prior probability

Hello again friends! I am reblogging the post below (via Remember Singapore), which surveys the history of one of Singapore’s oldest bridges and includes some old maps of the “orh kio tau” area of the Southeast Asian city-state.

You may have heard that the United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the largest labor unions in North America, is now on strike (see here or here, for example). What, however, you may not know is that among the union’s demands is a call for no more “tiered labor contracts” in their industry. To this end the UAW has even approved the following strongly-worded resolution:

“The union shall reject management proposals for contract language which seek to divide the membership through tiered wages, benefits, or post-employment income and benefits. Where current contracts provide for such divisive compensation, it shall be the obligation of the International Executive Board to seek the elimination of all such tiers by raising lower tiers to the higher level, holding to the long-standing union principle of ‘equal pay for equal work.”

Is this demand a reasonable one? By way of analogy, why don’t the tenured faculty members at our esteemed institutions of higher educations — which are supposedly bastions of progressive and “Marxian” academics, especially in the humanities — demand the end of “tiered contracts” in Academia, e.g. adjuncts, lecturers, instructors, etc.? In the meantime (but don’t hold your breath), check out the following links regarding some other sundry academic “scams”:

• “Tenure is a total scam” by Bryan Caplan
• “The rise and fall of peer review” by Adam Mastroianni
• “Are you in a BS job? in Academe, you’re hardly alone” by David Graeber
• “It’s hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is” via Hacker News

• 16 September 1810: Mexican Independence Day (see also here).
• 17 September 1787: Constitution Day (USA).
• 18-20 September 1863: The Battle of Chickamauga between Confederate and Union forces. (Among other things, this battle produces the second-highest amount of civil war casualties apart from Gettysburg.)

That is the subject of the podcast episode below. (For my part, it sure looks that way to me!)

File under: “Bayesian updating” (look it up!).

Wow! This 45-minute music-mix magically popped up into my YouTube homepage (thank you evil Google algorithms), and I loved every second of it!

That is the title of this suspenseful short story by my fellow writer and friend Luanne Castle. Her one-paragraph story, which was published in the Bright Flash Literary Review, belongs to a new literary genre known as “micro-fiction” or “flash fiction”; for more information about this genre or the BFLR, check out their website. Also, be sure to check out Luanne Castle’s eclectic literary blog “Poetry and Other Words (and cats!)“.

That is the title of this report by Stephanie Pappas for Scientific American. (Hat tip: Brian Leiter.) In brief, the word “unless” in Netwon’s First Law (see, for example, the infographic below) should really read “except insofar”; otherwise, the first law simply states a circular tautology!

FYI: This “discovery” (“clarification” would be a better word) was made Daniel Hoek, who teaches philosophy at Virginia Tech. Here is his formal paper (PDF), published in the journal Philosophy of Science, where Professor Hoek explains his discovery of the mistranslation of Newton’s First Law: “Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of Inertia“.

My colleague and friend Peter J. Boettke explores this question in his survey essay for The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (2022), pp. 267-275, which is available here (for free!) via SSRN. Among other things, Professor Boettke explains why what we call “capitalism” (voluntary exchange based on property rights and the enforcement of contracts) should really be called “socialism”!