prior probability

Check out this beautiful 26-page paper on “Chalk: Materials and Concepts in Mathematics Research” by Michael Barany and Donald MacKenzie. According to one of the authors of the chalk paper (Barany), one of the advantages of blackboards is that they smudge productively: “Often a mathematical argument will involve taking some term or idea and rewriting it or rephrasing it in a fruitful way. You can do that by using an eraser or the side of your hand to rub out the thing you’ve rephrased and writing over it, but the smudge will still be visible. Being able to write over something while leaving visual evidence there was something before – is a nontrivial part of how mathematicians communicate those kinds of arguments.” In other words, the inherent messiness of blackboards turns out to be a feature, not a bug. In addition, a minor (but non-zero) benefit to using blackboards is that you can tell when chalk is about to run out in a way that you can’t tell when a whiteboard marker is about to run out. More information is available here (via the Concord Monitor); hat tip: @pickover.

Niels Bohr’s last blackboard, Copenhagen. Source: Niels Bohr Arkivet.

Nine years ago (2011), Chief Justice John Roberts (pictured below, left) presented this devastating critique of legal scholarship. Among other things, the Chief made this wisecrack: “Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.” (The Prussian philosopher is pictured below, right.)

Five years ago (2015), law professor Orin Kerr wrote up this tongue-in-cheek scholarly reply to the Chief Justice’s critique. In brief, Professor Kerr conducted an extensive review of Kant’s original works of scholarship, concluding that “Kant never wrote about evidence law.”

Last year (2019), I responded to Kerr’s reply to the Chief Justice’s original remarks about Kant’s purported influence on the law of evidence. For my part, I propose a different way of responding to the Chief Justice’s critique of legal scholarship. Instead of searching through old tomes in dark and dusty libraries for a direct correspondence or causal relation between Kant’s work and evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, I propose the following thought experiment: What if Kant were an 18th Century Bulgarian law professor?

That is the title of my most recent contribution to the literature on judicial voting, a literature that goes back to Frank Easterbrook’s excellent paper “Ways of criticizing the court,” which was published in The Harvard Law Review in 1982. Unlike a traditional law review, however, where your average article can easily exceed 30,000 words (60 pp.) and contain over hundreds of obscure footnotes, my pithy scholarly piece was published online in The Journal of Brief Ideas (see below), where submissions may not exceed 200 words! (As an aside, I am also currently writing up a larger piece titled “Bayes versus Weyl” in which I compare and contrast my simple method of Bayesian voting with Glen Weyl’s more complicated “quadratic voting” method. I will blog about both of these voting methods–and explain why Bayesian voting is superior to quadratic voting–next week.)

Building on the work of Donald Regan, law professor Bert Huang explores the complex relationship between law, ethics, and artificial intelligence in his beautiful paper “Law’s halo and the moral machine” (hat tip: @lsolum). Among other things, Professor Huang describes a “feedback loop” between law and morality: the scope of existing legal duties might exert some level of influence on our moral judgements about right and wrong (i.e. knowledge of the law might produce a “moral halo” effect), and at the same time our moral intuitions might influence what the content of the law should be (cf. natural law theory). For my part, I find this conjecture to be plausible, but given the problem of motivated reasoning and the primacy of Humean emotions, is this feedback loop more likely to produce a virtuous spiral or a vicious circle? (Why vicious? Because morality can be used to justify bad deeds as well as good ones.) Also, what if we used auctions or some other market method to determine what our moral or legal duties should be, a counter-intuitive possibility that I have further explored in two of my previous papers: “Trolley Problems” (2014) and “Coase and the Constitution” (2011)?

Is the circle a vicious or virtuous one?

The Washington Post (via Natalie B. Compton) recently published “The completely correct guide to reclining on an airplane.” The problem with The Post’s guidelines, however, is that they are not only incomplete (what about commuter flights?); they are also inconsistent (since the application of this set of complex and multifarious rules depends on a wide variety of subjective factors, like the height of the reclinee). As a public service, then, I am reposting three of my previous blog posts on this subject:

1. The Airplane Seat Dilemma (10 Sept. 2014) (where we note the “reciprocal nature” of the right to recline versus the right to legroom);
2. The right to recline? (3 Oct. 2014) (where we explain why disputes over the “right to recline” on airplanes are a textbook example of a situation involving unclear or contested property rights);
3. The problem of reclining airplane seats (7 Oct. 2014) (where we summarize our analysis of the right to recline).

It depends?

For me it’s three. In addition to my main inbox, which serves as a holding pen for my most pressing matters (i.e. messages that I must respond to before I go to bed), I make use of only three email folders as follows:

1. “Action this week” folder: Everything that requires a response before the end of the week. (I will respond to these on Friday afternoon; my way of getting revenge on the person or organization who sent me the original email in the first place.)
2. “Happiness” folder: Emails that brighten my day or make me happy in some way (e.g. a thank you note from a student, an acceptance of publication from a journal, or other good news) go here.
3. “Zafacón” folder: I dump most of my emails into this massive catch-all folder (out-of-sight, out-of-mind!), just in case I may need to reference a particular email again, or if I am otherwise unwilling to hit the “delete” button. (In Puerto Rico, the word “zafacón” is slang for a general or all-purpose category.)

Pro-tip: just hit “delete” or dump everything into your “catch-all” folder.

Via Wikipedia (citations omitted): “In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km) of the city centre. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed ….” Victor’s justice aside, why wasn’t the bombing of Dresden by the Allies a war crime?