Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Yesterday we discussed the notion of what Pareto optimality means. To repeat, it represents any situation in which there is no further improvement anywhere without loss somewhere else. A situation is sub-optimal, then, to the extent that improvements are still possible without loss. The idea has had very broad application in the social sciences and in the attention philosophers pay to same. It is generally controversial only because it seems inadequately demanding. To the extent reform efforts are aimed at finding sub-optimalities, they are NOT aimed at correcting the gross inequalities and injustices that can occur within this notion of "optimality." But as I said yesterday, Sen's critique of the idea is different. He argues that in a certain hypothetical position (which I won't describe today again) Pareto is too demanding. His notion would require "Lewd" and ""Prude" to enter into a "peculiarly 'other-regarding' social ...

Pareto "optimality" (sometimes also called Pareto "efficiency") is an ideal often discussed in decision theory and related branches of the social sciences and philosophy. My understanding is that the two terms are synonymous, although "optimality" seems in broader use. The idea at heart is that it is wrong to refuse to do something that would make somebody better off, unless that action would make somebody else worse off.  So any circumstance in which there is an improvement possible for somebody, that does NOT involve a loss for anybody, is a sub-optimal state. Pareto optimality exists, then, when there are no such moves.  As you might guess, there is somebody named Pareto behind this idea. He is Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian engineer (1848 - 1923) who in midlife turned himself into an economist. Indeed, Benoit Mandelbrot (the famous chaos theorist) has said that it was Pareto more than anyone else who turned economics from a branch of moral phi...

"[A] wounded and unconscious victim of an accident may not take the decisions about what is to be done to him, but in so far as the doctor chooses a course which the doctor knows the patient would have preferred had he been conscious, there is no violation of the patient's freedom -- indeed, there is an affirmation of that freedom in the sense of 'effective power', if the doctor's choice is guided by what the patient would have wanted." A. Sen, THE IDEA OF JUSTICE (2009). For the bibliographically inclined, that's at p. 302, in chapter fourteen, "Equality and Liberty." Yes. I see the point, but it is bothersome. We might want to say, intuitively, that I am acting freely if a surrogate of mine (a chosen surrogate ideally) makes the decision I would have made in a time of medical crisis, when I could not have made it. In contrast, I am not free if the decision is made for me by someone who doesn't care what I would have wanted. For ex...

I came upon a fascinating discussion of the ambiguities in the word "reserve" as commonly used in discussions of banking. Okay, the word "fascinating" is subjective, perhaps especially in that context. Still, this is from a fellow calling himself Dwain Dibley, about whom I know nothing else, commenting in a thread to a post about US monetary policy in Mises.com, a blog on Austrian economics. --------------- Reserves' is one of those ambiguous Fed doublespeek terms that has different meanings and or functions, dependant upon the context in which it is being used. So let's cover some of what the Fed considers 'reserves'. 1) Reserves are: Cash held in bank vaults. 2) Reserves are: Bank assets held on deposit at the Fed. 3) Reserves are: Assets purchased by the Fed in its open market operations. 4) Reserves are: The liquidity provided by #2 and #3 in the interbank settlements system. When the Fed talks about adjusting bank reserves, it'...

We discussed quantum theory yesterday. Now it is time to remind ourselves of the other half of our proposed mash-up. 'Bayesianism' is an approach to probability theory that begins with subjectivity, with somebody's guess about what  is the likelihood of an event. It then discusses how an individual having certain circumstances may change his beliefs rationally, and (assuming he has beliefs on more than one question) may keep them consistent with one another -- or, in other words, how he may keep his view of the world coherent. The chief rival of Bayesianism is "frequentism." This treats probability as an objective fact in the world, another name for the frequency of some outcomes vis-a-vis others. I've discussed this difference before. But ... what does it have to do with quantum theory? Collapse the Function for your own Damned Self With a Bayesian approach we get a take on quantum theory that doesn't shrug its shoulders at the "what is rea...

Why do ordinary folks like me, who know nothing about advanced physics and only a smidgen of calculus, ever write about quantum mechanics? Heck, why do people who DO know the physics and all the necessary math, people like Fritjof Capra or Lee Smolin, persist in targeting writings on the subject to folks like me?                                                             The journalist Gary Zukav wrote The Dancing Wu Li Masters in 1979.  This work has been much ridiculed as "New Age" stuff pretending to be physics.  But Zukav wrote it after talking to a lot of real working physicists, participating in a 1976 physics conference as Esalen Institute, California, etc. Physicists don't just "talk among themselves" on these points. They make efforts to talk to the rest of us, explaining what it means. So they have to expect t...

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...