August 2017
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Great moments in obscure rock ‘n’ roll: After Tea, “Jointhouse Blues,” 1970
This Dutch psychedelic/blue rock band formed in 1967 and continued well into the 1970s, though never made it on this side of the Atlantic. This is from their 1970 album of the same name:
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PGR Draft Faculty Lists for Fall 2017 Survey
MOVING TO FRONT–ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 22 The draft list of faculties for the 2017 PRG survey is ready for review and correction. Download PGR Faculty Lists 2017-18 draft The benchmark for the faculty list is fall 2018, so, e.g., faculty who will be retired by fall 2018 are not included on the list, or faculty…
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Todd Henderson (Chicago): Lawyers make better CEOs in industries with high litigation risk (and worse CEOs elsewhere) (Michael Simkovic)
Professor Henderson finds that: "CEOs with legal expertise are effective at managing litigation risk by, in part, setting more risk-averse firm policies. Second, these actions enhance value only when firms operate in an environment with high litigation risk or high compliance requirements. Otherwise, these actions could actually hurt the firm." The full article is here.…
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Selective historical memory watch: American Confederacy edition
This is quite interesting, courtesy of a colleague in the History Department here.
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This guy nails Trump…
…better than anything I've seen; an excerpt: I don’t think Donald Trump really is a Nazi, in the same way and for the same basic reasons I don’t think he’s really a Confederate apologist, or a Republican, or a Russian operative, or anything. Honestly, even his white supremacism is a second-order thing, an artifact of…
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Walsh from UC Irvine to UCLA
Sean Walsh (philosophy of logic and mathematics, mathematical logic), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Irvine, has accepted a tenured offer to begin January 1, 2018. This is the third senior hire UCLA has made in the last year (the others were Michael Rescorla from UC Santa Barbara and Sherrilynn Roush…
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Mediocre white person watch: Richard Spencer edition
He read some Nietzsche, didn't get much out of it. (The linked essay makes a few good points, but for a more serious discussion of related issues, see this review essay of mine.) (Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)
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Should the government raid university endowments? (Michael Simkovic)
Vanderbilt Tax Professor Herwig Schlunk wants the federal government to tax university endowments, preferably out of existence. He writes: “In the best of all possible worlds, the federal government could and probably should . . . confiscate[e] all private university endowments . . .” Toward that end, Schlunk recycles arguments that were discredited years ago.…
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“Push Trump off a cliff again”
This is funny, and if you don't like cliffs, you have a choice also of volcanoes, sewers, and dinosaurs.
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Chomsky to take up part-time professorship in Linguistics at U of Arizona
Story here. He's been emeritus at MIT for a number of years now. I imagine it will be nice to spend the Winter terms in beautiful Tucson! I imagine philosophy PhD students will also try to take advantage of his seminars. (Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)
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Vice News report: “Race and Terror in Charlottesville”
This is pretty grim, though it conveys powerfully how ugly things were:
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Some nuance about the use of the term “nuance”
It's on the rise, even in philosophy.
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A striking paragraph in today’s NYT report about the fiasco of Trump’s apologetics for Nazis and racists
This paragraph lept out at me: The president’s top advisers described themselves as stunned, despondent and numb. Several said they were unable to see how Mr. Trump’s presidency would recover, and others expressed doubts about his capacity to do the job. Now one might laugh at mere "doubts about his capacity to do the job,"…
No-one knows how “the long run” is going to go in AI in general, and detection in particular. Right now,…