Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Mary Midgley passed away this month. I'm told she was a renowned ethicist, active in discussions of animal rights, I don't know any of her work in that field. I am familiar with her chiefly as a nemesis of Richard Dawkins. She forcefully criticized his use of the word "selfish" as an adjective that could coherently modify "gene." This is, as it happens, the headline of the Telegraph's obituary of her: "Mary Midgley, moral philosopher who took on Richard Dawkins."   Genes, she wrote, "cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological." [I agree on the atoms, though I'm not sure about the elephants. Was she saying elephants cannot think abstractly? or just that any given elephant we might meet is an individual creature, not the abstraction ELEPHANT?] That first review was part of a long feud, and Midgley eventually apologized (to readers, not to Dawkins) for wha...

Taleb (above)  also, on October 19th, put his response to Krugman's dissing of Gould in twitter form: "How econ models fragilize (or how Krugman blames others yet does not understand much risk & economics)." Daniel Davies then took up the twittering cudgels on behalf of Krugman, telling Taleb "your stuff always has one or two things in in that just can't be stood up." Tweet fight! A wonky tweet fight about economic and evolutionary theory, but a tweet fight still. It came to my attention through Salmon's column, here . And with that, I have said most of what I want to say on all this, except for three points: who is Daniel Davies?  how much of a Ricardian is Krugman really? and, where do I stand on the underlying Krugman/Taleb debate over trade? 1. Davies? I don't know.  His twitter account has nearly 3,000 followers, though. 2. Krugman and Ricardo. Here I admit my earlier reference was rather slighting. I said Friday that Krugman a...

Continuing... How has Taleb made his name? Look at the above graph. The blue line represents a normal or Gaussian distribution, also known as the "bell curve." Events on the far right or ar left side of that line, where the blue is approaching zero along the X axis, are sometimes call hundred-year storms. If we think of this in a finance/business context, the blue line may represent what a certain business thinks are its profits for the coming year. The tip of the bell represents the most likely result (a modest profit in line with that of most of its competitors, perhaps.) Toward the right end of the curve you get to ever higher but more unlikely profits, to the left you get losses, and then ever larger losses, though here too the fall-off in the line toward the zerobase of the X axis implies that certain disastrous results are very unlikely. But what if probabilities in finance don't have a normal outcome distribution? If you draw a flattened curve with "fa...

Headnote: I have just learned that the great scholar Jacques Barzun has died. It is hardly a life cut short -- he was born on November 30, 1907, so he was about a month short of turning 105. Still, for those of us to whom his life and work mattered, he had come to seem immortal. And in any sense that scholarship can secure: he is. For now, I will proceed with the material prepared for this and the following two entries in this blog. But I will have more to say about Barzun here soon enough.] Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist who did a good deal to educate the non-scientists of the world about the biology of evolution, passed away back in 2002. He might be surprised to learn that his name has now become a bone of contention [a fossilized bone of contention?] among economists. Of course it isn't all that surprising that there should be cross-fertilization between biology and economics. Ask Malthus about this. Ask Herbert Spencer. Still, my understanding is that this wasn...