Philosophy may be too broad a term for the specific interest I have in the Philosophy of explanation and knowledge, ways of reasoning, means for thinking about content and process, as well as making sense of rights, duties and obligations. Since business and life involves reasoning and knowledge, learning about these phenomena is indispensable for me....

An ethical as much as a philosophical issue this... from Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution.

Arnold Kling queries what I meant on that point in a recent talk. I meant the following:

1. There is an entire class of economists -- a large class at that -- whose choice of problems to work on bears little relation to what they think are important issues in the real world. I would stress, however, that it is difficult to find such economists (though there are some) at the top tier schools. This is a bigger problem at lower tier and wanna-be institutions.

2. I commonly meet economists and other social scientists who will tell you about the implications of their latest research, yet if you ask them other questions they will respond in hushed tones of the most severe agnosticism. For instance they will refuse to answer Robin Hanson's question about identifying large inefficiencies in the contemporary United States.

Now, if such agnosticism truly represents their actual views as human beings, that is a perfectly defensible stance. Yet I find that many (most?) of these same people will hold very definite political views and act on them in their private lives. They will support candidates, donate money, condemn colleagues who don't hold similar views, and so on. In other words, they are not really agnostic on all those other issues, they just don't want their personal views subject to full analytic scrutiny. They bifurcate the personal and the political.

This is one of my pet peeves. It is defensible to be truly agnostic. It is also defensible to believe that general principles of economic theory and empirics and ethics allow us to have "all things considered" policy views on matters we have not studied closely. It is not defensible to hold such views but, under the cloak of a not-really-meant agnosticism, refuse to put them on the social science table, so to speak.

(I find that bloggers hardly ever suffer from this problem. In many ways the core of blogging is a willingness to apply what you know to every problem you encounter, and see how good a job you can do of it in a more or less integrated fashion.)

3. Most intelligent people, in their ordinary lives, believe that other people, especially less intelligent ones, make stupid mistakes all the time, including in their decisive choices (not just in their voting). Yet some of these intelligent people call themselves rational expectations theorists. I don't get it.

"We speak for free markets and free people, the principles, if you will, marked in the watershed year of 1776 by Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." So over the past century and into the next, the Journal stands for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the ukases of kings and other collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities."

Some information here from the Economist March 7th - the remainder from my now 28 year old Ph.D studies and pondering.

A slightly obscure realm of physics is concerned with what seems to be as much a question of philosophy as of physics - the issue of the interaction between matter and anti matter.


Physicist Lucien Hardy asserted that when a particle meets its anti particle the pair explode in a burst of energy leaving nothing. His formulation did however leave open the possibility that the particles might collide and survive if they were unseen.

What nonsense is this? The "seen unseen" issue arises from the work of Bohr and Heisenburg in the 1920s showing that the very act of observing altered what was being observed and thus whatever "was" before it was seen could never be observed. More practically the act of observing plus all the apparatus being used to observe alters what is being observed - that apparatus includes the theories brought to the "seeing".

This then - starts to look a bit more exciting and relevant. If the thought apparatus brought to the observation process is in fact defining in some (unspecified) part what is being observed then we ought to be careful what we think.

The Economist reports however that two independent groups of physicists have demonstrated that things do indeed "exist" even when not seen (bad luck for the question "is a man wrong even when he says something in a dark wood and no woman can hear him"- at least for males).

The two teams - one from Japan and one from Canada - probed "reality" without disturbing it by using what is, in effect, an analogue model. Polarisation of photons (which are the particles making up light) involves behaviour which follows exactly the behaviour of the particles in Hardy's paradox.

The trick was to NOT gather all the information (shades of the non barking dog in the Sign of Four - again) in any one experiment and thus not "observe" in any one experiement. Data were then pooled so that the sum of the partial information allowed confirmation of collision and survival but only when not seen.

What might this mean for us lesser mortals trying to explain and describe social, economic and cultural behaviour. Well it admits the possibility, may even prove, that such phenomena exist but - the catch is they cannot be observed without altering them. So objectivity is both possible and impossible all at the same time.

The claim that objectivity is not possible is far from new but has been made before primarily as a matter of assertion and disciplinary defensiveness. These results suggest a more robust explanation is possible - and yes, theory and one's epistemological apparatus matter very, very much.

The following is from a lecture, given in 2003, by the late Michael Crichton, Professor at the California Institute of Technology. His interest was the intersection of science, technology, public policy and everyday life. (thanks to David Haarmeyer and WSJ)

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two-week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:
N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL


Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.

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George Mason's Don Boudreaux is, I often think, at his best when just a little annoyed... the following treatment of theory versus practice is Prof Boudreaux at his best:

"Yesterday I participated in a seminar sponsored by the University of South Carolina Law Review on today's financial crisis.

It was a high-quality affair; I learned much.

One participant, however, caused me to wince. This participant was a U.S. Representative from North Carolina, the Hon. Brad Miller. He began his remarks by pointing out that he was the only non-academic speaking at the seminar. Upon hearing this remark, I guessed correctly what he'd say next. It went something like this:

Unlike academics, I don't see things with theories. I see things with my eyes. And I trust my eyes.

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Why Conservatives Avoid the Lovely Ivory Tower on the Left Bank
March 14, 2008; Page A17 Wall Street Journal

When university professors see they're stuck in a system that does not necessarily reward hard work, many come to scorn the system that does -- capitalism. And because university professors know that to advance they must invent a new theory -- or reinvent an old one -- many choose to wage war on capitalism and to argue passionately for income redistribution. In academe, leftist notions sell, and Marxism revisited has become a highly profitable enterprise in universities nationwide.

Graduate students and untenured faculty catch on quickly. They must admire, or seem to admire, the ruling orthodoxy -- liberalism -- or risk being tagged "reactionary," which could wreck their prospects for employment or tenure. Grantors, taxpayers and tuition-paying parents then become unwitting patrons of scholars who sneer at the very ones who guarantee income, tenure, benefits, and the prospect of a lifelong pension. Only in academe can a young professional rise to stardom by exploiting the very system he or she claims to detest.

Nan Miller
Professor Emerita
Meredith College
Raleigh, N.C.

Oliver Burkeman
Saturday November 25, 2006
The Guardian

Here's a depressing thought: what if being depressed, at least a little bit, is actually a good thing? And if it is - if being generally pessimistic is a useful personality trait to have - then isn't that a cause for optimism? In which case, is it really a depressing thought after all? Shouldn't it make you happy about being depressed, in fact, and therefore not depressed?



Recently, I have been attempting to resolve this paradox, but my brain just locks up, rendering all further thought or action impossible, like whenever I try to use those self-service checkouts at Sainsbury's.

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I have recently finished reading CRITIQUE OF CRIMINAL REASON by husband and wife pair "Michael Gregorio".

This novel is set in Konigsberg, Prussia in 1804 immediately prior to the death of Immanuel Kant. It is a relatively simple if unusual crime thriller in which a young magistrate of the time seeks to establish the identity of a killer with horrific habits - which of course, he does.

Here I make no comment on the literary merits of the book or its entertainment value - except to say that I found it instructive and intriguing in a vaguely depressing manner. It is of interest though in describing, perhaps implicitly perhaps not, two quite different ways of approaching the issue and their differing implications for the conduct of criminal investigation and accompanying legal process.

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Last night I went to hear Emeritus Professor Jim Flynn of the University of Otago speaking to a lay audience about his work on intelligence. I remember him from my student and later tutor days at Otago - moral philosophy was his main area then. Always two steps ahead of everyone and it was rumoured or thought amongst us that he had all the tertiary qualifications with top honours by about age 21 and he was never, never a dull speaker.



About 38 years on and little has changed and he challenged and excited us last night. Thanks to Rosemary and the Toroa Lions Club for organising the event and of course my invitation.

Flynn's thesis - for it is more than a string of hypotheses and it promises or threatens a policy implication or two as well - concerns intelligence and mental ability, specifically changes or apparent changes in that ability.

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