prior probability

In all, I have been invited to make contributions to a handful of scholarly books (see below), including (1) The Godfather and Philosophy; (2) Hume, Smith, Burke, Geijer, Menger, d’Argenson, et EJW cetera; (3) Better Call Saul and Philosophy; (4) Economics of the Undead; and (5) Blade Runner: memoria, vigilancia y el sujeto desechable (in Spanish). Writing a chapter for a book, however, involves a delicate trade off: on the one hand, your work can reach a wider audience, especially if the book is intended for the general public (my chapter for The Economics of the Undead, for example, was featured on Freakonomics Radio!), but at the same time book chapters are much harder for potential readers to find or access online compared to journal articles. For reference, then, here are links to preprints of my book chapters (in reverse chronological order):

• Ronald Coase and the Corleones, Chapter 22 of Joshua Heter and Richard Greene, editors, The Godfather and Philosophy: An Argument You Can’t Refute, pp. 209-214. Chicago: Open Universe (2023). This chapter extends Ronald Coase’s idea of “reciprocal harms” to the famous wedding scene in the original Godfather movie.
• Adam Smith in Love, Chapter 7 of Daniel B. Klein and Jason Briggeman, editors, Hume, Smith, Burke, Geijer, Menger, d’Argenson, et EJW cetera, pp. 154-185. Vancouver: CL Press (2022). This chapter is a reprint of my original refereed “Adam Smith in Love” paper.
• Breaking Bad Promises, Chapter 22 of Joshua S. Heter and Brett Coppenger, editors, Better Call Saul and Philosophy: I Think Therefore I Scam, pp. 227-235. Chicago: Open Universe (2022). This chapter explores a peculiar puzzle in legal and moral theory: the problem of illegal or immoral promises.
• Buy or Bite?, Chapter 12 of Glen Whitman & James Dow, editors, Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science, pp. 123-129. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield (2014). This chapter introduces the concept of “legal failure” and proposes a free market for the purchase and sale of blood.
• El ajedrez in Blade Runner: lecciones de la Partida Inmortal, Chapter 7 of Daniel Nina, editor, Blade Runner: memoria, vigilancia y el sujeto desechable, pp. 105-130. San Juan de Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón (2008). This chapter explores the logic of strategic behavior through the lens of the legendary 1851 “Immortal Game” between two great German chess masters, Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky.

I surveyed some of my previous scholarly works earlier this year, including my probability theory papers, my Coase papers, my Gödel papers as well as my first few scholarly papers, my game theory models, and my turn to legal history. Today, I will survey my book reviews. To the point, I have read a lot of books since I became a law professor, and if one includes my many multi-part write-ups and micro-reviews on this blog (see here, for example) or my sundry informal reviews on Amazon (here), I have probably reviewed several dozens of scholarly books in all. Below, however, are the most notable reviews I have written, in reverse chronological order. (Nota bene: an asterisk indicates an unpublished review.)

1. *Mixed reviews of two new books about Adam Smith, Robin Paul Malloy’s Law and the Invisible Hand: A Theory of Adam Smith’s Jurisprudence and Paul Sagar’s Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics (2024).
2. Mixed review of Ryan Patrick Hanley’s book Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (2023).
3. Positive review of Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, A Sheer Excess of Powers (2023).
4. *Mixed review of Tyler Cowen’s book Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero (2020).
5. Critical review of Randy J. Kozel’s book Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent (2019).
6. Critical review of Nathan B. Oman’s book The Dignity of Commerce (2017).
7. Positive review of Ullica Segerstråle’s biography of W. D. Hamilton, Nature’s Oracle (2014).
8. Positive review of Jeremy Adelman’s biography of Albert O. Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher (2014).
9. Mixed review of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (2012).
10. *Critical review of David Garrow’s law review article “Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court: The Historical Case for a 28th Amendment” (2007).

One last thing (for now): my most recent reviews (see items #1 and #2 above) revolve around the ideas and works of Adam Smith. As I have mentioned previously, the Scottish philosopher-economist has taken up most of my scholarly attention since the summer of 2020, so stay tuned, for I will have much more to say about my rediscovery of Adam Smith soon …

Check out this 13-minute TED Talk by philosopher Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, who explains why AI tools like ChatGPT are a virtual Trojan horse: they look like promising solutions to pressing problems but only end up making those same problems worse! He also presents a set of questions to help us guide future decisions on our use of AI. (See also “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College” as well as this more alarmist thread.)

In honor of our new pontiff Leo XIV, who studied mathematics at Villanova University:

David Hume once wrote, “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” (Hume, Of Miracles.) But what about religious claims or paranormal beliefs, i.e. claims where physical evidence is disputed or lacking? Are people who believe in ghosts, telepathy, UFO sightings, alien abductions, etc. (see here, for example) foolish? To this end, I have converted my recent blog posts on Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel into a formal paper — “Belief and Evidence: David Hume in the Library of Babel” — and have just posted my new paper to SSRN. This work is dedicated to my colleague and friend, Todd French (Rollins College), who brought to my attention two books that have ended up having a profound impact on my thinking on these questions: Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible (2010), and Tanya Luhrman, When God Talks Back (2012). More generally, French, Kripal, and Luhrman have caused me to rethink my Humean priors regarding the relationship between evidence and belief.

Why do I even need an ID (i.e. internal passport) at all to travel inside my own country? Bonus question: How many more erosions of liberty (anti-smoking rules, seat belt laws, etc.) before we stop being a “free” country?

Via Vatican News: “The upcoming Conclave starting on May 7 to elect the 267th Pope will be the 76th in the form we know today, which was established by Pope Gregory X in 1274, and the 26th held under the gaze of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.” See also this 2013 report by Jason Horowitz, via The Washington Post.

Now that I have brought my 11-part series on “David Hume in Borges’ Library of Babel” to a close, what better way of marking the end of this intellectual escapade than with a melancholic piece of music performed by one of my favorite musicians of all time — the late great Argentine tango composer and virtuoso bandoneónist, Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla (1921-1992):

I will conclude my series on “David Hume in the Library of Babel” by returning to to the question I posed in my previous post: Why hope? Why faith? Hope/faith/belief that the decoder book or master index will one day be found or rediscovered. Hope that the incomprehensible volumes of the infinite hexagons are full of meaning. Hope that the Universal Library contains some secret sequence, that it “is unlimited but periodic.” While others are driven to suicidal despair, our narrator remains full of hope.

A potential clue to this puzzle is the concept of the “infinite.” In all, our unnamed narrator employs this word eight times. (See Borges 1998/1941, Paras. 1, 2, 7, 14, & 15.) But is the Library really “infinite”? And if not, where are its outer limits? Alas, The Library of Babel is full of contradictions. On the one hand, we are told in the first and last paragraphs of the story that the Universal Library “is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries” and that it is “unlimited.” But at the same, we are also told in the middle of the story that the total number of tomes, though astronomically large, is not infinite: “the Library is ‘total’—perfect, complete, and whole—and … its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite) ….” How can an infinite Library not contain an infinite number of books? Or, what about our Universe? Is the Universe infinite? Alas, scientists still don’t have a definitive answer, for while the observable universe is finite, with a radius of about 46 billion light-years, the total universe could be larger, potentially infinite.

Perhaps there are some things we cannot assign a Humean probability value to, such as the infinite or the impossible. Consider once again the possibility of a decoder book or master index. If such a literary holy grail were to exist, will it ever be found? Or to put this question in Humean terms (cf. Hume 1748), is the probability p₁ of locating the Universal Library’s master index higher or lower than the probability p₂ that any of the miracles reported in the New Testament Gospels of the Bible really happened? Alas, given the astronomical size of the Universal Library and the historical distance between our day and Biblical times, how would we even begin to quantify such probability values? So, what is to be done? What happens when we cannot assign probability values to carry out Hume’s probabilistic test?

What if the decision to believe in God—or in any other impossibility or improbable possibility, I might add—is not so much a belief but a lifestyle: “a choice founded not on evidence but on the way we choose to live in the face of inadequate evidence.” (Tanya Luhrman, When God Talks Back, p. xiv) In other words, what if we turn Hume’s argument against miracles—and religious skepticism more generally—on its head? Or to quote Tanya Luhrman again: “If you could believe in God, why wouldn’t you?” (Ibid., p. xvi)

On this Luhrmannian view of Borges’ Library of Babel, our narrator has “out-Humed” David Hume. Despite the lack of any direct evidence that the randomly-arranged and composed books in the Universal Library have any meaning, the narrator still holds out hope that those incomprehensible and indecipherable volumes are susceptible to cryptographic methods or allegorical readings. How could it be otherwise, for without this hope, where would we find the requisite curiosity and motivation to make sense of the impossible?