Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

A question for my scientifically literate readers about biochemistry and biological chemistry

I'm asking for a relative who studied chemistry, including biochemistry, but has never taken any formal biology courses.

What is the difference between biochemistry (as a PhD subject) and biological chemistry?

Many biochemistry programs are apparently located in medical schools.  What is the difference (what are the merits?) in pursuing the PhD in a medical school as opposed to a chemistry or biochemistry department?  Is one preferable?

What are the best programs beyond the obvious ones (e.g., Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech)?  Foreign programs also welcome!

Are there good online resources for students thinking about biochemistry and/or biological chemistry for PhD study?

Thanks!  Feel free to e-mail me at [email protected] if you'd prefer not to post her.e

Blast from the past: how difficult for a North American PhD to move from a job in the developing world to a North American job

Back in 2016, and probably on the mind of some job-seekers this year as well.

In Memoriam: William J. Wainwright (1935-2020)

Professor Wainwright, a leading contributor to philosophy of religion over the last half-century, was emeritus in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he spent most of his career.  There is a brief memorial notice from the UWM department here, which links to an obituary.

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Speed, Glue & Shinki, "Mr. Walking Drugstore Man," 1970

Japanese power trio led by Hendrix-inspired guitarist Shinki Chen, this is the lead number of their only album:

UPDATE:  On Twitter, Andrew Grossman points out to me that in fact they released a second album, in 1972:  some details here.

As expected, state Republican leaders won't get involved with (illegal) efforts to change the slate of the electors

Political self-preservation triumphs over criminality!

Mobility network models of COVID

People going to gyms and restaurants means trouble,  among other findings.

Blast from the past: remembering Annette Baier

Back in 2012.

Did suburbanites tired of Trump put Biden over the top?

That's the hypothesis here, and it doesn't bode well for Democrats going forward; an excerpt:

Biden was able to hit the numbers he needed in the crucial highly educated suburbs, but many of these traditionally Republican voters split their tickets down ballot, voting for the Republican in the US Senate and House of Representatives. Despite polls showing clear gains for Biden among white non-college-educated voters in the rural midwest, Democratic gains here were minimal, and in some places, like much of rural Wisconsin, Trump actually increased his margin after it had seemed like Democrats had hit rock bottom in 2016. With the hugely increased turnout, Trump actually netted more votes out of much of the rural midwest than in 2016.

Most concerningly, Democrats hemorrhaged votes among non-white working-class voters. Exit polls show Trump winning more non-white voters than any Republican in a generation. This was most apparent among Cuban American voters in Miami-Dade county, who of course have their own idiosyncratic politics. But losses among Latino voters could also be seen in huge margins in the Rio Grande valley, one of the most impoverished regions in the country, in Osceola county, Florida, and up and down the map from El Centro, California, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Early returns also show consistent gains for Republicans among black voters across the board. Even in the crucial states Biden was able to flip, Trump reduced Democratic margins in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. These results should be setting off alarm bells among Democrats.

COVID vaccine and the universities

Next fall may be normal, but masks will probably be necessary through the Spring.

On the will to truth and the will to meaning in Nietzsche

Philosopher Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) comments.

It's hard to undo election results...

...but Trump is, as usual, doing a lot of damage that may come back to haunt us in the future.

Blast from the past: Why study history of philosophy?

Back in 2011, an open letter from Robert Pasnau (Colorado), and an extensive discussion in the comments.

The problem with polls

It's not "shy" Trump voters lying to pollsters, it's that the Trump voters aren't the kind of folks who respond to questions from pollsters (what I've been saying all along!):

[I]t turns out that people who answer surveys are really weird. They’re considerably more politically engaged than normal. I put in a five-factor test [a kind of personality survey] and they have much higher agreeableness [a measure of how cooperative and warm people are], which makes sense, if you think about literally what’s happening.

They also have higher levels of social trust. I use the General Social Survey’s question, which is, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” The way the GSS works is they hire tons of people to go get in-person responses. They get a 70 percent response rate. We can basically believe what they say.

Richard Marshall interviews Steven French (Leeds)...

...at 3:16 AM.  Very interesting!

Mink-strain of COVID spreading to humans?

I don't know whether this is pure alarmism or whether it has some factual basis and we should worry.  Any insight from readers?

Lord Kilclooney of Northern Ireland refers to Senator and VP-Elect Kamala Harris as "the Indian"

Old habits die hard.   But seriously:  what happens if the Mick loses his peerage over this?  Who gets it?  An Indian? A Colored?  A Yid?

Gauleiter Barr continues his destruction of the Department of Justice...

...as the top prosecutor for election misconduct resigns in protest. One can only hope that Barr is treated as radioactive by the legal profession for the remainder of his life.

The Evans-Strawson debate comes from the archives of The Open University...

...which includes similar items!

Important philosophers/scientists who are theists and who weren't raised in religious households?

A mathematician elsewhere writes:

Are you aware of many (any?) good modern philosophers or scientists who are ardent theists, but who didn't have some kind of childhood religious indoctrination?  In my circle (mostly mathematicians), I haven't yet found such an example.  

I cannot think of any, although I can think of several philosophers who are atheists who were raised in religious households.   Readers?

ADDENDUM:  Just to clarify:  we're looking for cases of people who had no religious upbringing who ended up becoming theists.  People who converted from one religion to another are not relevant in this context. Thanks.

Blast from the past: Hacker on Williamson on "The Philosophy of Philosophy"

Back in 2009.

On Trump's appeal: from the less-to-more plausible

Here's two takes, from commentators I've never heard of, both hostile to Trump.

First:

That Mr. Trump has received nearly 70 million votes is a disgrace. And it says a lot about this country that too many people refuse to face.

This is America. This is not an aberration. This is indeed our country and who the proverbial “we” are. The way this election has played out shouldn’t be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention or if you understand racism and how systemic it really is. Polling can account for a great many factors, but unless they ask about the extent to which racism motivates voters — and find a way to get honest answers on this topic — they will never be able to account for this....

Many will say it was identity politics — which, in their minds means a focus by Democrats on the experiences of marginalized people, which some find distasteful — that kept Mr. Biden from winning by a larger margin. They may be right, but not for the reasons they mean. There is no greater identity politics than that of white people trying to build a firewall around what remains of their empire as this country’s demographics continue to shift.

The United States is not at all united. We live in two countries. In one, people are willing to grapple with racism and bigotry. We acknowledge that women have a right to bodily autonomy, that every American has a right to vote and the right to health care and the right to a fair living wage. We understand that this is a country of abundance and that the only reason economic disparity exists is because of a continued government refusal to tax the wealthy proportionally.

The other United States is committed to defending white supremacy and patriarchy at all costs. Its citizens are the people who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories and take Mr. Trump’s misinformation as gospel. They see America as a country of scarcity, where there will never be enough of anything to go around, so it is every man and woman for themselves.

I'll just note that Obama won, twice, and by much larger margins than Trump, and in many states that went for Trump in 2016 and in 2020.  America is only two generations removed from apartheid, so they're are lots of racists around, but not enough to explain anything outside the confederacy.

Second:

It has been easy, for liberal pundits, to dismiss the entirety of Trump’s backing as a rabble of unreconstructed racists, but that cannot be the entire reality—and shouldn’t be for journalists who seek to understand their enormous country. A vast and significant minority of Americans—nearly 70 million—have voted for Trump. These 70 million people do not all belong to the Proud Boys or the Ku Klux Klan. They are not all silent fascists. Florida and Ohio, which Barack Obama carried in both his elections and are now Trump states, are not merely hotbeds of race-hatred. Trump managed, despite a collapsing economy and an out of control COVID-19 pandemic, to grow his share of the Black and Latino vote.

The numbers cannot be argued with. Black men and women, despite Trump’s bigotry, shifted toward Trump. Latinos did as well. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 79 percent of the vote in Texas’s Starr County, an overwhelmingly Latino area that borders Mexico. In 2020, Trump captured 47 percent of the vote, nearly winning it outright. After barely winning North Carolina’s Robeson County, home to the Lumbee tribe, Trump won 59 percent of the vote in 2020, easily breezing past Biden. (Obama won Robeson by almost the same margin in 2012.)....

And now for a different perspective

My esteemed former philosophy colleagues from Texas, Daniel Bonevac and Robert  C. Koons, discuss the election here.  They are a bit to my right, hence their different take (scroll into the comments).

(Thanks to a mutual friend who flagged this for me.)

Promising initial data on Pfizer vaccine for COVID

The NYT story includes the appropriate notes of caution as well.   If it's 90% effective, that's phenomenal.  That it has proven safe in 43,000 people is good but does not yet mean it is really safe.  If it produces adverse effects in 1 out of every 100,000 people, they might not yet know, but that level of risk would produce thousands of adverse cases just in the U.S.  It would still be worth distributing such a vaccine in all likelihood.

Richard Marshall interviews Paul Woodruff (Texas)...

...at 3:16 AM.  Woodruff is a gem, both as a person and a scholar.  If the American Academy of Arts & Sciences weren't really a "friends of friends" academy, he would have been elected long ago.

Hume and Trump

When Hume observed that, "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger," he was not thinking of a Trump humiliated. Let us hope the military professionals will be alert over the next three months.

Crispin Wright on the Evans-Strawson debate about truth

An interesting essay, a propos this.   I read a lot about this in graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Wright taught at Michigan during part of that time), but coming back to it many years later some of the unargued-for assumptions do leap out at me:  e.g, "it should be a priority to hang on to a uniform account of truth, applicable to all the kinds of indicative sentences that permit of congruent substitution within that schematic platitude"; "since Evans has agreed that we should seek an undifferentiated account of truth, a challenge arises to explain its generality, to explain what accounts for its applicability throughout the wide variety of contents that discomfort the simple correspondence thought."  I wonder how well they will age in another thirty or forty years.  (Wright himself takes issue with the explanatory demand as Strawson understands it.)

The wrong "Four Seasons"

This is too perfect a mistake by the monster-child's minions; if it weren't real, no one would find it plausible.

Speaking of "fake news"...

...stories like this purporting to offer evidence-free explanations for Biden's victory are a staple of our media, and no one seems remotely embarrassed about running them.  Why did Biden win?  Here are some possible explanations:  (1) hatred of Trump sent people to the polls to vote against him; they would have voted for anyone other than Trump; (2) anger about the pandemic and the economy sent people to the polls to vote against him; they would have voted for any challenger; (3) Republicans and Democrats showed up, voted for their party's candidate, and then the "independent" voters (i.e., those who can't tell the differnce between night and day) showed up and voted on instinct or whim, and it broke for Biden, just barely.

Those three scenarios are at least as plausible (indeed, I'd venture more plausible) than the fictional NYT narrative according to which Biden won because he "campaigned as a sober and conventional presence, concerned about the 'soul of the country.' He correctly judged the character of the country."  

Great moments in obscure rock 'n' roll: Ancient Grease, "Mother Grease The Cat," 1970

Welsh hard rock band, this comes from their one and only album:

 

All politics is local

Back to Queens edition:

A 74-year-old Jamaica Estates developer has less than three months left at his current address after Americans overwhelmingly voted him out of the White House, the AP projected Saturday.

President Donald Trump, a Republican, lost his bid for reelection after a days-long vote count, becoming the 11th commander-in-chief to lose the presidency after a single four-year term and the first major-party candidate from Queens to twice lose the popular vote.

As of 11:40 am EST, Fox is the only major media outlet not to have declared Biden the winner

That's bad, but hopefully they will get there soon.  (UPDATE [11:46 AM EST] :  Fox has declared Biden the winner. Whew.)

On the other hand, the Drudge Report headline is "You're fired!" with this photo:

Both Georgia Senate contests head to a runoff

Although Republican incumbent Perdue beat Democratic challenger Ossoff by a couple of percentage points, he failed to get more than 50% of the vote, so they will meet again in a January contest.  The other race everyone knew would lead to a run-off:  incumbent cretinous social parasite Loeffler outperformed another Repug challenger (the two split the Repug vote), but trailed Raphael Warnock, the African-American senior pastor of MLK's old Church in Atlanta.  Note that the Democrats would have to prevail in both contests to have a 50-50 tie in the Senate, which Vice-President Harris would then break for the Democrats.  Gauleiter McConnell would have less power in a split Senate, but individual Senators would have more power to delay or derail agenda items.  (See, e.g., this or this.)   What are the odds that the Democrats prevail in both Georgia run-offs?  I wouldn't think they're very good, and I suspect Gauleiter McConnell will be in charge again come January.  One thing that is sure is that Georgia residents may soon yearn for the days when the only TV ads were for Wendy's and car dealers.

Small Boston study finds 1 in 5 grocery store workers test positive for COVID

But the vast majority were asymptomatic.  Given that clerks in a grocery store will interact with several dozen people during a day, and in a closed environment, this isn't wholly surprising, but still sobering if it generalizes.  All the more reason to mask up carefully when grocery shopping.

A propos nothing...here's the earliest known recording of Joni Mitchell...

...at age 19, singing "House of the Rising Sun."  It's instantly recognizable as her!  What a voice!

 

Rosenberg v. Dennett on naturalism

An exchange of letters.

A few reader comments that particularly struck me...

...all taken from yesterday's open thread.   Blog traffic has been up as much as 50% over usual levels the last couple of days (e.g., 16k+ visits on Wednesday, 21k+ page views), which was gratifying.  So let me share some interesting insights from blog readers (but do read the whole thread, these are just selections):

Peterwoit:

What strikes me looking at some of the exit poll data:

1. Almost no gender gap among white people (both men and women around 55% Trump).
2. 18% of Black men voted for Trump.
3. The reasons given for voting Trump read like they come directly from Fox News: "Trump is a strong leader", "The stock market is high and the economy is great because of Trump", "Biden is a Socialist who will raise our taxes".

The failure of pre-election polling has been striking, and relatively uniform across the country, overstating the fraction of those voting for Biden by around 5%. This is not a statistical error, it is a huge systematic error, of so far completely unknown origin.

Bottom line is that Rupert Murdoch over the last few decades has created our world. We just live in it, with our best political minds totally unable to even successfully measure the problem, much less understand it and start figuring out what to do about it.

Ben:

I may eat my words here in the next few days but let me echo the sentiment of many election watchers regarding how smoothly the election process went despite all of Trump's wailing. In particular, it's notable that the major news organizations still seem to be the primary source for election results, and, despite predictable bias in analysis, they've maintained a pretty conservative adherence to reality in reporting them. Even Trump's protestations implicitly concede the media's authority.

It's all over, except the mischief

Biden will win the electoral college:  he is ahead in Pennsylvania, Georgia (wow!), and Nevada (he won Arizona, although some media outlets seem nervous about calling that for him).  Pennsylvania alone gets him over 270, Nevada gets him to 270, Georgia gets him over 270.  All three gets him over 300 electoral college votes, but any one will do it.

What isn't over is the mischief.  Newt "just call me Adolf" Gingrich is already "going there".   The unknown is whether ordinary Republican legislators would go along with such outrageous tactics; my guess is not enough will, for fairly ordinary self-serving reasons:  they will fear being punished at the polls, since it will be quite clear to enough of them that not all their supporters are Trump supporters, and the latter will react with volcanic outrage to such theft of their vote.  Still, the fact that some Repugs are talking like Gingrich is breathtaking, and indicates how far gone we are as a polity.

ADDENDUM:  The legal challenges Trump is mounting are unlikely to make any difference.  (See also this more extended discussion by a leading election law expert.)

ANOTHER:  A hopeful sign is that a good number of Republicans are rebuking the monster-child.

STILL MORE:   Biden is going to win more than one of the outstanding states, meaning Trump would have to prevail in legal challenges on multiple fronts, which will be impossible.

Philosophy job postings in 2020 down by roughly 50% from 2019 and 2018

Philosopher Charles Lassiter (Gonzaga) looks at the grim numbers.

Effects of addictions

When all you have is a hammer...

...everything looks like a nail, redux.   A well-known philosopher in the UK, a more serious and alert Twitter user than me, shared the following regarding what he aptly called "Kate Manne's non-falsifiable thesis" (he asked not to be credited for his find!):

Re the limits of Kate Manne's one trick: "Without misogyny as a factor, I fully expect Tuesday to be a landslide for Biden."

...she has now contorted the pony 180 degrees: "We can never again underestimate the political appeal of toxic masculinity. It inspires loyalty like nothing else."

And see this response to a challenge: https://twitter.com/kate_manne/status/1324034496639979521

(Amusing interlude from November 1: "I don't think I'm often wrong tbh. (And it's hardly apocalyptic to predict a Biden win, as I did yesterday.) But I'm the first to admit it when I am.")

Marxists are sometimes chided for "class reductionism," but as reductionist explanations go, it seems a better bit of tunnel vision in the political realm than "gender reductionism."  Indeed, one might think class plays some role in explaining the fixation on the latter.

ADDENDUM:  Even the Twitter Red Guard is making fun of Manne's claim!

Gauleiter McConnell speaks, and Trump is doomed

This Gauleiter plays the long game--hence his fixation on courts--plus he hates Trump and he knows that the Biden Presidency is hobbled now that the Gauleiter retained his legislative chamber.  This odd congruence of interests for a very bad man should mean the monster-child is finished for 2020 (he'll be back, of course, until his appointment in Samarra...or Attica).

Election open thread

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

I will moderate comments to keep things sane, but you've heard what I have to say, now it's your turn.  Please submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear.  Thanks.

Speaking of sick fascists salivating in public...

...here's Mark Levin, radio host and Trump lapdog, tweeting to his two million followers.

All the incumbents in the House of Representatives who lost...

...were Democrats, although Democrats still control the House.  Not a good sign, however.

On the pandemic and voter behavior

Reader Felix Sadeli writes:

Just want to share a thought in response to your blog post.

What I think is often overlooked is that responses to the pandemic by local governments that put heavy emphasis on prohibitions but showing little or no effort in keeping the economy alive are just another side of the incompetence coin.

I live in a blue island amidst a sea of reds in Florida and the local government strikes me as representing that other coin side. In mid-March I lost my two jobs that took me about three months to find. I was not able to get a job again until early August. During the months when I wasn't working, I often wondered what a healthy homeless I would make, living in this fine city that excels at stirring away from the pandemic by running over the economy.

My bet is that economically vulnerable people who were not directly affected by the pandemic saw the disruption to their ability to make a living as more of a threat than the pandemic itself. They may very well have been wrong, of course, but when supposedly millions of Americans are just two paychecks away from homelessness, the danger of pandemic was neither here nor there compared to the prospect of a life ruined by poverty.

There's probably something to this, although one upshot of the Achen & Bartels work on voter behavior is that voters are quite terrible at assigning causal responsibility for the harms that befall them:  so it would be just as plausible that voters would take their economic misfortune out on Trump as they would the direct effects of the pandemic on the health of themselves and their loved ones.

Why are the American stock markets elated with the election outcome?

Readers may recall they were also elated after 2016:  unified Republican government meant give-aways to corporations and the rich, and stock markets love that.   There was the downside that Trump was somewhat erratic and unpredictable and liked trade wars, all of which was bad for business.   Now the stock markets expect the best of both worlds:  a stable guy at the helm, Biden, who will be paralyzed from raising taxes by a Republican Senate.   Hence the booming markets.  Ain't capitalism grand?

Against explanations in terms of "luck"

Philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg) comments.

Richard Marshall interviews Robin Attfield (Cardiff)...

...at 3:16 AM.

Nevada is still undecided

Biden leads Trump by less than 9,000 votes, with tens of thousands of ballots still uncounted.  Although Biden has squeaked out victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, he needs Nevada if he loses Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania is very far from being clearly in Biden's camp.  Indeed, given the massive polling errors, I'd bet on Biden losing Pennsylvania at this point, given that he barely won Michigan and Wisconsin where his lead in the polls was greater.  But we won't know about Nevada until tomorrow.  Oh boy.

ADDENDUM:  This generally smart election watcher is more optimistic about Pennsylvania.

USEFUL:   This article (circa 5:30 PM EST) gives the state of play with ballot counting in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina.  This article even suggests that the latter two could tip to Biden.  I won't hold my breath.

A ballot initiative in a blue state and what it reveals about the electorate (plus a telling anecdote)

California voted for Biden over Trump by a 2-1 margin.  And yet California voters decisively rejected a ballot initiative that would have restored affirmative action in public employment and college admissions by at least a dozen points.

One might have thought that affirmative action (or "diversity" as it is now wrongly called) is a staple of the Democratic brand in American politics, yet voters can overwhelmingly prefer the Democratic candidate and yet also overwhelmingly reject this policy.  What might we learn from this?

Affirmative action is deeply unpopular, even with many Democratic voters, because admissions and employment are zero-sum games, and the outcomes of those "games" are perceived to be life-and-death matters, which to some extent they are:  under capitalism, everyone the market doesn't need is disposable, so not getting a job or a spot in a prestigious university can seem a serious matter.  And any perception of according an advantage in this life-and-death struggle to a whole group that one is not part of is, perhaps not surprisingly, quite unpopular with those adversely affected.