Philosophy and Game Theory at Carnegie Mellon 🦚 Research the interface between philosophy, economics, and biology 💱
Jun 19, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Just in case anyone reading this is thinking about debating a crackpot on a famous podcast. Here are some important tips for how to debate from a former debater and coach.
1. I don't care that you are an expert. You have not prepped for the debate. In college, we scouted. A lot. Knowing the subject matter is not enough, you need to know what your opponent is going to say and prepare specifically for that.
Oct 28, 2022 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
I think slot machines are really interesting and I'm always curious about why they are designed the way they are. They have changed in some pretty significant, and I'm curious to know why.
(Fair warning, I'm not an expert on any of this, so this may be all hot air.)
My understanding is that there has been a kind of paradigm shift in the way that slot machines are being designed. The machines of 30 years ago focused on maintaining the veneer of "winning."
Aug 27, 2021 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
A few thoughts on what makes a good letter of recommendation for philosophy grad school. 🧵
1. Be specific about your knowledge of the student. Detail how you know the student and on what basis you make a judgment. We (seriously) get letters where it's not clear the faculty knows the student very well, but still says incredibly nice things.
Jul 11, 2021 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
This thread is full of people saying "don't pay for an MA/MS in philosophy, it's not worth it."
I think it's right to be cautious when deciding about a masters program, but I think this advice is remarkably presumptive. A 🧵
First, unless I knew someone really well, I would be cautious saying something is "not worth it." I don't know how much value someone puts on learning philosophy or how much $ they have. How could I possibly judge whether something was worth it for them?
Jun 22, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This is a common question that philosophers ask and get asked a lot. In my opinion, the answer is obviously "yes" and thinking that there might not be progress in philosophy is the result of thinking about philosophy the wrong way. A 🧵
Since I'm a philosopher, I need to know what counts as philosophy? Let's start with a simple version: has there been progress on the questions asked by people who were called "philosophers"?
Apr 29, 2021 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
A short story about the time I was accused of being part of a cabal to keep a dangerous & "controversial" idea from seeing the light of day.
It's not the idea that you probably think it is...
Last year I (and a bunch of other folks I know) got an email from a seemingly nice fellow who wanted to talk to me about infinity and set theory.
Initially the emails started off very kind. The writer said he was "confused" about how infinities work in math.
Apr 27, 2021 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
There's been a lot of discussion (and mockery) of the new Journal of Controversial Ideas. I thought it worthwhile to condense many of the serious concerns into a single thread. Beware: this thread might be controversial!
Concern 1: Need
Why bother creating this journal, do we really need it?
Apr 26, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I've been thinking about what journals I should do peer reviews for, and here's my new policy. Tell me what you think.
Given I have the time, I am willing review for any journal that meets at least ONE of the following criteria:
1. A journal that I have sent a paper to in the last year or one that I plan to send a paper to in the near future. Regardless of who owns it, if I demand labor from others, I should reciprocate.
Mar 9, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The question "Why are COVID cases flat in Pittsburgh?" provides a great example to explore why even "scientific" answers to questions are, in some respects, relative.
Imagine a "complete" answer to that question. You'll immediately realize that it is mind mindbogglingly complex. You have to talk about social behavior, rates of transmission, invasion of new variants, vaccine delivery and efficacy, weather, and millions of other causes.
Dec 22, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
While this statement will strike many as obviously true, it's worth interrogating.
Here's the question: does science do best when it's practitioners take a neutral position regarding the truth of a proposition?
@msolomonphd gives an important example that should give folks pause: continental drift. When the idea was first proposed, most of the evidence suggested it was wrong. Had scientists been dispassionate observers, they should have abandoned the idea right away.
Dec 20, 2020 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
The scale of how much we have to do with vaccination can be overwhelming. So I did some back of the envelope calculations to make myself feel better. Hope they make you feel better too. A short🧵
Suppose by some miracle that the pandemic suddenly vanished at the end of next week. Even then, the vaccines delivered in the US last week would directly* save (on average) ~18 lives.
Oct 19, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I think "self-signaling" is one of the more interesting concepts to come out of behavioral economics. The idea is that some of our behaviors (especially economic behaviors) are really about telling yourself something about yourself.
daytradinglife.com/wp-content/dow…
People have postulated that a lot of behavior might be self-signaling, things like exercise, charitable donations, purchases certain types of products, etc.
But I think there are some interesting philosophical questions lying just below the surface.
Oct 15, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The game theory of October surprises, a thread.
A somewhat bad (but not terrible) October surprise could actually help a candidate rather than hurt them. Here's why:
Let's talk about tests for a moment. Suppose you know that I'm going to take an IQ test, and you are going to get to see the results no matter what. If the result is higher than you expected, you'll raise your estimate of my IQ. And same for lower than you expect.
Oct 13, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
We often joke about how irrelevant philosophy is. But, here we find -- on a national stage -- a philosophical position from "social ontology." Can groups of people have intentions? Can a group action create 'meaning' for a document? 🧵
We often talk about people having an intention. That they mean something when they talk. Even these individualistic notions can be tricky to make sense of. What if you say something vague without really thinking through what you meant?
Oct 12, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Milgrom and Wilson for their work on auction theory. In addition to its critical importance to economic theory, I also think that this provides an interesting illustration of the importance of theory in the social sciences.
A very important result in auction theory is the "revenue equivalence theorem" which shows that -- in theory -- many different auction mechanisms should have the same outcome.
In experiments, this doesn't always hold. Sometimes different auction designs lead to diff. outcomes.
Sep 15, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
It's not uncommon to hear people say that computer simulations "just aren't philosophy."
No more!
Conor Mayo-Wilson and I have a new paper where we argue that computer simulation should be seen as a *core* philosophical method.
philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18100/
Our argument proceeds via a comparison with thought experiments. We first develop a list of purposes for engaging in thought experiments in philosophy. We then argue that computer simulations achieve many of these -- sometimes better than thought experiments.
Aug 18, 2020 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
I think we, as teachers, need to be on the lookout for how our own judgment about the right way to teach might be effected by common cognitive and inductive biases. A thread...🧵
Bias #1: survivorship bias. This is the bias where you look at a population that has been selected for one reason and assume that features of that selected group represents the population at large.
This is why one has to be careful when thinking about scientific "consensus": When @nytimes surveyed 511 epidemiologists about the future, they got a small number of very bizarre answers from scientists.
~20 scientists said that they expected to never again hug or shake hands with a friend.
~7 said they never expected to go out with someone they didn't know well again.
~5 expected to continue wearing masks forever.
~5 would never again get a haircut at a salon.
Apr 30, 2020 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
This was the last week for my network epistemology class (sad emoji). We focused on models of citation networks, the network formed by how papers cite other papers.
This is an enormous literature, so we focused on one question: why might citations fail to track quality?
This question is incredibly important because increasingly scientists, journals, and papers are evaluated by using various citation metrics. Hiring, firing, promotion, tenure, subscription, and search all depend on these metrics. If they don't track quality... things are bad.
Apr 22, 2020 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Today in my Network Epistemology class we discussed the well known phenomena "Pluralistic Ignorance." The idea of pluralistic ignorance is that people may privately believe one thing, but publicly profess another. (Privately they may hate the regime, but publicly praise it.)
The Anderson story "The Emperors New Clothes" is often used as a motivating example. Each person privately believes the Emperor is naked but is afraid to say it because they worry they may be revealing themselves as uncultured.
This week in my Network Epistemology class we looked at models of argumentation in social networks. "Argumentation" here is not to be taken negatively -- like when you say someone is argumentative. Instead, it's meant as the method of conversation where you exchange ideas.
Most models of information spread and belief aggregation look at how one belief is affected by social influence. For example, models of probabilistic pooling all assume we are "pooling" a single belief with others.
