July 2016
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What kind of person is Trump?
It's a good question, but has an obvious answer: he's a sociopath (which is why, of course, he lacks empathy). He belongs in an asylum or some secure facility where he can't harm any more people. UPDATE: Here's a better discussion of Trump's likely personality disorder. (Thanks to Glenn Branch for the pointer.)
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New Books in July
Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me these new books this month: Nietzsche's Great Politics by Hugo Drochon (Princeton University Press, 2016). Renewing Liberalism by James A. Sherman (Springer, 2016). A Political Theory for the Jewish People by Chaim Gans (Oxford University Press, 2016). Legal, Moral, and Metaphysical Truths: The Philosophy of Michael S. Moore edited…
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What is like to be a philosopher? Kwame Anthony Appiah edition
Once again, courtesy of Clifford Sosis.
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Some questions for Professor Benjamin H. Barton about his use of IRS data to estimate solo practitioner incomes (Michael Simkovic)
After Tuesday's post explaining why IRS schedule C data dramatically underestimates incomes for solo practitioners and other sole proprietors, Professor Benjamin H. Barton emailed to indicate that his views remained unchanged and he did not intend to respond beyond his previous comments on Professor Stephen Diamond's blog. Barton's comments did not address many of the issues I raised. On…
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Polls: looking back at 2012
As long as it's "polling day" at the blog, this item from Nate Silver when he was still part of NYT is worth revisiting–it compares polls the three weeks before the 2012 election with the actual results. An excerpt (with some bolded emphases added): Among the more prolific polling firms, the most accurate by this…
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Also counting against Dopey Donald Chump is that two-thirds of the growth in the electorate…
…comes from the groups who hate the Chump: There are 10.7 million more eligible voters today than there were in 2012. More than two-thirds of net growth in the U.S. electorate during this time has come from racial and ethnic minorities. Hispanics, blacks, Asians and other minorities had a net increase of 7.5 million eligible…
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More on polling outfits, and why they differ right now about Clinton’s prospects
From PEC and the NYT. Nate Silver, as we noted awhile ago, is not as reliable as he was in 2012. My theory is that, having ditched the New York Times, and ventured out on his own, he is now much more dependent on generating traffic and attention, which gives him an incentive to be…
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Yale Daily News piece on Thomas Pogge’s hiring by Yale
Some new information, some old, but a nice piece of reporting by the student journalists; an excerpt: According to an affidavit written by [Martha] Nussbaum to support Lopez Aguilar’s 2014 pre-action filing against Yale, which was obtained by the News, Pogge was a candidate at the University of Chicago about a decade before he was…
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How much do lawyers working in solo practice actually earn? (Michael Simkovic)
In 2015, Professor Benjamin Barton of the University of Tennessee estimated for CNN.com, and Business Insider that attorneys working in solo practice earn an average of slightly less than $50,000 per year. Barton made similar estimates in his book, “Glass Half Full.” Professor Stephen Diamond of Santa Clara argues that solo incomes are quite a bit…
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Annals of “bullshit” rankings
Rankings are fun, sure, but it's good to figure out wheter the metric means something (anything!) lest one produce nonsense. Case in point: ranking law reviews by Google Scholar h-indices. The problem (we've encountered it in philosophy in the past, but now everyone there knows Google Scholar is worthless for measuring journal impact) is that there…
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On Trump’s convention (non-) bump in the polls
Worth reading, if you're a poll follower.
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Ferrero from Wisconsin/Milwaukee to UC Riverside
Luca Ferrero (philosophy of action, moral psychology), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, has accepted a tenured offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calfornia, Riverside, effective for 2016-17. With John Martin Fischer, UCR is already a major destination for students interested in philosophy of action and…
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Hamilton College brands itself, perhaps fatally
During college tours last year, we passed through Hamilton College, which my son liked, especially the open curriculum (he ended up going elsewhere in the end). But this decision is both pedagogically dubious and inconsistent with the absence of distribution requirements, which is probably one of Hamilton's most distinctive features in the landscape of elite liberal…
I just published in the new PPA and can say it was one of the most difficult, rigorous R&R’s of…