prior probability

He was 82. See here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-dennett-dead-at-82/

For me, Dennett’s most influential idea was his distinction between “skyhooks” and “cranes”: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1068/p241101

My spring semester officially comes to a close on Monday, so looking ahead to the rest of spring as well as my summer break, I am happy to report that I will be working on three, possibly four, scholarly projects as follows:

1. First and foremost, following up on my previous work on orbit auctions (see here), Professor Justin Evans and I are researching and writing a new “space markets” paper — tentatively titled “Space Auctions and the Tragedy of the Outer Space Commons” — which will describe how to actually get space markets off the ground, beginning with the tricky problem of how to define property rights in orbits. We hope to complete a first draft in time for the annual meeting of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB), which will take place in Washington, D.C. in August.
2. Next up is one of my unpublished game-theory papers, “The Colonel Blotto Litigation Game“, which I was invited to present at the Ninth Annual Civil Procedure Workshop at UC Law in San Francisco on May 31. Rest assured, I will be reviewing and revising my Colonel Blotto draft ahead of the workshop and blogging about it next month.
3. Last but not least, I will be making another round of additions to my work-in-progress “Die Adam Smith Probleme“, which I am co-authoring with my colleague and friend Salim Rashid. This paper surveys the many open problems still surrounding the work and life of the great Scottish philosopher-economist. As it happens, I have already been invited to present this work at a special session of the next meeting of the History of Economics Society (HES), which will take place in Santiago de Chile in mid-July; in the meantime, I will blog about our new set of Adam Smith problems here, most likely in June and July.

The fourth project is, as yet, undefined, but I want to leave some extra space for it in case something unexpected or surprising catches my fancy.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion

On this day (April 17) in 1961, a brigade of 1,400 Cuban exiles (Brigade 2506) landed at the “Bay of Pigs” (Playa Girón) on the south coast of Cuba with the goal of removing Fidel Castro from power and liberating Cuba from communism. According to Wikipedia, “67 Cuban exiles from Brigade 2506 were killed in action, additionally, 10 more were executed by firing squad, 10 lost their lives on the boat Celia trying to escape, 9 captured exiles in the sealed truck container on the way to Havana, 4 by accident, 2 in prison, and 4 American aviators, for a total of 106 deaths.” Alas, the question of why the Bay of Pigs invasion failed is debated to this day; see here, for example.

Should the Insurection Act be amended? Check out this report, which originally aired on the PBS News Hour last week (8 April 2024). Here is a summary:

A bipartisan group of former senior officials are urging lawmakers on Capitol Hill to reign in a president’s ability to deploy the U.S. military within the country through a provision in the centuries-old Insurrection Act. Harvard Law School’s Jack Goldsmith, one of the leaders of these proposed reforms and former assistant attorney general, joins Geoff Bennet to discuss.

As it happens, I traced the historical origins and subsequent evolution of the Insurrection Act in my 2019 Univerity of Arkansas paper “Domestic Constitutional Violence“, which is also available here.

Will new “generative AI” models like ChatGPT end up self-imploding in endless feedback loops? Check out this report by Samantha Murphy Kelly titled “Teachers are using AI to grade essays“. Hat tip: Brian Leiter. Below is my favorite part:

And parents and students who are already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on tuition may wonder if an endless feedback loop of AI-generated and AI-graded content in college is worth the time and money.

“If teachers use it solely to grade, and the students are using it solely to produce a final product, it’s not going to work,” said Gayeski.

Thanks ChatGPT! (Sarcasm voice.)