prior probability

I have been in “America’s finest city” this week attending the annual meeting of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (my penultimate trip this summer). Below is a small sample of some of my San Diego snapshots:

Are Hollywood and Broadway the last bastions of sexism? The Bechdel test asks whether a play, motion picture, or TV show features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Although this now-iconic litmus test began as a joke (see screenshots below), it is still rather remarkable how many–or should I say how few?–theatrical and cinematic productions are able to pass it.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the publication of my 2013 law review article “Gödel’s Loophole” (my most downloaded paper by far), I just posted to SSRN a new work-in-progress titled “Gödel’s Loophole 2.0“, which is now available here. (I will be presenting this paper at the annual meeting of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business this week.) In summary, my previous work from ten years ago conjectured that Gödel’s loophole in the domain of constitutional law refers to constitutional self-reference, i.e. an amendment to a constitution’s amendment clause.

My new article extends the general logic of Gödel’s loophole to two new domains. One is the field of artificial intelligence and a new proposal known as “constitutional AI”, a self-regulating system for minimizing the harmful effects of large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepMind. (See here, for example.) The other domain is the planet Mars. Although as of this writing the possibility of permanent human settlements on Mars is still far off, several draft constitutions of various lengths and levels of complexity have already been proposed for Mars! (See here, here, and here.) Alas, neither “constitutional AI” nor the sundry Martian constitutions are immune from the inexorable logic of Gödel’s loophole.

On this day (25 July) in 1868, the Territory of Wyoming officially becomes an incorporated territory of the United States. (The Congress later admitted Wyoming to the Union on 10 July 1890.) To commemorate this occasion, I am sharing this excellent paper “Why Not More States? States’ Importance to Democracy and Statehood’s Relevance to Twenty-First Century America” by Jennifer Kindred Mitchell.

Six copies of The Godfather and Philosophy: An Argument You Can’t Refute arrived in my mailbox while I was out of town! (I wrote one of the chapters for this volume: “Ronald Coase and the Corleones.” An ungated copy of my contribution is available here.)

Honest question: now that Barack Obama has put out his annual summer reading list (pictured below), an Obama tradition going back to at least 2016 (see here), I wonder what books, if any(!), are on Joe Biden, Ron DeSantis, or Donald Trump’s respective reading lists?

I love this creative montage of the new “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” productions (more details about this motley movie montage are available here), though I would prefer to not waste my time on either film. Why not? Because of my cinematic priors: a movie/marketing gimmick about a beloved toy doesn’t need to be any longer than 90 minutes tops, and at three hours “Oppenheimer” sounds like it’s way too long and tedious for its own good.

In honor of the 2023 women’s World Cup tournament, which begins today (20 July) “down under” in Australia and New Zealand, check out this two-minute World Cup ad celebrating France’s national football team. More details about this amazing ad are available here. Hat tip: kottke.