prior probability

Are college professors, lawyers, political pollsters, or opera singers examples of productive or unproductive labour? Does this distinction even make sense? See, for example, this short lecture by the imitable Tyler Cowen explaining Adam Smith’s classic distinction, via Marginal Revolution University:

Or, better yet, read Book II, Chapter 3 of The Wealth of Nations.

That is the title of this beautiful homage to the great Martin Gardner by Rebecca DeLee (Liberty University). See also this brief biography titled “A Mind for the Masses“, according to which “Gardner never took a college math course yet his Scientific American columns earned the respect of noted mathematicians.”

I know of only two such instances in my field (law): my colleagues Brian Frye and Maybell Romero co-authored “The Right to Unmarry: A Proposal” and, pictured below, my wife and former student(!) Sydjia Robinson and yours truly co-authored a novel thought-experiment paper — published in the National Law School of India Review and available here, via JSTOR — proposing a “Unified Code of Procedure” for both civil and criminal cases!

Update #1 — I stand corrected: my new friends Carissa Byrne Hessick and Andrew Hessick have published at least 10 papers together, including this one comparing and contrasting statutory interpretation of civil versus criminal laws: “Constraining Criminal Laws“!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati

As a follow up to my previous post in honor of the memory of Thomas Konda, I am sharing the Wikipedia link for the entry for “Illuminati” as well as one of my favorite excerpts from this entry, linking to yet another Wikipedia page: “The Eye of Providence, as seen on the US $1 bill, has been perceived by some to be evidence of a conspiracy linking the Founding Fathers of the United States to the Illumina.”

I just learned that Thomas Milan Konda died on 29 January 2022 at the age of 74. (Here is his obituary.) Among other things, Professor Konda was the author of Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America (University of Chicago Press, 2019), which surveys our obsession with conspiracy theories going back to the heady days of the French Revolution and a secret society known as the “Bavarian Illuminati”. As it happens, I had picked up a copy of Prof Konda’s book back in June of 2022 at my first meeting of the History of Economics Society (HES) but I did not get around to reading his scholarly work until now.

For my part, I once wrote about a little-known conspiracy theory (see here) that might have piqued Prof Konda’s deep and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity: a supposed centuries-old worldwide scheme to suppress the works of the great German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Although “the Leibniz conspiracy” is a relatively minor one in the scheme of things, it might nevertheless have grabbed Konda’s erudite attention (and that of his readers) because of the man who invented it, the legendary logician Kurt Gödel! Simply put, that one of the most logical and rigorous thinkers of all time could formulate such an elaborate and far-fetched conspiracy theory shows us why beliefs in conspiracies are so compelling, widespread, and unavoidable!

Today (11/11) is Veterans Day 🇺🇸

I watched this mesmerizing film earlier this semester as part of my sabbatical studies on the philosophy of tragedy and the human order. Hat tip: Dr Scott Rubarth

That is the title of this 2007 presidential address of the 53rd annual meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association by David McNaughton (pictured below), now a retired academic. In brief, for Professor McNaughton, bad writing or what he calls “Oxford obscurantism” is the main culprit, but perhaps the main reason why contemporary philosophy has become so mind-numbingly “tedious” and boring is that, with the deaths of Nozick and Rawls, most academic philosophers no longer grapple with the “big questions” or perennial puzzles of mankind, such as the meaning of life, beauty, or justice. Ditto my field: jurisprudence or the philosophy of law!