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Serious business
Feb. 19th, 2011 04:58 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -3. High today: -2. It was 10 very early yesterday morning, eating all the snow and bringing out the squirrels. If the TV weather people were interested in "record wind", I'm sure yesterday would've been a record-windy day in Toronto.
Headline: Humans kick Watson's ass at understanding natural language! I guess the great question about Watson and future Watsons, among people who actually care what the point is supposed to be, will be the same as the great question about Deep Blue: to what extent does it "think" in a categorically different way than humans do, and what difference does it make? The game itself was over as soon as they decided to give Watson super-human reflexes--you'd think it would've been easy enough to match Watson's reflexes to the average of Ken's and Brad's, or something; they seem to have decided to give Watson just enough of a delay that it was possible for the humans to score significantly above zero, but too little of a delay for the result not to be a foregone conclusion--but the most interesting thing with regard to the actual point was how many plainly stupid answers Watson came up with, if not as its top choices, then at least as possibilities. But eventually, you can suppose, Watsons will get good enough at understanding natural language by word-association that they won't think stupid things any more than smart humans do. (I'm not sure whether it was this that prompted me to devote much of yesterday afternoon to poking around in the "conjunction fallacy" stuff. It's easy to understand the fallacious response to the "Linda" scenario as being produced by a Watson-like word-association way of understanding language--people get the Linda problem wrong in much the same way as Watson came up with "Toronto" as the most probable answer in the first final jeopardy despite Toronto being wrong on every count except that it's a city with two or more airports. I suspect that Watson might get the Linda problem wrong, unless it's specifically programmed to avoid conjunction fallacies, by dismissing the first half of the conjunction "Linda is a bank teller and a feminist activist" as noise. One interesting thing about the Linda experiment is that a lot of people who pick the conjunction as more probable than one of its elements change their answer if you ask them which one they'd bet on. Betting is a device to get people to think better about the scenario; the question is whether it just motivates them to think harder or to think in a different way--and whether being asked to bet somehow prompts some people to understand the question, and what the options mean, differently.) Currently, when Watson is pretty good, but not as good as a smart human, at understanding natural language by word-association, you can see what's wrong with that mechanism of "understanding"--you can see it going wrong. Intuitively, its going wrong seems to count as evidence that word-association isn't the way humans understand language. But when Watsons don't think dumb things anymore, that intuitive evidence won't be available anymore....
The text for my philosophy of religion lecture the other day starts with a Star Wars analogy. This set me to wondering how many of my students have never heard of Star Wars--because, for any social phenomenon or entity x, given a large enough set of undergraduates, some undergraduates will never have heard of x. Thinking about that set me to thinking about the sort of irony of appealing to Star Wars as a cultural touchstone (this text was from the late '80s--today the analogy would be to Harry Potter, no doubt) in the context of a discussion of religion: in contemporary multicultural secular societies, religions themselves, which through almost all of human history have been the arch-touchstones, no longer serve as touchstones at all (even, to some large extent, among "believers"). And thinking about that inevitably set me to thinking about sports as touchstone and social glue. So, after polling my class as to whether they had heard of Star Wars--no one admitted that they had never heard of Star Wars, which I found a bit suspicious--I asked: "How many of you have never heard of Phil Kessel?" Half of them put up their hands. "No no," I said, "have not heard of Phil Kessel. How many of you have not heard of Phil Kessel?" Half of them put their hands back up. Then I asked them how many of them had never heard of Mats Sundin, and one person put up her hand. There were maybe fifty people in the room, so around twenty-something times as many of them had never heard of Phil Kessel as had never heard of Mats Sundin.
(Poll: have you heard of Phil Kessel? Yes, no, ticky-ticky?)
The obvious (and maybe even correct) explanation for this is that Phil Kessel has never been in the playoffs with the Leafs, and lots of people in Toronto pay no attention to the Leafs except at playoff time. So this set me to thinking about how the Leafs, when they're not in the playoffs, fail to serve as touchstone and social glue in Toronto. So, of course, that's why we all hate each other and elected a stupid asshole as our mayor! The Leafs haven't been in the playoffs since 2004! It's the Leafs' fault! (And, yeah, the Jays' fault, too.) But, but: the company that owns the Leafs is controlled by the Ontario teachers' pension fund, so, ultimately, it's the teachers' fault. If you hate Rob Ford, smack a teacher. And if you're Dalton McGuinty, I figure you better hope the Leafs make the playoffs this year.
Speaking of the importance of playoff teams: Joe Carter's best OPS with the Blue Jays was .841, in 1994. In the two World Series years, his OPSes were .808 and .802. Vernon Wells's OPS last year, when he was generally thought to be OK but still an anchor on the franchise, was .847. Joe Carter's five best "Wins Above Replacement" years for the Blue Jays: 4.1, 2.4, 1.9, 0.7, -0.9. Vernon Wells's: 6.1, 4.6, 4.4, 2.9, 2.7. The 4.4 and the 2.9 were both after he signed the "anchor" contract; the 4.4 was better than any year Carter had in Toronto, and the 2.9 was better than all but one of Carter's Toronto years. Elsewhere, Carter's five best WAR years were 5.8, 3.1, 1.3, 1.3, 0.9. The season before the Jays traded for him, his WAR was negative. That means that the average replacement player from AAA would be expected to make more of a positive contribution to his team than Joe Carter did that year. Even in his lost year of 2009, Vernon Wells had a slightly positive WAR. Carter had negative WARs his last two years in Toronto. But Joe Carter was in the playoffs, and hit that home run.... You might want to say he didn't have that contract, except, actually, he kind of did. Over his time in Toronto, Carter was paid between 65% and 92% as much as the highest-paid player in baseball each year. Vernon Wells so far has never been paid half as much as the highest-paid player in baseball. Next year, at $23 million, he'll be getting 74% of Alex Rodriguez's $31 million, and that's probably as close as he's going to get to the highest-paid player in baseball, since his salary goes down to $21 million after that. A-Rod, incidentally, had a WAR of 2.9 last year, and 3.9 the year before. Offensively, A-Rod and Wells had amazingly similar stats last year, including identical .847 OPSes.
I keep wondering lately: what is seriousness in philosophy? (As I've sometimes liked to say to my students: philosophy is not just sayin' stuff. But of course it's hard to say what the essential difference between philosophy and just sayin' stuff is--particularly when some philosophers, maybe a lot of philosophers (and when you're coming to philosophy for the first time, it probably looks to you like just about all philosophers) seem to be just sayin' stuff.) I keep feeling like I'm not serious enough. Thinking about this quickly leads to the idea that we've got a problem in English in that "seriousness" has two different senses that can easily be run into each other: on one hand, humourlessness; on the other, commitment. But then thinking about it a bit more reveals that these senses aren't really independent. We have a problem these days being serious about anything in the sense of commitment because it's so easy to make fun of everything--making fun of something means changing the frame of reference from one in which it looks like something good, worth being committed to, to one in which it looks bad, silly, not worth being committed to.
Anyway ... it's comparing myself with people who know more than me, read more than me, write more than me that makes me think that I'm insufficiently serious. Not feeling motivated to read all the literature about something I'm writing about and litter my papers with dozens of references makes me think that I'm insufficiently serious. But: at the same time, I strongly (self-servingly?) suspect that a lot of people in comparison to whom I feel insufficiently serious are themselves, in a different (and more important!) way insufficiently serious. Last week I went to a talk that was as good an example as any of this kind of thing. It was the kind of talk I think of as a standard APA conference talk: very serious, in that conforms to all the current conventions of scholarly rigour, but completely unserious, in that it completely fails to examine its philosophical assumptions. It's a finely crafted castle, floating in the air.
I suppose that which sense of seriousness in philosophy you're inclined toward might depend on whether you think that philosophy "leaves the world as it is" or that the point of philosophy is to change it. (I suspect, I hope, that when Marx says "the point is to change it", he doesn't mean an extra-philosophical and super-philosophical point--he means that the philosophical point is to change the world; the philosophers hitherto in trying to interpret the world without changing it have failed as philosophers: they have failed by supposing that philosophical knowledge is found "outside the cave", so that their knowledge is empty. Fortunately for the philosophers hitherto, it's impossible to live outside the cave and not to change the world, so philosophical knowledge has not been empty--despite the best intentions of the philosophers (of course inspired by, but in radical contradiction to, Plato).) So it is, I imagine, that I admire the seriousness of the Straussians (and even, Lord help us all, the Randians), and someone like Leiter finds them contemptibly unserious.
Headline: Humans kick Watson's ass at understanding natural language! I guess the great question about Watson and future Watsons, among people who actually care what the point is supposed to be, will be the same as the great question about Deep Blue: to what extent does it "think" in a categorically different way than humans do, and what difference does it make? The game itself was over as soon as they decided to give Watson super-human reflexes--you'd think it would've been easy enough to match Watson's reflexes to the average of Ken's and Brad's, or something; they seem to have decided to give Watson just enough of a delay that it was possible for the humans to score significantly above zero, but too little of a delay for the result not to be a foregone conclusion--but the most interesting thing with regard to the actual point was how many plainly stupid answers Watson came up with, if not as its top choices, then at least as possibilities. But eventually, you can suppose, Watsons will get good enough at understanding natural language by word-association that they won't think stupid things any more than smart humans do. (I'm not sure whether it was this that prompted me to devote much of yesterday afternoon to poking around in the "conjunction fallacy" stuff. It's easy to understand the fallacious response to the "Linda" scenario as being produced by a Watson-like word-association way of understanding language--people get the Linda problem wrong in much the same way as Watson came up with "Toronto" as the most probable answer in the first final jeopardy despite Toronto being wrong on every count except that it's a city with two or more airports. I suspect that Watson might get the Linda problem wrong, unless it's specifically programmed to avoid conjunction fallacies, by dismissing the first half of the conjunction "Linda is a bank teller and a feminist activist" as noise. One interesting thing about the Linda experiment is that a lot of people who pick the conjunction as more probable than one of its elements change their answer if you ask them which one they'd bet on. Betting is a device to get people to think better about the scenario; the question is whether it just motivates them to think harder or to think in a different way--and whether being asked to bet somehow prompts some people to understand the question, and what the options mean, differently.) Currently, when Watson is pretty good, but not as good as a smart human, at understanding natural language by word-association, you can see what's wrong with that mechanism of "understanding"--you can see it going wrong. Intuitively, its going wrong seems to count as evidence that word-association isn't the way humans understand language. But when Watsons don't think dumb things anymore, that intuitive evidence won't be available anymore....
The text for my philosophy of religion lecture the other day starts with a Star Wars analogy. This set me to wondering how many of my students have never heard of Star Wars--because, for any social phenomenon or entity x, given a large enough set of undergraduates, some undergraduates will never have heard of x. Thinking about that set me to thinking about the sort of irony of appealing to Star Wars as a cultural touchstone (this text was from the late '80s--today the analogy would be to Harry Potter, no doubt) in the context of a discussion of religion: in contemporary multicultural secular societies, religions themselves, which through almost all of human history have been the arch-touchstones, no longer serve as touchstones at all (even, to some large extent, among "believers"). And thinking about that inevitably set me to thinking about sports as touchstone and social glue. So, after polling my class as to whether they had heard of Star Wars--no one admitted that they had never heard of Star Wars, which I found a bit suspicious--I asked: "How many of you have never heard of Phil Kessel?" Half of them put up their hands. "No no," I said, "have not heard of Phil Kessel. How many of you have not heard of Phil Kessel?" Half of them put their hands back up. Then I asked them how many of them had never heard of Mats Sundin, and one person put up her hand. There were maybe fifty people in the room, so around twenty-something times as many of them had never heard of Phil Kessel as had never heard of Mats Sundin.
(Poll: have you heard of Phil Kessel? Yes, no, ticky-ticky?)
The obvious (and maybe even correct) explanation for this is that Phil Kessel has never been in the playoffs with the Leafs, and lots of people in Toronto pay no attention to the Leafs except at playoff time. So this set me to thinking about how the Leafs, when they're not in the playoffs, fail to serve as touchstone and social glue in Toronto. So, of course, that's why we all hate each other and elected a stupid asshole as our mayor! The Leafs haven't been in the playoffs since 2004! It's the Leafs' fault! (And, yeah, the Jays' fault, too.) But, but: the company that owns the Leafs is controlled by the Ontario teachers' pension fund, so, ultimately, it's the teachers' fault. If you hate Rob Ford, smack a teacher. And if you're Dalton McGuinty, I figure you better hope the Leafs make the playoffs this year.
Speaking of the importance of playoff teams: Joe Carter's best OPS with the Blue Jays was .841, in 1994. In the two World Series years, his OPSes were .808 and .802. Vernon Wells's OPS last year, when he was generally thought to be OK but still an anchor on the franchise, was .847. Joe Carter's five best "Wins Above Replacement" years for the Blue Jays: 4.1, 2.4, 1.9, 0.7, -0.9. Vernon Wells's: 6.1, 4.6, 4.4, 2.9, 2.7. The 4.4 and the 2.9 were both after he signed the "anchor" contract; the 4.4 was better than any year Carter had in Toronto, and the 2.9 was better than all but one of Carter's Toronto years. Elsewhere, Carter's five best WAR years were 5.8, 3.1, 1.3, 1.3, 0.9. The season before the Jays traded for him, his WAR was negative. That means that the average replacement player from AAA would be expected to make more of a positive contribution to his team than Joe Carter did that year. Even in his lost year of 2009, Vernon Wells had a slightly positive WAR. Carter had negative WARs his last two years in Toronto. But Joe Carter was in the playoffs, and hit that home run.... You might want to say he didn't have that contract, except, actually, he kind of did. Over his time in Toronto, Carter was paid between 65% and 92% as much as the highest-paid player in baseball each year. Vernon Wells so far has never been paid half as much as the highest-paid player in baseball. Next year, at $23 million, he'll be getting 74% of Alex Rodriguez's $31 million, and that's probably as close as he's going to get to the highest-paid player in baseball, since his salary goes down to $21 million after that. A-Rod, incidentally, had a WAR of 2.9 last year, and 3.9 the year before. Offensively, A-Rod and Wells had amazingly similar stats last year, including identical .847 OPSes.
I keep wondering lately: what is seriousness in philosophy? (As I've sometimes liked to say to my students: philosophy is not just sayin' stuff. But of course it's hard to say what the essential difference between philosophy and just sayin' stuff is--particularly when some philosophers, maybe a lot of philosophers (and when you're coming to philosophy for the first time, it probably looks to you like just about all philosophers) seem to be just sayin' stuff.) I keep feeling like I'm not serious enough. Thinking about this quickly leads to the idea that we've got a problem in English in that "seriousness" has two different senses that can easily be run into each other: on one hand, humourlessness; on the other, commitment. But then thinking about it a bit more reveals that these senses aren't really independent. We have a problem these days being serious about anything in the sense of commitment because it's so easy to make fun of everything--making fun of something means changing the frame of reference from one in which it looks like something good, worth being committed to, to one in which it looks bad, silly, not worth being committed to.
Anyway ... it's comparing myself with people who know more than me, read more than me, write more than me that makes me think that I'm insufficiently serious. Not feeling motivated to read all the literature about something I'm writing about and litter my papers with dozens of references makes me think that I'm insufficiently serious. But: at the same time, I strongly (self-servingly?) suspect that a lot of people in comparison to whom I feel insufficiently serious are themselves, in a different (and more important!) way insufficiently serious. Last week I went to a talk that was as good an example as any of this kind of thing. It was the kind of talk I think of as a standard APA conference talk: very serious, in that conforms to all the current conventions of scholarly rigour, but completely unserious, in that it completely fails to examine its philosophical assumptions. It's a finely crafted castle, floating in the air.
I suppose that which sense of seriousness in philosophy you're inclined toward might depend on whether you think that philosophy "leaves the world as it is" or that the point of philosophy is to change it. (I suspect, I hope, that when Marx says "the point is to change it", he doesn't mean an extra-philosophical and super-philosophical point--he means that the philosophical point is to change the world; the philosophers hitherto in trying to interpret the world without changing it have failed as philosophers: they have failed by supposing that philosophical knowledge is found "outside the cave", so that their knowledge is empty. Fortunately for the philosophers hitherto, it's impossible to live outside the cave and not to change the world, so philosophical knowledge has not been empty--despite the best intentions of the philosophers (of course inspired by, but in radical contradiction to, Plato).) So it is, I imagine, that I admire the seriousness of the Straussians (and even, Lord help us all, the Randians), and someone like Leiter finds them contemptibly unserious.
