Getting Started
A return to blogging
A while back I had the thought to start up a Substack to distribute chapters of a book in progress. The problem was that while I thought the book was in progress, it was actually stalled. So rather than wait for it to get back in progress, I decided to start up a more general purpose blog. I’ve had philosophy blogs before, but it’s been a while, and I thought it would be fun to get back in the habit.
There are four main things I’m thinking/working on now that I hope to have posts on as this blog develops.
Knowledge: A Human Interest Story, my book-(not-really-)in-progress on knowledge and pragmatic encroachment.
Game Theory as Decision Theory, my book-(actually-)in-progress on the decision theory implicit in textbook game theory, and why it’s a better decision theory than the ones typically endorsed by philosophers.
Philosophical themes in the work of John Maynard Keynes, and in particular the elusive question of how his early philosophical work related to his later economic work.
Questions about the value of information, and what happens to the value of information theories in non-partitional models. In the short-term, what I hope to post on is the significance of David Blackwell’s work on the value of experiments, and what lessons it has for recent philosophical debates.
And there are four other categories of posts that I expect will crop up from time to time.
I’m going back through all my old published papers and converting them all to Quarto so they’ll have proper HTML versions. And maybe some things will come up that I feel like highlighting1
When I published a book on the history of philosophy journals, I called it “Volume 1” thinking that there would be another volume very soon. That didn’t happen, but if some stuff comes up I’ll start posting about it here.
I’m planning on doing some experimental work in class in my teaching next term, using the resources provided by Veconlab, and I’ll post about those if anything interesting happens.
And there will be some frivolous posts, like this one.2
Hopefully posts will be on a weekly schedule, on Monday mornings (US East Coast time), starting next week. But if I get so many posts, or something comes up that it seems best to post about quickly, I’ll have some mid-week posts as well.
So if this seems interesting, subscribe away. I’m not going to have a paid tier, but if you absolutely want to send me money, I’m not normally in the habit of turning down money. Borrowing an idea from John Quiggin, I’ll use any subscription revenue to support other writers. But the aim here isn’t to make money, it’s to have a place to write.
For instance, one of the big questions in the value of information debates is what happens if the right logic of evidence is between S4 and S5. And looking back on earlier papers, I was reminded that I was partially responsible for a nice result concerning one of the stronger logics in that range.
I have one-tenth of a draft of a pastiche of Losing My Edge written from the perspective of a middle-aged philosopher who thinks that the kids these days are better looking, and more talented, with better ideas, and also really nice. If I finished it, and the lawyers say that it’s fine to publish, it would go in this category.
Welcome back!