vehicles Master Chef and Hell's Kitchen. In both shows twenty or so people compete with one another in inventively designed cooking contests. One loser is thrown off every episode until the lone survivor emerges victorious at the end of the season. The ginned up drama is fun and there's lots of interesting food.

      Recently though Ramsay's schtick has started to wear thin. Before throwing people out at the end of every episode of Hells Kitchen, he makes two or three people tell him why they deserve to stay in Hell's Kitchen. What follows are desperate platitudes about how they are a fighter and getting better all of the time. It's infantalizing. Then Ramsay strings it out dramatically, telling one person to step forward and starting a sentence where you might think one thing will happen and then ending it by telling them the opposite. It's frankly obnoxious. And of course he yells at and belittles the contestants in the manner of an abusive father starting to lose his temper. And nearly every episode has the obligatory bits where the contestants gush at length about what a wonderful person this obnoxious man is. It's Orwellian.

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    • Anatomy of a drubbing

      of Brazil here.

    • Against the ‘this is nonsense!’ objection

      Carolyn Dicey Jennings has a post up discussing the unfortunate implications of criticizing a person’s views in terms of their presumed (lack of) intelligence. I agree with much of what she says there (though I don’t think the issue is exclusively or even predominantly about criticism of women and members of other disadvantaged groups, even if impacts these groups to a greater extent). I want however to bring up another aspect of Brian Leiter’s criticism of Carolyn’s analysis, namely his use of the adjective ‘nonsense’, and connect it to what seems to be a pervasive but somewhat questionable practice among philosophers.

      In fact, I was thinking of such a post even before reading Carolyn’s post. The idea was prompted by a conversation with Chris Menzel over lunch last week in Munich. Chris was telling me about some of his thoughts on Williamson’s Modal Logic as Metaphysics, and how Williamson describes the actualism vs. possibilism debate as ‘confused’, i.e. as something that he cannot make sense of. So technically, Williamson is (here) not accusing specific people of holding nonsensical positions, but according to him this is a nonsensical debate, as it were. (Chris Menzel is working on a paper on this material where he objects to Williamson's diagnosis of the debate.)

      The notion of ‘nonsense’ has an interesting philosophical (recent) history, dating back at least to the Tractatus, and then later appropriated by the Vienna Circle. (I’d be interested to hear of earlier systematic uses of the notion of nonsense for philosophical purposes.) So, to be sure, it is in itself a philosophically interesting notion, but I think it becomes problematic when 'this is nonsense!' counts as a legitimate, acceptable move in a philosophical debate.

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    • Congratulations to Naftali Weinberger and Charles Rathkopf

      for winning the 2013 Philosophy of Science Association prizes for best essay by, respectively, a Graduate Student and a recent PhD.  More details here.  

      Welcome to the club!  :)

       

    • A pretty awful argument against scientific replication (h/t Dan Weiskopf).

      Jason Mitchell, a Harvard social neuroscientist, gives an argument against scientific replication, and a defense of unreplicated science, here.   His argument, in a nutshell, is that all we ever learn from the failure to replicate an experiment is that the attempted replicator is a lousy experimenter.  Quoting Mitchell: 

      • Recent hand-wringing over failed replications in social psychology is largely pointless, because unsuccessful experiments have no meaningful scientific value.
      • Because experiments can be undermined by a vast number of practical mistakes, the likeliest explanation for any failed replication will always be that the replicator bungled something along the way.  Unless direct replications are conducted by flawless experimenters, nothing interesting can be learned from them.

      Mitchell is giving, pretty much out of a bottle, what Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch call "The Golden hands" argument.   "If you can't replicate what I did in the lab, that shows I have golden hands and you have iron claws."   Interestingly, C&P generally believe that this is always a rationally defensible claim that any scientist can make.   Of course, unlike Mitchell, C&P understand that was is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  If the above is, as both M and C&P maitain, always a defensible claims, then so is its converse:  "If I got the opposite result in the lab and you can't replicate it, then that shows I have golden hands and you have iron claws."

      The problem is, if all the above is true, then this would vindicate C&P's claim that all scientific reasoning is circular.   This is, after all, and for example, what they think the famous case of Pasteur and Pouchet and spontaneous generation shows.    Pasteur can always claim that Pouchet has iron hands, and Pouchet can always claim that Pasteur has iron hands, and this explains, from each one's point of view, why the other is getting results that don't accord with the first one's theoretical views.    

      C&P are absolutely right to think that it follows from this that all scientific reasoning is circular.  It becomes a matter of definition, on this conception, that you have iron hands just in case you get results that don't accord with my theoretical views.   But scientific reasoning isn't circular.  And hence there has to be something wrong with this conception.    And what's wrong is that pace C&P, there are often, in the long run (and hopefully not such a long run that we are all dead, thought that may have been the case in the Spontaneous Generation case) independent means of deciding whose experiment is the valid one.  And that means that pace Mitchell, scientific replication, and the process of figuring out who has the iron claws and who has the golden hands, is a crucial part of the scientific enterprise. 

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Garota de Berlin’

      [Special edition] After the massacre of yesterday, there is little left to do other than reminding oneself of other, more mutually rewarding Brazilian-German encounters. So here is ‘Garota de Berlin’, the song that owes its existence to the brief but intense encounter between German singer Nina Hagen and Brazilian singer Supla. This happened back in 1985, when Hagen went to Brazil to perform in the first edition of the Rock in Rio festival. At the time, Supla, now also a reality TV celebrity of somewhat dubious reputation (and the son of two influential politicians – quite a mix!), led the post-punk band Tokyo, and so the band ended up recording ‘Garota de Berlin’ with Hagen’s participation.

      The video-clip below is almost comic in its badness, and the song is not exactly a high point in Brazilian music. (I didn’t say that this particular Brazilian-German encounter would be rewarding for all the parties involved, including listeners.) But it is a funny episode in the history of Brazil-Germany relations, and in any case way less painful than those depressing 6 minutes in yesterday's match — which are easily the most painful 6 minutes in the history of the Seleção.

      (On the bright side, I get another chance today! The joys of carrying two nationalities…)

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    • Intelligence as a Criticism

      When the NewAPPS bloggers first invited me to submit a guest post on my attention research as a graduate student, I decided to submit a post on the term "genius" instead. In the case that it was the only post I would write, I wanted the post to have maximum utility. After some thought, I decided to target the obsession with genius, thinking it a pernicious problem easily deflated. I am not alone in finding it to be a problem. In fact, I may well have been alerted to the problem by Eric Schwitzgebel's blog post on "seeming smart." Commentators on the problem have looked at everything from its impact on women and racial/ethnic minorities to its impact on child prodigies, some of whom have written against it in favor of work-based praise (and for good reason). So, I was half-right: I was right to think it is a problem, but I was wrong, of course, in thinking the problem could be easily deflated. I am going to give it another stab, this time aiming closer to the heart of what I find to be the problem–the way that the terms "genius" and "smart" are used to silence minorities. I know about this first hand–just last week Brian Leiter implied that I was not smart enough to understand a particular distinction that he felt I had overlooked.

      Update (6/9/2014): I urge skeptical readers to examine these much more respectful posts, where there is no mention of intelligence, for sake of comparison: on David Marshall Miller, on Andy Carson, and again on Andy Carson. These job market analyses were perfomed after my first analysis in April 2012 and have many similar elements. Furthermore, the content of Brian Leiter's criticisms to these analyses is much the same, but without the damaging remarks about mental capacity, intention, etc. 

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