prior probability

Below is the introduction to my paper “Gödel’s Interbellum: Interwar Europe through the Eyes of Kurt Gödel” (footnotes omitted; emphasis added):

“One of the great unsolved mysteries of constitutional law is ‘Gödel’s loophole‘. In brief, the great logician Kurt Gödel reportedly discovered a deep flaw in the United States Constitution, a logical contradiction that could lead to a constitutional dictatorship. In a previous work, I conjectured what the substance of this loophole might be. Here, by contrast, I will address a different constitutional question: how plausible is Gödel’s loophole as a practical matter? More to the point, how likely is it that a would-be dictator could exploit Gödel’s constitutional loophole in these turbulent times? It turns out, very likely, if the constitutional history of interwar Central Europe is any guide. By way of example, by the time Gödel was awarded the right to lecture at the University of Vienna in March 1933, democracy had died in at least nine or ten states in interbellum Europe, depending on whether Atatürk’s Turkey is classified a dictatorship: Hungary under Admiral Horthy, Italy under ‘Il Duce’ Benito Mussolini, Lithuania under President Smetona, Poland under First Marshal Piłsudski, Portugal under Prime Minister Salazar, Spain under Captain General Primo de Rivera, and Yugoslavia under King Aleksandar had all become constitutional dictatorships.”

Bonus video: “Chaos and Classicism: The Interwar Period” by Professor Atina Grossmann:

My most downloaded work of all time, Gödel’s Loophole, describes the logician Kurt Gödel’s discovery of a logical contradiction in the United States Constitution, a discovery he reportedly made while he was studying for his U.S. citizenship exam in 1947. To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the publication of my loophole paper, I wrote a “prequel” titled Gödel’s Interbellum. My prequel surveys the demise of three Central European democracies through the eyes of Gödel: King Aleksandar’s “January 6” dictatorship in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß’s declaration of the “self-elimination of Parliament” in March of 1933, and King Carol’s seizure of emergency powers in Romania in 1938. In short, I conjecture that Gödel was not only aware of these dramatic events in his corner of the world (Central Europe); I also surmise that the possibility of a self-coup–what I refer to as a “recursive” transfer of power–must have informed Gödel’s discovery of a loophole in the U.S. Constitution.

Bonus video: MetaMaths video on “Gödel’s constitutional Loophole”:

My colleague Dan Markel was murdered in his own home in Tallahassee, Florida on 18 July 2014. Yesterday, a jury found Markel’s brother-in-law, Charlie Adelson, guilty of conspiring to murder Markel.

Wendi Adelson, you’re next! One of the things we learned from Charlie’s trial is that his sister Wendi (Markel’s evil ex-wife) knew about the murder plot and did nothing to stop it from happening.

I am reblogging this recent post “Redhill Close SIT Estate Walks into History” from one of my favorite specialty blogs, Remember Singapore:

By October 2023, a large part of Redhill Close estate has been bulldozed, with only a couple of blocks left standing. Another old Singapore …

Redhill Close SIT Estate Walks Into History

Check out this devastating critique of the so-called “effective altruism” movement (or EA, for short) by Sophie McBain (@SEMcBain), a writer for the New Statesmen who interviewed many EA leaders, including Larissa Hesketh-Rowe, the CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism from May of 2018 to February of 2019, i.e. before the downfall of EA’s prime pecuniary benefactor, Sam Bankman-Fried. Below is an extended excerpt from Ms McBain’s excellent essay, describing how so many effective altruists fell down a money-grubbing slippery slope of their own making:

… Hesketh-Rowe told me that “once the community got more money, there were more discussions of, ‘Well, if you can save time by spending money, maybe you should. Maybe you should take a taxi instead of taking the bus or the train. Get a nicer desk, spend more to move closer to work – if it’s going to make you more productive.’” It wasn’t a unique business philosophy, but how did it fit with EA’s principles? “The line of reasoning isn’t completely wrong, but that’s what makes it risky,” said Hesketh-Rowe. “You need strong character, a good culture and leadership to navigate it, otherwise it’s too easy to accidently drift in the direction of corruption.”

This is how the movement that once agonised over the benefits of distributing $1 de-worming pills to African children ended up owning two large estates: the $3.5m Chateau Hostačov in the Czech Republic, purchased in 2022 by the small EA-affiliated European Summer Program on Rationality with a donation from Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation; and Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century manor house near Oxford, bought for £15m to host EA retreats and conferences. Wytham Abbey, which is undergoing restoration, was purchased by the Effective Ventures Foundation (the UK umbrella group for EA) using a £17m grant from Open Philanthropy (the US EA foundation set up by Moskovitz and Tuna).

On the EA forum, several people have questioned the “optics” of this purchase: “You’ve underestimated the damage this will do to the EA brand,” wrote one in late 2022. “The hummus and baguettes signal earnestness. Abbey signals scam.”

For what it’s worth, I presented my own classical liberal critique of these obnoxious elite do-gooders in a previous post, which I am reblogging below.

The order of co-authors on an academic article or scientific paper are most often arranged either alphabetically or by the amount of their respective contributions to the paper. (See here, for example.) Why not instead arrange co-authors randomly or, better yet, by each author’s degree of belief in the results of the paper? As it happens, this latter option is what Andy Clark and David Chalmers chose for their “Extended Mind” paper, which was published in the journal Analysis, 58:1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 7-19.

What really caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? (Alternative caption: Big Bang #2)