prior probability

As you may have heard by now, the NBA recently released a 113-page manual in anticipation of the resumption of the 2019-20 season. (Check out this summary of the manual by Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal.) The manual contains a whole host of health and safety protocols that basketball players (and coaches, I presume) must follow when the season resumes in Orlando, Florida next month. Among other things, the NBA is setting up a “snitch hotline” to allow anyone to anonymously report a player or coach who is breaking the guidelines. So, who will be the first player to call the new NBA snitch hotline? According to my fellow Gaucho Jim Rome (both of us went to UCSB in the 80s), it will be Chris Paul–check out Rome’s “hot take” below:

Source: jimrome.com

In all seriousness, this anonymous snitch hotline is a terrible idea. Instead of building trust…

Review (part 2 of 2) of Matthew W. Slaboch, A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics (U Penn Press, 2018).

In my previous post, I mentioned that the concept of progress might have a cultural or spatial dimension, one of the most important ideas I learned from reading Slaboch’s book on anti-progress. Here, I shall discuss another insightful idea in Slaboch’s book, what I call “the paradox of the anti-progress canon.” Simply put, why should anyone bother to improve man’s lot or change the course of history for the better if the ideal of progress is bullshit?

Slaboch presents this dire paradox in the chapter devoted to Henry Adams (Chapter 3), who attempted to apply the law of physics to the study of history. Briefly, Adams’s view of world history was a pessimistic one (p. 80): social and political collapse are inevitable; all such systems will…

Review (part 1 of 2) of Matthew W. Slaboch, A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics (U Penn Press, 2018).

As soon as I heard about Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen’s recent call for a new field of “progress studies” (Collison & Cowen, 2019, available here), my initial reaction was one of deep skepticism. Simply put, I mistrust our collective ability to discover, let alone implement, a reliable recipe for boosting long-term economic growth or for promoting ever-higher levels of human flourishing generally. But my skepticism poses a deeper, second-order question: is this mistrust warranted, or is it the result of my own Burkean and Humean biases or what Cowen likes to call “mood affiliation”? It turns out that I am not the only one to be skeptical of the concept of progress. Matthew Slaboch, a research fellow at Princeton, has devoted an entire scholarly…

Hello. Because this is a one-man blog, and because I will be taking a vacation for the rest of July and for most of August, I will be blogging much more sporadically, if at all, during the next few weeks. Rest assured, however, that I will present my grand synthesis of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s prediction theory of law and H.L.A. Hart’s internal point of view upon my return in late August or early September. Note: I won’t really be “on vacation” per se; instead, I will be using this time to give talks (via Zoom, of course) at several academic conferences and to complete some other scholarly projects, including a book-length treatment of “Goedel’s Loophole.” (If time permits, I may blog about these other projects in the days ahead.)