17 villages

I made my first donation to the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes mosquito nets in Africa. The founder, Rob Mather, sent me this email:

"I am catching up on recent donations to AMF and wished to thank you for your exceptional generosity and support. It is very much appreciated. 100% of your US$11,698.40 donation will buy 4,670 long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) and protect some 8,410 people. That's 17 entire villages."

I don't know whether I'm obligated to donate money like this, and I don't care. I just think it's awesome to be the defender of 17 villages against an inhuman blood-drinking child-killing evil.

A Backward Clock Thanksgiving Picture

I have a lot to be thankful for this year, including the acceptance of "The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, and Safety" in the Journal of Philosophy! It was my good fortune to have John Williams, who published his first epistemology paper before I was born, as my co-author.

Here we are in the NUS philosophy department. John came across town that day to see Mary Salvaggio's talk and have a reading group meeting on his next book, which discusses Moore's paradox.

You can use this picture of us in your presentation if you're discussing our paper.

Of Marco Rubio, and hiring philosophers in Singapore

We've started to review applications for our tenure-track position at the National University of Singapore. If you're looking to apply and haven't already, send your application quickly!

Back when NUS hired me in 2008, the department advertised five positions, including some that were open in both rank and specialty. I'm told that the total number of applications for the whole mix of five jobs was something like 150.This year we're only advertising one job at the Assistant Professor rank, open to all specialties. We have 311 applications.

I'd like to think that the higher numbers are because we've been publishing lots of good work and raising the international research profile of the NUS philosophy department, making people more interested in crossing oceans and continents to come to Singapore. But even if that's part of it, the big story is the huge backlog of PhDs seeking jobs anywhere after the global financial crisis crushed university hiring. It looks like the supply of jobs this year is even lower than the last two. With the global economy mostly on an upswing, I have no idea why. 

I've taken at least a brief look at all the applications. It's exciting and depressing at the same time. Exciting because lots of people are doing useful work on questions that human beings so far haven't been able to answer, and one of them is going to be our new colleague. Depressing because the number of people doing good work far outstrips the number of available jobs, and a lot of them will have to do something else instead.

Marco Rubio's inaccurate claim that welders make more money than philosophers was a big story this week. Many of my philosophy friends pointed out that philosophy majors have a median income of $85,000 by mid-career while the median wage for welders is $37,420. Of course, most of those philosophy majors are chasing the big money in the private sector rather than facing the grim academic job market that I've described. And that brings me to something else that was wrong with Rubio's remark.
 
The path to American prosperity in this century is unlikely to involve being the world's top welding country, or even the top country for welding education. Other countries' labor markets are set up to out-weld us. America still manufactures lots of stuff, but usually through highly automated processes that require ever-fewer humans and create ever-fewer jobs.

America could be the country with the world's best universities, where all the other nations pay to send their best young people. Steel manufacturing may be moving to China and India, but academia there still lags far behind the US. Knowing this, wealthy parents there will pay lots of money to get their kids US college degrees. Oxford and Cambridge used to play a similar role in the old British Empire as the prestigious place where the smartest kids in the colonies wanted to study, and America could easily step up and occupy much of that role. Even apart from tuition fees, the financial benefits of having the world's smart people connected up through your country's university system are diffuse but tremendous.

Philosophy investigates the answers to deeply puzzling questions. The country that hires the philosophers publishing the best research becomes the country where the best answers to these questions are. That's the kind of country whose university system one should regard highly.

With three of my excellent NUS philosophy colleagues:
Ben Blumson, Weng Hong Tang, and Loy Hui-Chieh

If America doesn't seize the benefits of having the world's best universities, other countries will get them. Singapore did that when it hired 5 philosophers in 2008. As the head of our hiring committee, I'm helping it do that now.

Rubio isn't a confused dad giving his kids dubious career advice. He's a US Senator, and perhaps the most likely Republican presidential nominee. He has influence over funding for humanities research in America, and may come to have much more. Whether America reaps the benefits of being the global leader in higher education, or whether it lets these benefits fall to other countries wise enough to seize them, is among the stakes in the 2016 Presidential election.

Laura Stevenson and The Cans - The Healthy One

Laura Stevenson's voice makes me imagine her as the doting mother of all my favorite indie rock stars. Cheery music, dark lyrics.

Does this happen often in books on ancient philosophy?

Sometimes your copy editor requests that you include an author's first name in the bibliography. But you have already included the author's full name, and it is "Aristotle".

Peter Railton meets fan

To conclude my talk in Belgium, I asked: what kind of normative ethics do you get if you base constitutivism on my Humean account of agency instead of a Kantian one? And then I stripped off my shirt to reveal my jersey and said: "You get Peter Railton's view!" It was my first time giving a talk with Peter in the audience and I was going to make the most of it. Thanks to Maarten Steenhagen for taking this picture of us!

Bentham on bestiality

Apparently there are credible allegations that British Prime Minister David Cameron had sexual relations with a dead pig as a member of a secret society in college. This provides a nice occasion to note Bentham's sensible discussion of bestiality in 1785:

Bestiality
An abomination which meets with as little quarter as any of the preceding is that where a human creature makes use in this way of a beast or other sensitive creature of a different species. A legislator who should take Sanchez for his guide might here repeat the same string of distinctions about the vas proprium and improprium, the imaginations and the simultaneity and so forth. Accidents of this sort will sometimes happen; for distress will force a man upon strange expedients. But one might venture to affirm that if all the sovereigns in Europe were to join in issuing proclamations inviting their subjects to this exercise in the warmest terms, it would never get to such a height as to be productive of the smallest degree of political mischief. The more of these sorts of prosecutions are permitted the more scope there is given for malice or extortion to make use of them to effect its purpose upon the innocent, and the more public they are the more of that mischief is incurred which consists in shocking the imaginations of persons of delicacy with a very painful sentiment. 

Burning the animal
Some persons have been for burning the poor animal with great ceremony under the notion of burning the remembrance of the affair. (See Puffendorf, Bks. 2, Ch. 3, 5. 3. Bacon's Abridg. Title Sodomy. J.B.) A more simple and as it should seem a more effectual course to take would be not to meddle or make smoke [?] about the matter.

Election special in my political philosophy class

Singapore holds elections on Friday! After the election timing was announced in August, I changed the syllabus for my honors political philosophy seminar so that the students could do 5-minute presentations on election-related topics of interest to them, with 5 minutes for discussion.

So today students presented on the various parties' manifestos, lowering the voting age, Max Weber, gerrymandering, Singapore's (awful) treatment of single mothers, and many other things -- some concrete and some abstract. There was a pretty even split of support for the ruling PAP and the opposition coalition, with a few people arguing forcefully for one party or another and many people in the middle or making broader points. I'm proud that my class can be a venue for smart students in a young democracy to discuss important issues before an election.

Google logo thoughts

This was a good redesign. Google likes to present itself as brilliant and innocent like a genius kindergardener. The primary school primary colors and Google Doodles are part of that image. Now the logo is a bit more elementary school to match. I'm not sure about the tilted 'e', which looks out of place, but it does have a bit of a happy and optimistic vibe. The old 'g' never seemed right to me, and now it's fixed. 

Liquidity

The Bank of Japan prints Yen, so the Yen falls against the Singapore dollar, so it's cheap to fill my fridge with Asahi and have a party! Germans take note: the role of central banks is to provide cold smooth delicious liquidity.

When my head of department came to the party, he remarked that this was less like taking advantage of a sale and more like commodities trading.