Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

More thoughts on living with autism and social interaction

A very smart former student of mine from the University of Texas, Mark Engelson, who is on the autism spectrum, writes:

I read the post you shared on the blog with great interest, and I share your doubts about ableism.

There are things that I do (at times, not at others) that can be deeply unsettling to others. My voice has a tendency to crescendo without my conscious intention, for example. This is of a piece with a particularly verbose, larger-than-life manifestation of my autism which is, to be fair, a lot. This combines with a distinct lack of grace (I can't drive, and I once broke a partner's toe when I tried folk dancing as a college freshman). As much as I might like to believe otherwise, I can very much be the bull in the proverbial china shop.

While I had some sense of this about myself, it wasn't really clear to me just how unsettling these traits are until I saw them in someone else. I had the opportunity to meet one of my heroes in music - I don't want to call anyone out - but this gentleman does the exact same thing with his voice, and his affect was like a coiled spring that had just done a line of coke. When I spoke to him, I experienced a brief moment of uncertainty in which I was afraid the guy was going to go apeshit - possibly violent - on me; he actually hugged me. While I know of no history of violence by this individual, his bearing had that effect on me.

Another pretend ethnic minority unmasked

An historian at Furman University.   I wonder how many of these cases involve attempts to take advantage of "diversity" initiatives in hiring?  It certainly seems like the clearest grounds on which such fraud could lead to loss of an academic position.

Richard Marshall interviews Henrik Lagerlund (Stockholm)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Regional patterns in polling errors in 2016, 2018

Polls underestimated Republican votes in the Midwest, Democratic votes in the Southwest.  Some useful comparisons with Clinton/Trump polls in 2016 too.  Bottom line is this analyst thinks Biden will win.

Writing a "trade book" in philosophy

Philosopher Tamler Sommers (Houston) recounts his experience and offers some advice.

Academic freedom does not protect your "freedom" not to do your job

It cheapens the value of academic freedom for professors to invoke it as protecting their right not to teach their classes in "solidarity" with what they deem a worthy social movement.    Academic freedom does not cover failure to discharge professional duties; indeed, just the opposite.  Faculty who consistently fail to carry out their professional duties--whether teaching or research--can be terminated consistent with academic freedom. 

Academic freedom protects the freedom of faculty in their teaching and research, subject only to standards of disciplinary competence as assessed by their peers in the discipline.  That means faculty can design their classes as they see fit, and can explore any directions in their research--in both cases, subject only to the constraints imposed by their disciplinary competence.  A sociologist can certainly choose to focus on issues of race in their teaching and research, as long as what they're doing is competent sociology.  But a sociologist teaching a class on race in American society can't cancel class to make a political statement:  academic freedom does not cover that choice.

Philosophy PhD didn't know Australia is a country, fails student for knowing that it is

Oy veh!

In Memoriam: J. Adam Morton (1945-2020)

Professor Morton's work ranged widely across epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of the emotions and other areas.  He taught in the 1970s at Princeton University, where he also took his PhD, and then for more than two decades at the University of Bristol, and then held a Canada Reserch Chair at the University of Alberta and taught as a visitor at the University of British Columbia through much of the 2010s.  You can learn more about him and his work at his personal page.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

538 says there's now a 13% chance (up from 12%) of Trump winning the election...

...which might seem like a 13% chance of the apocalypse, so way too close for comfort.  While it would obviously be very bad if Trump were genuinely re-elected--especially for what it says about the level of pathology in this country--it's worth remembering that the other elections count too.  If the Democrats take the Senate and keep the House, then Trump's reelection is much less bad, since his greatest unconstrained power will be in foreign affairs, where he has been fairly benign compared to traditional Republican and Democratic war-mongers.  Domestically, he can still make a lot of mischief (especially if Republican Senators continue to refuse to hold him to account), especially through executive orders and control of administrative agencies.

On the other hand, if Trump is re-elected and the Republicans hold the Senate, that will be much, much worse, since the House can not really hold Trump to account without Senate support, as the impeachment earlier this year (remember that?) made very clear.

The *real* origin of Kenutcky Fried Chicken

Survey on "The Concept of Representation in the Mind Sciences" seeking participants

I was asked to share the following announcement, which I'm happy to do:

I am Dr. Edouard Machery, Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (www.edouardmachery.com). I would like to you to participate in a 15-minute research study about the meaning of the notion of representation. 

If you decide to participate in this study, you will be presented with four short scenarios describing a neuroscientific experiment and asked a few questions about each. You will also be asked a few general questions and a few demographic questions. The survey is entirely anonymous. There is no risk associated with participating to this study. Although we do not currently have plans to share the data, should we do so in the future, your data will be shared in an anonymous manner. Also, your data will anonymous in any related publications or presentations. Again, participation is completely voluntary. You can choose to be in the study or not. You are also free to withdraw from the study once you begin. However, if you withdraw, any responses you provided will potentially be used. 

Here is the link to the survey to please fill out as soon as possible, but no later than November 15, 2020: 

Amerliorative analysis [sic] and Humpty Dumptying

This is amusing.

ADDENDUM: And here's the 2005 paper by philosopher Nicholas Shackel (Cardiff) that introduced this terminology.  (Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

On being a philosopher with autism

Parts of this interview are quite eye-opening; for example:

[I]t’s not that uncommon for people to tune me out completely in the way that people in a public setting tune ou[t nearby conversations. The result is that people often treat as empty the space that I occupy in a social situation. For example, they make eye contact with everyone else while their gaze merely passes over me or they fail to hear (literally) my contributions. This treatment is most noticeable when I’m trying to socialize with people who are all, for example, standing around chatting at a conference during a break. Often when a group of people are talking while standing, how they stand in relation to each other depends on the size of the group. A group of four people might be standing at the four corners of a rough square. If one person leaves, then the others temporarily remain standing where they are so that they appear to be standing at three corners of a square, with the fourth corner empty. If no one else comes to fill the space, they tend to move in closer to form a rough equilateral triangle.

Hospitals in Utah preparing to ration care...

...due to surge of COVID patients.   Utah has a 7-day rolling average of about 1,400 cases per day in a population of a bit more than 3 million.  By way of comparison, Illinois has a 7-day rolling overage of about 4,100 cases per day, but with a population four times the size; Illinois is, not yet, facing such a crisis, but Illinois also has a fairly good ratio of beds to persons compared to many other states.  (Illinois has 2.8 ICU beds per 10,000 people, while Utah has 2.2.)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Irish Coffee, "I'm Lost," 1971

Belgian rock band, this was the concluding track on their debut album:

 

A good summary of the backtracking and dissembling by the NYT about its error-ridden 1619 Project

From analysts at the World Socialist Website, which has been at the forefront of exposing the scholarly problems and errors.

As COVID cases surge, one bit of good news is that doctors are now much better at averting death

A useful overview of the changes:

Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness....

The study, which was of a single health system, finds that mortality has dropped among hospitalized patients by 18 percentage points since the pandemic began. Patients in the study had a 25.6% chance of dying at the start of the pandemic; they now have a 7.6% chance.

That's a big improvement, but 7.6% is still a high risk compared with other diseases....

 

Horwitz and her colleagues looked at more than 5,000 hospitalizations in the NYU Langone Health system between March and August. They adjusted for factors including age and other diseases, such as diabetes, to rule out the possibility that the numbers had dropped only because younger, healthier people were getting diagnosed. They found that death rates dropped for all groups, even older patients by 18 percentage points on average....

COVID on campus: an update

Philosopher Gregory Pence (Alabama/Birmingham) kindly shared this list of universities with the biggest outbreaks of COVID on campus.  What they have in common is that they are all large, mostly state schools, most of which have big fraternity/sorority scenes.  (One surprise on the list is BYU, which is large, but is an alcohol-free campus, which one would have expected to contribute to more sensible behavior by students.)   But these schools are the outliers, as even the NYT data reveals, despite their best journalistic effort to emphasize the negative:

More than 35,000 cases [COVID] cases have been identified since early October.

Though some colleges moved all their fall classes online, many campuses remained open even as positive tests accumulated by the hundreds or thousands. Of more than 1,700 institutions surveyed by The Times, more than 50 reported at least 1,000 cases over the course of the pandemic. More than 375 colleges have reported at least 100 cases.

Translated into non-hysterical English:  3% of universities account for about a third of all the cases on campuses, and one-quarter of the schools account for almost all the cases--meaning about 70% of colleges and universities are doing quite well.  Considering that COVID is spreading out of control in huge parts of the country, colleges are performing admirably overall.

Some more reasons to worry about the electoral college map

You can play with the electoral map here.

If you look at the high quality polls at 538 (e.g., those with A-range ratings), Biden is at best slightly ahead in Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona, states that often land in the Republican column.  If those polls are missing anyone, it is surely Trump voters:  folks who believe in QAnon aren't going to be talking to pollsters one suspects.  So let's assume the missing folks all vote Trump, and Florida, North Carolina and Arizona go for Trump again.

Forget about Ohio and Georgia:  those polls sometimes show Biden up by a point or tied, but mostly show Trump ahead.  If Ohio and Georgia really go Democratic, then we're in Biden landslide territory, but I doubt it's going to happen (in part for reasons that some Trump voters reveal here:   that Trump is a bad person isn't enough reason to vote Biden if you basically like Republican policies.  As in 2016, the Democrats are counting too much on "Trump is an awful person.")

So if all the frequent or typical Republican states vote for Trump, that means all Trump has to do is to recapture one of the states he won in 2016.  The best bets are Wisconsin and Pennsylvania:  although Biden leads in both, the lead is not as strong as in Michigan (and nothing like his double-digit leads in places like Virginia).  If Trump flips Wisconsin, then no one wins the electoral college, and oh boy are we in for a nightmare (then, as I understand it, everything will turn on whether the Democrats capture a majority of states in the House of Representatives).  If Trump flips Pennsylvania, then he wins the electoral college, no matter how many millions more vote for Biden in California, Illinois, New York, New England, the Pacific Northwester, Colorado, Minnesota etc.

On the other hand, if Achen and Bartels (Democracy for Realists) are right, then Trump should lose in a landslide because of the pandemic and the economic carnage.  We'll find out soon enough.

QAnon and age-old anti-semitic tropes

Great news that millions of Americans believe this stuff now!  I'll have more to say about this later, but right now I have to get on a conference call with other members of the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy to make some decisions about what kind of economy we want for 2021.

New study of non-voters in the U.S.

Here; from the summary of the main findings:

• Non-voters have less faith in the electoral system than voters. Non-voters say they don’t vote for many reasons, including not liking the candidates and feeling their vote doesn’t matter. Compared with voters, they have less faith in the electoral system, don’t feel they have enough information, and are less likely to think increased participation in elections is good for the country. They are more likely to think “the system is rigged.” 

• Splitting the vote in 2020. If non-voters all turned out in 2020, non-voter candidate preferences show they would add nearly equal share to Democratic and Republican candidates (33 percent versus 30 percent, respectively), while 18 percent said they would vote for a third party.

• Evenly divided on Trump. They are more evenly divided on current political issues and President Trump than previously thought. Fifty-one percent have a negative opinion of Trump, versus 40 percent positive. While non-voters skew center-left on some key issues like health care, they are slightly more conservative than active voters on immigration and abortion.

• Non-voters are less engaged with news and information. They consume less news, are more likely to accidentally “bump into” news rather than seeking it out actively, and more likely to say they don’t feel informed enough to decide who to vote for.

• Eligible Gen Z voters say they are less interested in politics and 2020 election than non-voters. Americans aged 18 to 24 are less interested in politics and less informed. They are the age cohort least likely to say they will vote in 2020, and 38 percent say they don’t have enough information to decide who to vote for.

Richard Marshall interviews Carlos Montemayor (San Francisco State)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Blast from the past: what might the philosophy profession look like in 2043?

Back in 2013.

Post-election scenarios

Suppose Biden wins and the Democrats end up with at least 52 seats in the Senate.  Robert Paul Wolff comments.

Another take on the election

Optimistic analysis, but not wholly!

(Thanks to Christopher Pynes for the pointer.)

On our remarkable sense of smell

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Ann-Sophie Barwich (Indiana/Bloomington) comments.

Some election musings

On October 20, 2016--about 2 1/2 weeks before the election--Nate Silver's operation gave the odds as follows:  Trump had a 14% chance of winning, and Clinton was about 7% ahead in the national polls.  (Do read the rest of Silver's 2016 analysis for grim amusement:  that he thought Clinton's debate performance locked things up shows how little he knows about voter behavior.)

Now here we are on October 21, 2020 (with the election less than two weeks away), and according to Silver, Trump has a 12% chance of winning, although Biden's lead over Trump is about 10%.   Pollsters have apparently made changes since their 2016 fiasco, to better account for the votes of whites without college education, so perhaps this year's numbers are better.  On the other hand, does anyone think that  the 50% of Trump's supporters who believe Democratic and some Republican elites are running a secret child-sex-trafficking ring are the kinds of people who are likely to participate in polls by mainstream polling outfits?  The big unknown here is what proportion of the country is bat shit crazy and likely to cast a vote?

Do philosophers make the world a better place? Thoughts from the late John Gardner (Oxford)

I posed the question back in 2013, and thought I'd re-up the late John Gardner's interesting answer at that time (and invite reader thoughts/reactions):

I'd be the first to say that the world is a better place - constitutively - just in virtue of containing more good philosophy, and more good philosophers. But I take it that the questioner is asking about making the world a better place instrumentally by his or her work, owed to to the dissemination of good ideas in it. Beyond helping students and other scholars to solve puzzles or to frame arguments, I do not believe that my philosophical work has any significant consequences via such dissemination and I do not intend it to have any. I do not intend it to have any, partly because I suspect that any consequences it would have, if it had any, would be really bad. Not because it is bad philosophy (though maybe it is) but because philosophy (in my subfields: moral, political, legal) is ripe for abuse. It is better not to have any effects than to have predictably unwelcome effects through the kind of people who are likely to put my work to use. On the very rare occasions when I have seen my work used by judges, policymakers, journalists, etc. - what Andrew [in a comment above] callled 'intermediaries' - I have very much disapproved of what they did with it and wished that I had managed to keep it much more secret.

Philosophy course at Wesleyan gets a nice-write up in the NY Times

"Living a Good Life," taught by philosophers Stephen Angle, Steven Horst, and Tushar Irani.

STAT News runs a very useful COVID-19 "tracker" of drugs and vaccines in development...

...here.

Blast from the past: best philosophical stylists for students to emulate?

Back in 2011.

Gideon Rosen (Princeton) answers "five questions"...

...about himself, his work, his conception of philosophy, his fears, as part of the podcast series run by philosopher Kieran Setiya (MIT).  I've listened to a couple of these, but this was one of the most interesting I thought.

2020-21 Update for the top ten U.K. schools ranked in the 2017 PGR

MOVING TO FRONT--ORIGINALLY POSTED OCTOBER 14 (changes to:  Leeds)

Since the 2020-21 PGR has been delayed, this is a summary of changes at the tenured (or almost tenured) ranks at the top 10 PhD programs in the United Kingdom since the 2017 Philosophical Gourmet Report; more precisely, these are changes that were not reflected in the faculty lists evaluators saw for the 2017 PGR surveys (some moves that weren't official until 2018 were reflected in the faculty lists for the 2017 surveys).  (Please e-mail me any corrections or additions, thanks.)   My thanks to Mitchell Barrington for his assistance in compiling this information.  (I will fill out the top 15 from the UK at a later date.)  (The Canadian updates are here, the U.S. updates are here.)

Oxford University (#1 in the UK, #2 in the world):  Added Catherine Abell (philosophy of art) from Manchester; Joel David Hamkins (logic) from CUNY; Nicholas Jones (metaphysics) from Birmingham; Amia Srinivasan (epistemology, social-political philosophy) from UCL; John Tasioulas (ethics, philosophy of law) from King's College, London; and Mark Wynn (philosophy of religion) from  Leeds.  Lost Ralf Bader (Kant, political philosophy, ethics) to Fribourg (Switzerland); John Hyman (philosophy of action and mind) to UCL; Brian Leftow (medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion) to Rutgers.  Stephen Blamey (logic, philosophical logic) and Elizabeth Fricker (epistemology, philosophy of language) retired.  John Gardner (philosophy of law, ethics) passed away.  Will surely remain #1 in the UK, and probably #2 in the world.

Cambridge University (#2 in the UK, #19 in the world): added Alexander Bird (philosophy of science & medicine) from King's College, London.  Lost Tim Button to UCL; Tom Dougherty (moral & political philosophy) to North Carolina/Chapel Hill; Huw Price(philosophy of science and physics, philosophy of language, metaphysics) to retirement (although he retains a half-time role at Cambridge, but has no formal teaching duties); Maarten Steehagen (aesthetics, philosophy of mind) to Uppsala.  Will probably still remain #2 in the UK.

University of St Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program (#3 in the UK, #24 in the world).   Lost Barbara Sattler (ancient) to Rohr University Bochum.  Added Franz Berto (logic, metaphysics) from the University of Amsterdam.  Crispin Wright (philosophy of language, math and logic, epistemology) is also now back part-time at the University of Stirling (he is at NYU the rest of the time).   St Andrews has also added a number of short-term visitors, mostly from the U.S.

"Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk"...

...reviewed at the LARB.

The Swedish COVID disaster

The chart here certainly sums it up:  Sweden has had 59.3 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to 11.8 per 100,000 for Denmark, 6.3 for Finland, 5.2 for Norway, and 11.7 for Germany, all proximate countries that were far more proactive in managing it.  Sweden is up there with other countries whose response everyone knows has been disastrously incompetent, including the U.S. (66.3 death per 100,000) and the U.K. (64.5 deaths per 100,000).

Divers from Leeds to Trinity College Dublin

John Divers (metaphysics), Professor of Philosophy at the Unviersity of Leeds, will take up the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin in June 2021.  (He succeeds the emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, Peter Simons, a metaphysician who was also recruited from Leeds!)

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Freedom, "Nobody," 1970

A terrific number (the lead track) from the second album of the British blues/rock band we featured in the late summer:

 

Good news about air travel and the risk of contracting COVID...

...although it does  require that passengers wear masks!  A question for anyone who has flown recently:  are airlines enforcing mask wearing?

Classics professor at UT Austin defamed last December as a "pedophile" by deranged students...

...has now, thankfully, sued them (complaint here:   Download BLAKEMORECOMPLAINT(Final)).   (Earlier coverage (and also), and see also this for more details, including about material since deleted from the Twitter account of the deranged students.)  Professor Hubbard's lawyer issued this statement, which sums up what is documented in the various new sources and also reveals UT Austin's failure to act honorably in defense of academic freedom:

In December of 2019 Professor Hubbard’s home was violently attacked by a mob of masked University students.   They vandalized his home, distributed leaflets to neighbors falsely accusing him of pedophilia, and chanted threats of violence against him.  Dr. Hubbard does not have this sexual orientation, and has never been convicted or even accused of such conduct before now.  He was forced to flee his home under police protection and move out permanently.  Dr. Hubbard’s treatment is a matter of public record and known to UT.  Dr. Hubbard is unaware of any serious effort by the University to identify or sanction the students involved in the mob attack and vandalism on his house, or the blatant libel and slander he has suffered through a systematic and coordinated effort by UT students both on campus and off.   He reluctantly takes this step to defend himself because UT Austin leadership has not taken sufficient action. He will hold responsible anyone who alleges he has encouraged pedophilia, engaged in pedophilia, or has any interest in doing so.  Until these recent attacks on him he had worked for 33 years at UT without a single allegation of sexual impropriety.  The climate at UT Austin that allows students to freely lodge harmful, false allegations needs to stop and adult students must be held accountable for their actions. Dr. Hubbard has pledged that any award he wins will go directly to charities that work on behalf of gay, lesbian, and trans people, who have been tarred by false charges of pedophilia since the 'Save Our Children' crusade of Anita Bryant in the 1970s.

Another letter from Notre Dame faculty opposing Judge Barrett's nomination on the merits

Here.  The earlier letter called on her to delay the process given the circumstances.  (That letter subsequently got some signatories from the law school; the new one does not appear to have law school signatories.)  Barring catastrophe, she will be confirmed, not because of her qualifications (which are shared by hundreds of others), but because of her ideology.  If the Democrats control government come January, they should implement various reforms, including adding seats to the Court, changing the rules on the votes needed to overturn legislation, and stripping the Court of jurisdiction of certain matters.  Enough is really enough.   The Republicans began earnest packing of the federal courts during the Obama Administration, when Senator McConnell not only blocked Judge Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court but blocked the nomination of many federal judges as well; it will be time for the Democrats to undo the damage.

Some striking COVID graphics...

...which document vividly the differential impact of the pandemic across the United States at different times.

(Thanks to Tushar Irani for the pointer.)

Reinfection with the coronavirus? Possible, but quite rare

An informative discussion of what we know, and why it's not a cause for concern.

Picollo from UCL to National U of Singapore

Lavinia Picollo (philosophical logic, metaphysics, philosophy of logic and mathematics), currently Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London, will take up a tenure-track post in philosophy at the National University of Singapore in January 2021.  My guess is she will be tenured before long.

Americans' engagement with the humanities during the pandemic

A new study from the AAAS, with some interesting results.  A bit further down the list was researching the ethical aspects of a choice--although it doesn't suggest the research was done with the help of philosophy.

(Thanks to Robert Townsend for the pointer.)

MA programs in philosophy with funding

Via Geoff Pynn's FB page, I discover this useful resource.  It lists both free-standing terminal MA programs and those embedded in PhD-granting departments.   But do see the guidance in the PGR on how to approach MA programs, especially those embedded in PhD departments.  I increasingly counsel students to avoid Tufts, notwithstanding the strength of the faculty, since they do not provide adequate financial aid for their MA students.

 

On COVID and aerosol transmission

This is informative.  It's pretty clear by now that aerosol transmission (i.e., not just droplets when someone sneezes!) is important, more so than fomites for example.  Links to other sources on this issue welcome in the comments.

Maybe there will be a Democratic landslide...

...but not all indicators, if one looks closely, are good.

Notre Dame faculty (but none from the law school) call on Judge Barrett to step aside until after the election...

...for the good of the country.  She won't, of course.  First, she knows that if she were to withdraw, the Republicans would push through someone else.  Second, she believes that her approach to judicial decision-making is the correct one and ought to be on the Supreme Court.   Or, as a German philospher once remarked, life itself is the will to power.

Blast from the past: "sanctiramus" (from the dynamic lexicon)

Back in 2016.

1987 NYT editorial appeals to a "consensus among economists" that there should be no minimum wage

A good reminder for whom the NYT really speaks. 

(I saw this gem via Alex Gourevitch's FB page.)