Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  The state of Louisiana now officially mandates displays of the Ten Commandments in both public and private schools. When I first heard about this, the thought that came to my mind was, "whose version of the commandments"?  The passage in Exodus 20 is somewhat different from that in Deuteronomy 5. And neither of them neatly breaks itself down into a list of ten bullet points. The traditional Jewish understanding of the "ten commandments" involves a first commandment that demands monotheism. A second commandment that prohibits graven images. And so forth. In this version, there is only one commandment against "coveting". The Roman Catholic Church has another take on it. The RC Church, after all, enthusiastically embraces icons (the Eastern Church even more so). The RC Church regards iconoclasm, the smashing of images of the sacred, and even of God Himself, as a heresy it has done well to overcome. So it soft-pedd les the whole no-graven-images thing. (...

 Last year the FDA approved of an Alzheimer's drug named Leqembi, created by a US biotech firm and a Japanese counterpart in concert. The two companies were: Biogen and Eisai.  Biogen is a Massachusetts based mid-sized biotech firm.  This year a much larger company -- larger than either of those two separately or together -- looks ready to receive FDA approval for a similar drug, one that like Leqembi targets amyloid plagues in the brain thought to be central to the disease process. Eli Lilly should get approval for its Donanemab. Why is Alzheimer's treatment such a hot subject for profit-hungry pharmaceutical concerns?  In part because people, around the world, are living longer. Medical and public health improvements mean that more people live long enough to become victims of this horrible late-life malady.  At any rate, the interest of these three companies IS good news for sufferers.  Eli Lilly in particular has the ability to scale up in ways that are ...

  Nothing sadder. You think of a website you used to visit regularly, though perhaps years ago. You say, hey just for old times sake, I think I'll surf on over there.  When you type in the well-remembered domain name, you are met with the depressing information, "This domain is available." A bit like an Elvis song. "return to sender, address unknown, No such URL. No one's home." Elvis re-written for the internet age.  Well, there are some things sadder.  But this is pretty disorienting.  

  Am now reading through one of those two books I mentioned last week.  I said I would report on them to you: here is a first report: Deborah G. Mayo has an impressive resume to be writing on statistical inference. She is a winner (in 1998) of the Lakatos Prize, an award for contributions in the field of the philosophy of science.  The book I'm concerned with now though is her 2018 publication, via the Cambridge University Press, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing. The subtitle she gives it is "How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars".   What are these wars?  They are generally philosophical disputes about what kind of thing we are doing when we talk about statistics and probability. By the warring sides she means especially Bayesians on the one hand and frequentists on the other.  Bayesians acknowledge subjectivity in probabilistic inferences. After all, you must start with a "prior," and you may start with a very different prior from the one I sta...

In August 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission set out an extensive list of rules for the marketing of private investment funds. These rules covered funds that had, until then, been specifically exempt from SE regulation.  But the SEC was employing new mandates bestowed upon it by (its interpretation of) the Dodd-Frank Act, which in turn was a legislative response to the global financial crises of 2007-09. Six financial industry trade bodies joined to file a lawsuit to strike the new rules. These bodies included the National Association of Private Fund Managers and the Alternative Investment Management Association.  They made four arguments.  I'll rank them from the most procedural to the most substantive.  They argued that the new regulation violates the premises of notice-and-comment rule making (in re the final rule was not closely enough related to the original rule, so there had been no proper notice of the final rule); that the SEC is required to produc...

  There is a television commercial in regular rotation these days that bugs me.   (That is usually the case, but let me vent a bit about the latest example).   A woman is talking into her cell phone while standing in front of a wall of paintings. Some of the paintings are kitschy, some are rather surrealist so far as we can tell at our quick glance. NONE of them is abstract.  Woman says, "I just love abstract art. I don't understand it, but I love it."  Huh? Can someone explain this to me?  I neither love this scene nor understand it. Are we supposed to regard the art behind her as her collection, which she has amassed because of this love? Or is she at a museum, and the title she gives this art is due to the curators?  Were the set designers for this shot too lazy to find anything at all abstract?  Or is the mismatch between words and background somehow the point of the scene?  I am agog.  The above image, BTW, is abstract a...

  As I have discussed here before (notably in connection with the Vienna Circle), I believe there are limits to the applicability of the law of the excluded middle.  One example: one can say with some plausibility that as recently as 1990 the validity of Fermat's last theorem was outside the scope of the law.  The answer was not only not known, there was no clear procedure for solving it. So ... it was neither true nor false until such a proof had been created (not discovered, if one is going to take this view: created).   Likewise with the  Riemann Hypothesis,  still unsolved to this day, though it helpfully provides us with a striking image above. A gentlemen who regularly comments on math issues in Quora wrote recently, "There are several fields of mathematics which only make sense on the premise that the Riemann Hypothesis is true, and a handful of others which only make sense on the premise that it is false."   My point though is that n...

 I've ordered two new books from Barnes & Noble.  They both have a philosophy-of-probability vibe. Probability as a branch of mathematics has been intertwined with philosophical debate for a long time, at least since Pascal's day.  I've ordered FUNDAMENTALS OF BAYESIAN EPISTEMOLOGY 1: INTRODUCING CREDENCES by Michael Titelbaum. This was published in April 2022. So far as I know, there has not been a second volume yet, though the title certainly suggests there will be one at some point.   Covering overlapping subjects from a different point of view, I have ordered STATISTICAL INFERENCE AS SEVERE TESTING by Deborah G. Mayo. This one was published in September 2018. Do I know how to line up the gripping reads, or what?    As for the contents beyond the titles: I am told that Mayo's book has some connection with Popperian philosophy of science. One can certainly see how "severe testing" could be an effort to put a new coat of paint on Popperian falsifi...

On June 6, 2024 the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Connelly v. Internal Revenue Service . This was an estate-tax issue arising in the context of closely-held corporations. Since that is already putting several of my readers to sleep, I will say only that the issue concerned a trick that controlling families sometimes use to retain their control of the corporation from one generation to the next. Let's ignore the particulars of that trick. The point is: SCOTUS held unanimously against said trick. It is a decision that will likely lead in at least some instances to some dilution of the control of certain rich and powerful families over small-but-wealth-packed corporations.  So SCOTUS ruled (1) in favor of the IRS and (2) against certain rich powerful families (3)  Unanimously (4) in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas.  Who appointed these damned libs anyway?  I have posted David Hume's image here to suggest that the above cited decision may be ...

In the business world at present, the initials "LLM" mean "large language model". It also means one particular avenue of movement in the development of artificial intelligence.  Algorithms scour the web, scooping up huge blocks of text in the meantime (hence the initials), and output/offer what seems like the answer to a question that a well informed human would give. Or that is the idea.  Sometimes it fails in fascinating ways. For example, an LLM model told me that Plato, in the dialogue PHAEDO, tells a story of how Socrates held a young man's head under water.  This is a story that has already been making the rounds of the internet, pre-LLM. It shows up in self-help books. Socrates lets go of the young fellow (Simmias, on some accounts) in time for him to surface, breathe, and survive.  Then Socrates delivers the punchline, "when you desire success as much as you just desired air, you will be a success." The story is a recent invention, and is jus...

We as a country will have a wild few weeks now while Donald J. Trump is (a) receiving the formal nomination of a major political party for the presidency, and (b) also receiving his probation report and sentence. An odd intertwining of processes. It is a good time to try to put one’s thoughts together with some clarity. So … what do I think? First, I want to set aside the warnings we hear from the former president and his admirers, that “if it can happen to Trump, it can happen to you.” Yes, I know it can happen to me. I’m an ordinary non-billionaire non-celebrity. I'm a schmoe. It has always been the case that “it,” arrest, trial, conviction, sentence could happen to me. The fact that it is happening to Trump means he joins the club in which the rest of us are members, it doesn’t bring the club into existence! “They” don’t have to get through Trump to come after me, They could always have just come after me. When someone like Elon Musk says that, though, he may mean, “since it i...

  I wrote a post here in March about the bankrupty proceedings in regard to WeWork, a company that had attempted to arbitrage the commercial lease market. It leased temporary office space, used for example by companies in the midst of a transition, whose new digs aren't quite ready yet.  It leased such space long term from the owners of suitable properties, and subleased them short term, counting on the fact that you can get more money on a per-day basis leasing short term. As I indicated when I wrote it up in late March, WeWork seemed o a knife's edge. Either it would end up liquidating OR it would end up being re-organized on a solvent basis. The issue would turn on how effectively it could stiff its own leasors, the building owners, in the bankruptcy process. The situation is an unusual one because, although most businesses do pay rent to someone, including most businesses that are cash strapped enough to seek bankruptcy court protection, in the usual case this is a humdrum...

 I recently took some vacation time at the Mohegan Sun hotel and casino in southeastern Connecticut. It is a fine place, and as you might guess from the title it is tribally run.  I'm not a big gambler. The shows are a bigger draw than slots or roulette wheels.  When one speaks of 'shows' at the Mohegan, one may be thinking of the Arena, of the Wolf Den, or of the comedy club. This last trip I was there largely to check out an act at the Wolf Den. I saw and heard a country-music vocal group from south Georgia, the Castellows.  The  Mohegan Sun Arena  (capitalize the 'A') has the headliners.  I've seen Pat Benatar there, Aretha Franklin, Lionel Ritchie. One pays well for the privilege of seeing such artists. For the Wolf Den, though, the privilege is that of seeing someone whose name is not recited with regularity in households across the land: people of whom you may have never heard until you checked out the Wolf Den Upcomings page on the Mohegan Sun...

 Some  North Carolina litigation provides today's food for thought.   There are many contested facts about the case, but if there is any glimmering of truth in the complaint Barings made, then Corinthia, and those behind it, are acting like mobsters amidst the world of high finance, specifically the subdivision of that world known as private credit.  Barings, a storied bank headquartered in London, runs a substantial private credit operation out of North Carolina. Recently, and apparently at the instigation of another financial giant, Japan's Nomura, an Australian fellow has created this new entity ( Corinthia -- like the adjective for leather but without the "n" at the end) and has used it to go on a hiring spree. The Australian, Paul Weightman, hired a lot of talent and then called/emailed the bosses of these talented folk to demand that they sell him the "platform," i.e. proprietary information and facilities used to extend and manage loans. Tony Soprano...

  Let us finally say something about two deaths: the murder that justifies the title of the book we have been discussing, "The Murder of Professor Schlick," and four decades later the mental-illness driven death of the mathematician/logician Kurt Godel.   On the morning of June 22, 1936, Schlick was due to present his final lecture of the semester to his class at Vienna University. He took Tram D and arrived at the University at 9:15. He walked through the iron gate, down the hall, and turned right onto a staircase. Students in Room 41 were waiting for him.  He must have walked right past Johann Nelbock on his way. Nelbock, a mentally unhinged student, had become extremely agitated by a lecture Schlick had given on immortality earlier in the semester. (For the positivists, there was a puzzle as to whether the claim of immortality was even meaningful.)   After Schlick walked past him, Nelbock ran forward to get ahead of Schlick, turned around and fired four ...

  Let us take another look at an issue we discussed both last week and the week before: the unity of science, and the issue of the demarcation of science from non-science. There are three intertwined ideas here we have to look at all at once: induction, causation, science.  The problem of induction has been a constant in philosophy since David Hume (pictured). I can encounter a thousand white swans without ever having encountered a black swan. This should not necessarily give me confidence in the proposition "swans cannot be black". How, if at all, does the accumulation of examples produce a conclusion? Consider, too, causation. I hit a pool ball with the off-the-rack stick a thousand times. The ball always moves forward in the direction of my tap.  It never blows up. Should this give me confidence in the proposition that it will never blow up? Relatedly, should this be enough for me to call my tap the cause of the ball's subsequent forward momentum?   And such...