Monthly Archives: November 2017

Philip Tetlock

More “balanced” thinkers (who were prone to frame arguments in “on the one hand” and “on the other” terms) were less overconfident (r = .37) and less in the limelight (r = .28). Of course, causality surely flows in both directions. On one hand, overconfident experts may be more quotable and attract more media attention. On the other, overconfident experts may also be more likely to seek out the attention.

Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, Princeton, 2005, p. 63

Richard Nisbett

[Y]ou can’t prove whether discrimination is going on in an organization—or a society—by statistics. You often read about “glass ceilings” for women in a given field or about disproportionate school suspensions of boys or minorities. The intimation—often the direct accusation—is that discrimination is at work. But numbers alone won’t tell the story. We don’t know that as many women as men have the qualifications or desire to be partners in law firms or high-level executives in corporations. And we have some pretty good reasons to believe that girls and boys are not equally likely to engage in behavior warranting suspension from school.

Not so long ago, it was common to attribute women’s lower representation in graduate school and faculty rosters to discrimination. And there certainly was discrimination. I know; I was there. I was privy to the conversations the men had about admitting women to grad school or hiring them onto faculties. “Go after the guy; women are too likely to drop out.” Bugged conversations would have proved what raw statistics, comparing percentage of men and women hired, could not.

But nowadays 60 percent of college graduates are women, and they constitute a majority of law and medical students as well as graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, and biological sciences. And the University of Michigan, where I teach, two-thirds of the assistant professors hired are women (and they get tenure at the same rate as men).

Do these statistics prove discrimination against men? They do not. And I can assure you that bugged conversations—at least at my school—would not support the discrimination idea either. On the contrary, we are so frequently confronted with the prospect of admitting huge majorities of women into our graduate program that we contemplate relaxing admission standards for men, though we’ve never carried it out in a conscious way, of that I’m sure.

The statistics on postgraduate education have not stopped some people from claiming there is still discrimination against women in the physical sciences. One book I read recently claimed that women were “locked out” of physics. In the absence of evidence other than the purely statistical kind, there can be no justification for that assertion.

Richard Nisbett, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, p. 188

Ben Garfinkel

Another simple search cost, which we might regard as something of a fixed cost, is the cost of learning about smart contracts and how to use them. As the length of this report may help to demonstrate, this cost should be regarded as non-trivial.

Ben Garfinkel, ‘Recent Developments in Cryptography and Potential Long-Term Consequences’, sect. 4.5

Richard Shryock

Measurement, declared so distinguished an authority as Goethe, could be employed in strictly physical science, but biologic, psychologic and social phenomena necessarily eluded the profane hands of those who would reduce them to quantitative abstractions. Here one detects the feeling that measurement somehow robs human phenomena of all mystery or beauty, and denies to investigators the satisfactions of age-old sense impressions and of intuitive understanding. Such feeling unusually appears within any discipline when it is first threatened, as it were, by quantification. Dr. Stevens terms it, in relation to current psychology, “the nostalgic pain of a romantic yearning to remain securely inscrutable.”

Richard Shryock, ‘The History of Quantification in Medical Science’, in Harry Woolf (ed.) Quantification: A History of the Meaning of Measurement in the Natural and Social Sciences, New York, 1961, p. 93

Quentin Smith

I was planning to move to Florida, write philosophy in a library, while it was open, sleep outside in the warm weather at night, and hopefully find some soup kitchen or something. […] Living in the city slums wasn’t that enjoyable a feeling, especially since being robbed and shot at tended to disrupt my concentration on the theory I was working on.

Quentin Smith, ‘An interview with Quentin Smith’