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    • 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.

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    • 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.

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    • 164th Philosopher’s Carnival

       
      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.

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    • 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).

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    • 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.)

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    • 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:

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