Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The world needs more forthright retractions. The tendency, given the nature of the human ego, is to defend one's own record. This is a temptation perhaps especially for highly intelligent people, who bend their intelligence to defend what they see as their legacies, and thus find themselves looking back and fighting defensive wars. Frances Arnold is obviously very intelligent -- she is a recent winner of the Nobel in Chemistry! -- yet she resisted whatever temptation in that direction she may have felt. https://retractionwatch.com/2020/01/02/nobel-winner-retracts-paper-from-science/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral Three cheers!

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year went to three men who together pioneered cryo-electron microscopy.  The explanation of their work by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences includes this: " Researchers can now freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualize processes they have never previously seen, which is decisive for both the basic understanding of life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals.” Jacques Dubochet is Swiss, Joachim Frank is German born and a long time resident of the US, (thank God for our immigrants), Richard Henderson is a Scot. In the "philosophy of chemistry" article in wikipedia (yeah, using wikipedia today), one finds the following quote from philosopher Joachim Schummer: " Substance philosophers define a chemical reaction by the change of certain substances, whereas process philosophers define a substance by its characteristic chemical reactions." It's a nice line, and it is intended to convey the idea t...

I went to bed Wednesday night, October 5, believing that there was a reasonable chance that, when I awoke, Philip Roth would at last have won a Nobel Prize in Literature. This was a mistake. The first problem was the scheduling. The Prizes are usually announced over the course of a single week, one announcement per day, and in the 'natural' course of events, the Lit Prize would have been announced after each of the 'hard sciences' on the list" medicine, physics, chemistry, had had its turn in the spotlight. So, that would have been last Thursday. Unbeknowst to me, though, the Lit panel had announced back in September, before I was paying attention, that it was taking longer than usual to make its decision, and that it would not bestow its prize this year until the Thursday after everybody else had bestowed the others. Maybe they're tired of always coming in the middle, after the hard sciences, before the Huge Publicity events of Peace and Economics. M...

A warning from the late Christopher Hitchens, one that seems especially pertinent in the light of the post-coup turmoil in Turkey these days: In a Bush speech to the new membership of NATO, delivered in Istanbul last June, one of the  President's handler's was astute enough to insert a quotation from Pamuk, to the effect that the finest view of the city was not from its European or its Asian shores but from -- yes -- 'the bridge that unites them.' The important thing, as the President went on to intone from Pamuk, 'is not the clash of parties, civilizations, cultures, East and West.' No, what is important is to recognize 'that other peoples in other continents and civilizations' are 'exactly like us.'   De te fabula narratur. Human beings are of course essentially the same, if not exactly identical. But somehow this evolutionary fact does not prevent clashes of varying intensity from being the norm rather than the exception. 'Remember y...

The Nobel Prize went to two physicists honored for the discovery that neutrinos have mass . Their discovery was a major contribution to what is now known as the "standard model" of the elementary particles. Until their turn-of-the-millennium work, the widely shared opinion was that neutrinos (like photons) don't have mass. This consensus had led -- don't ask me why-- to a further consensus on how many of them ought to be detectable on earth. And that, in turn led to some confusion because the quantities actually detected were much smaller than what they 'should' be. So these are experimenters who managed to clear up a split between other experimenters and theorists. The theory had to be revised so that the experimental results, the actual quantity detected, could be accommodated, and their work showed how that could be done.  A victory for pragmatism in science, the hospitable homeland of pragmatism. I enjoy this time of year for a number of reasons, n...

You will be assimilated into the Borg! Regular readers probably know that I believe that the infrastructure of contemporary capital markets is broken. The broken character of it is sometimes (misleadingly) attributed to the speed at which trading is done, or (not quite so misleadingly) to the automatic, Borg-like, algorithmic character of such trading. The initials HFT (high frequency trading) have come to serve as short hand for a range of issues that have made markets overly easy for some players to rig at the expense of other players: and at the expense of issuers, the going-public process, even the over-all economy. Mary Jo White, the chair of the SEC, is setting up a panel to advise her and the whole of the Commission on such issues. Unfortunately, it appears that the panel is rigged in favor of assimilated into the Borg. Bloomberg is reporting that economist Joseph Stiglitz (a Nobel Prize winner)  has been excluded from the body precisely because he has express...

John Cochrane, the beaming fellow in this photo, took on Paul Krugman here: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/12/deflation-links.html Okay, I'm a little late to the fair, but I'm traveling this week, not doing any blogging at all, so you're reading something written when that Cochrane blog entry was still fresh. Cochrane's point is that NY Times columnist (and Nobel Prize winner) Paul Krugman repeatedly, in 2009 and 2010, warned of a deflationary disaster if the Fed didn't really put the pedal to the medal on money creation. Well, the Fed didn't. Not by Krugman's standards. And the deflationary disaster didn't happen. In case you didn't follow the above link, I'll paste the gist of Cochrane's take-down here: -------------------------------- " But deflation is a huge risk — and getting out of a deflationary trap is very, very hard. We truly are flirting with disaster." " So we're really heading into ...

The Nobel in Economics this year went to the dapper Frenchman pictured here,  Jean Tirole , a member of the Toulouse School of Economics, and with the Institut d'Economie Industrielle (IDEI). In fact, he chairs the board of directors of IDEI. Nonetheless, if you are an Anglophone, even if you are reasonably well informed about contemporary academic economics, the odds are good you've never heard of him. Which is just as well. The selection of a more widely-known figure, Krugman, Kahneman, Mundell, to take recent examples, doesn't really teach us anything. The selection of Tirole naturally leads some of us to wonder why, and so to teach ourselves something. In that teaching-moment respect, the choice is akin to that of Elinor Ostrom a few years back. Tyler Cowen got the goods, collecting a lot of material about Tirole quickly and effectively on his blog on the morning of the announcement. About a third of third of the way down Cowen's blog piece, this caught m...

Nobel week is a fascinating time of year. Each day brings an announcement of one of the prizes, in a way that starts with the hard sciences and seems to build toward the politically contentious pair -- Peace and Economics. The news in the hard sciences is intriguing (and political in its own way surely, though I am happily abstracted from the sort of academic politics that would manifest itself in such matters). It is intriguing because the bestowal of an award on someone who certainly ISN'T a household name, like the chemists Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner this year, forces various bright science journalists to explain their life work to the rest of us. And I always enjoy getting some easily digestible field about a subject to which I never otherwise give any thought at all. Here is the prize committee's own explanation of the work of the three chemists who win this year. Click .   I've put a photo of Eric Betzig at the top of this post...

Allow me to get in my own two cents (and yes, I realize I'm rather late to this party) about the EU's receipt of the Peace Prize. The Peace Prize is awarded by a committee that is selected by Norway's Parliament.   Follow that link for some particulars. It is fitting, then (nay, it is pragmatically compelling) to observe that Norway isn't a member of the EU. Norway has twice held referenda to determine whether it would join, and in both cases the go-it-alone faction prevailed: 1972 and 1994. The Peace Prize is apparently justified this year by a simple and seemingly pragmatic tie: Europe hasn't gone to war since the nations thereof became a single economic unit. That is pretty clearly a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, and thus a fallacy. Heck, the US hasn't had a civil war since the EU was created either, but even the Nobel Committee doesn't seem to draw that connection. I'll only note as a counter that Norway itself has managed to s...