My picks for the 2016 Oscars

The Oscars are tonight. I’ve always quite liked the Oscars, in spite of all the reasons not to. This year I decided to guess the winners. Here are my picks:

Picture	Revenant
Director	Iñárritu
Actor	DiCaprio
Actress	Larson
Supporting Actress	Vikander
Supporting Actor	Stallone
Original Screenplay	Big Short
Adapted Screenplay	Spotlight
Score	Hateful Eight
Song	Til It Happens to You
Sound Editing	Mad Max
Sound Mixing	Revenant
Hair and Makeup	The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of a Window and Disappeared
Costume Design	Carol
Production Design	Martian
Cinematography	Revenant
Documentary Feature	Amy
Documentary Short	Chau
Live Action Short	Stutterer
Animated Short	Sanjay's Super Team
Animated Feature	Inside Out
Foreign Language	Mustang
Editing	Mad Max
Visual Effects	Mad Max

My methodology was to look at some other people’s picks, and go with the consensus. Where there were ties, I broke them in a few different ways. In the categories where hardly anyone will have seen the nominees, I went for the one rated by the most people on IMDB.com. I went for Mad Max over Star Wars in a couple of technical categories because I thought people might be a bit ashamed to vote for Star Wars. I went for Carol over The Danish Girl for costumes, and The Martian over Mad Max for production design, because Carol and The Martian went down pretty well and voters might want to make sure they got something, while Mad Max and The Danish Girl are probably winning in other categories. The only one where I overruled the professionals altogether was makeup, because I couldn’t think of a way of breaking the tie and I read somewhere that the 100 Year Old Man has pretty impressive old-person makeup. Also I really liked the book.

I’m looking forward to finding out how I did. If you think my picks are stupid, tell me why in the comments!  

You cannot be Ceres

The biggest rock in the asteroid belt is called Ceres. It already has a couple of alien settlements on it, as you can see from the picture below. This probably won’t stop us colonizing it one day. It’s kind of a big deal as extraterrestrial objects go, but I don't know how to pronounce its name. Here are some suggestions. If you have any others, put them in the comments!

1. Series
2. Sear’s
3. Cheers
4. Cerys
5. Caress
6. SARS
7. Sirs
8. Chairs
9. Cherries
10. Serries
11. Cares
12. Churrs
13. Curs
14. Shares
15. Cerise

How to link to things on Twitter

Twitter is fun. One of the fun things you can do on it is link to things you think people will like. Another is you can retweet things other people have tweeted. And nowadays when you retweet something you can add a little comment of your own. Without a comment it comes up on people’s feeds like this:

And with a comment, your followers see something like this:

Now, you may have noticed that what Janine and Carl have done is to combine the two fun things about Twitter that I mentioned earlier: they have retweeted things with links in them. But while Janine’s followers can click on the link to open it, Carl’s followers can’t. At least, not if they’re using Twitter on any of the devices I’ve ever used. You can’t click on a link in a quoted tweet! What you have to do, as far as I can tell, is click on the quoted tweet to open it up, either in a new tab or by leaving the main twitter feed page, and then click on the link. This involves a lot more clicking and mouse-moving, and if Richard Thaler and co have taught us anything it’s that making people do things like open new tabs will make them less likely to open a link. You want people to open the link, don’t you? Well, maybe sometimes you don’t. You might be quoting the tweet for some other reason. But if you do want people to open your link, you should repeat it in your comment, like this:

Got that? See the difference? When you quote a tweet with a link in it, repeat the link in your comment. Unless you don’t want people to click on the link. And it’s not just Carl I’m talking to; he was just the first example in my Twitter feed. I hardly ever see anyone else doing it right. Do it right! You’ll save your followers time, and the things you’re trying to make viral will be more likely to go viral.

Emotional Logic

A couple of weeks back I was reading a review of a book about rhetoric over at NDPR, like you do. It was called “The Philosophy of Argument and Audience Reception”, by Christopher W Tindale, and it was reviewed by Gary Curtis. The review was very negative. Here’s how it ended:

“To end on a positive note, the editing of this book is outstanding and a great relief after some prior unpleasant experiences with sloppily edited scholarly books. I have found only three typographical errors in the entire volume (pp. 55, 117n, 235), which may be some kind of record.”

The review did get me thinking a bit about the role of emotions in argument though, especially with this passage:

“Chapter 8 examines the important issue of the role of emotions in argumentation. As mentioned previously, this is a major difference between rhetorical argumentation and logic or dialectic. Tindale claims that emotions are rational (p. 160), but his support consists of pointing to the work of neurologists such as Antonio Damasio (1994) that appears to show that emotion is involved in practical decision-making. However, this does not support the conclusion that emotions are necessarily rational and, elsewhere in the same chapter, Tindale accepts that sometimes emotional argumentation can be fallacious (pp. 161-162). So, how can we tell whether a given appeal to emotion is fallacious? Tindale seems to accept as rational the appeal to hope in the speech that launched Barack Obama’s presidential campaign (p. 164) but labels fallacious an example from Benjamin Netanyahu that appears to have appealed to fear (p. 162). What makes the one emotional appeal rational and the other irrational? Is it the difference between hope and fear? Are not some appeals to fear rational and some hopes irrational? Unfortunately, the book supplies no answer.” (My emphasis)

When I read this I felt like Curtis was guilty of a kind of uncharitable interpretation. I’ve calmed down now, but I still think he’s been a bit cheeky. If you’re affecting to attempt to fill in the gaps in someone’s argument, you shouldn’t just make the first suggestion off the top of your head, no matter how weak it might be, only to shoot it down in the next sentence and move on. I think it would have been a better review if he had cut out “Is it the difference between hope and fear? Are not some appeals to fear rational and some hopes irrational?” And of course it would have improved the review even more if he’d been able to come up with a plausible suggestion.

I think it’s quite likely that the difference between good and bad argumentative appeals to emotion can be spelled out in a reasonably illuminating way. Rather than look for a difference between hope and fear, which Curtis and I both take to be a non-starter, you can look at the way the argument under discussion appeals to emotions. And if we’re already in the game of saying that emotions can be felt for good or bad reasons, and can rationally motivate actions, then it’s not too hard to see how that might go. Basically, if emotions can follow rationally from reasons, and things can follow rationally from them, then good emotional arguments can be the ones where the emotions appealed to really do follow rationally from the reasons the speaker uses to support them. Likewise, if the speaker justifies a claim or recommends an action on the basis of an emotion, then the argument is good only insofar as the claims or actions really do follow rationally from the emotion.

I don’t know which specific arguments Obama and Netanyahu were using, but using the idea from the previous paragraph the difference might be something like this. Netanyahu argues for some policy or other towards Iran on the basis of fear, and he tries to get the audience scared by lying to them about how close Iran is to building a nuclear bomb. That’s analogous to an unsound argument, because the premises supporting the fear aren’t true. Alternatively, he might have said some things that were true but don’t rationally elicit fear, for example pointing out that a lot of Iranians have beards, which is analogous to an invalid argument. Or maybe he argued soundly for the fear, but then used the fear to support actions that fear doesn’t rationally support. If Obama avoided all these things, telling the audience things which are true and are good reasons to hope, and if the hope rationally supported the things he was using it to support, then Obama’s appeals to hope are dialectically OK.

So, suppose we’re on board with this sort of thing and think that arguments appealing to emotion might be subject to rational appraisal in terms analogous to validity and soundness. Then we’ve got some work to do developing a logic of emotional argument. What could we expect it to look like? One thing to note is that the emotional parts of an argument can figure as premises, conclusions or lemmas, just like the propositions in a regular unemotional argument. As premise: you are speaking to someone who is already emotional and appeal to this to support a conclusion. As conclusion: your goal is to get someone emotional so you tell them things to (rationally, you’d hope) elicit the emotion. And as lemma: you say things to get people emotional and then start making policy recommendations. All of these seem pretty common in the wild, and all fit quite nicely into a framework based on the paradigm of arguments as chains of propositions, each of which either is believed already or follows from the ealier ones.

There are a couple of places I think emotional arguments might depart from the unemotional paradigm. First, there’s a fairly standard picture on which logical consistency and consequence are relations between propositions, and instances of them generate rules governing which beliefs shouldn’t be held simultaneously, which changes we should and shouldn’t make to our beliefs, and which bits of talking are good arguments. It’s clear enough what form the rules part will take when it comes to emotional logic, but it’s less clear what form the “relations between propositions” part will take. That’s because it isn’t clear what stands to an emotion the way a proposition stands to a belief or an assertion. So there’s a danger that rational norms governing emotions will be a bunch of superficially plausible rules built on nothing.

The second is more fun, if that’s possible. It doesn’t seem to me completely out there to say that emotions might sometimes be made rationally permissible in the light of the reasons for them, without being made obligatory. If that were the case, then using an emotional lemma might enable us to rationally draw a conclusion which didn’t follow from the premises by cold unemotional logic. Emotional lemmas could play an essential logical role in arguments, rather than just the pedagogical or rhetorical role that propositional lemmas play - you can’t accept the conclusion on the basis of the premises without going via the emotional lemma. And you have to really feel it. This looks like a violation of something like harmony or conceptual conservatism, but that’s why it’s so exciting. But perhaps reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions, and this whole emotional logic stuff is bunk.

Uses for cloned woolly mammoths

The possibility of cloning woolly mammoths has been back in the news lately. Someone I know asked what they would be good for:

What would even be the main reason for it? Besides curiosity. Woolly mammoth cloning war - http://t.co/V4eZfZBd9a
— Kiara White (@kiara_white) November 16, 2014

I have compiled a list. Thanks to Aliya Vasylenko for her contributions.

• Wool
• Easier to get across Alps than elephants
• Men's rights activists can fight them to boost their self-esteem
• Zoo attraction
• Food
• Episode of Inside Nature's Giants
• Polo variant for cold climates
• Replacement for elephants for when they go extinct
• Ivory source
• Decorative hairdressing subject for animal shows
• Pet therapy for the elderly; especially effective due to unique combination of wool and trunk
• Riding through Siberia
• Bookmobile for those hard to reach areas
• Breed with elephants to produce mammophants
• Potential for musical talent, if they're anything like elephants:

Bubbles might not always be silly

I’ve been listening to NPR’s Planet Money podcasts recently, and a couple of days ago I listened to this one about economic bubbles. Bubbles are what some people call it when the price of something goes up and up and then crashes, and often you could kind of see that a crash was coming sooner or later. Sometimes people say that people were silly to spend all the money buying the thing when it was expensive. The podcasters spoke to Nobel Prizewinner Robert Schiller, who thinks the people driving up the price were being silly, at least sometimes. They also spoke to Eugene Fama, who shared the prize, and thinks that people aren’t being silly; you just can’t tell when something’s a bubble and when it isn’t. It was all pretty good-natured. Schiller and Fama shared their prize with another guy called Lars Peter Hansen, if you’re interested.

Now, regular readers will probably have noticed that one of my hobbies is duplicating the intellectual efforts of other people, and today is no exception. I had a bit of a think about bubbles. Silliness is hard to model, so I tried to think of a kind of situation where the price of something might go up and up and then crash, even though the investors are going into it pretty much with their eyes open.

Here’s what I came up with. You have some kind of commodity which is generating a pretty good income at the moment, but you don’t know how long it’s going to carry on doing it. Maybe it’s a tulip farm and at the moment people are paying top dollar for tulips, but you don’t know how long the craze is going to last. Maybe it’s a share in Justin Bieber’s record company. How do you value something like that?

Well, you need to quantify how long you think it’s going to last. Maybe you think it’ll last something between one and ten years, and your credences are distributed equally over one year, two years and so on up to ten years. That lets you put an expected value on it. Now, if you’re a Bayesian and it’s still popular after a year, you’ll think it has between one and nine years left, and your credences will be equally distributed over one year left, two years left, and so on up to nine years. This lets you put a new expected value on it, and it’ll be lower than it was a year ago. So the expected value of Bieber's tulip farm goes gradually down, until sometime during this decade people lose interest in his tulips and the value of the farm crashes. That’s not a bubble. In a bubble the price is meant to go up until the crash.

Suppose you model your uncertainty about how long the craze will last differently. Instead of thinking how long it’ll last, you think about what the craze’s half-life is. Maybe you think it’s got a half-life of between one and five years, and you distribute your credences equally over half-lives of one year, two years, and so on up to five. (The craze’s half-life is the length of time in which it has a 50% chance of ending. In general, if the half-life is h years, the chance of the craze surviving the next h*n years is 0.5ⁿ.)

Now what happens if the craze is still going after a year? Well, that was more likely to happen if the half-life was long, so you end up redistributing your credences to make a long half-life more likely and a short half-life less likely. This means that after a year the value will go up. And it’ll keep going up until the craze ends. That’s got the rise-rise-crash character of a bubble, but nobody has had to do anything silly. This is true even though it’s predictable that the price will rise until the crash, and even if the investors are all sure the crash is coming sooner or later. I guess that if prices going up and up and then crashing was always this kind of phenomenon, that would mean Fama was right and Schiller was wrong. But I don’t really know; I just listened to one Planet Money podcast. (Well, actually I’ve listened to about a hundred Planet Money podcasts, but only one was about bubbles.)

Is this a reasonable way of dealing with uncertainty about how long a craze will last? Sometimes, it probably is. People have been into Barbie dolls for longer than they’ve been into Loom bands, and this inspires confidence that Barbie will still be around after Loom bands are gone. The longer Loom bands stick around, the longer they might seem to have left. When something’s been around as long as Barbie and Coke, it’s hard to imagine it ever going out of fashion.

So here’s another question: do real commodities exhibiting the price-rise-then-crash phenomenon fit this model? Well, no. Not exactly. The dotcom bubble was based on a load of companies which often weren’t bringing in much income at all at the time (right?), with investors betting on future income. But I think that can still fit into the model. Even if you only projected that the income would come, say, five years into the craze, the expected value still goes up as the probable half-life goes up, and the probable half-life carries on going up until the craze ends (or until a bunch of similar crazes end). So maybe the dotcom bubble was like that too. And the tulip bubble. Anyway, I recommend the podcasts.

Change your life now, stupid

There’s a certain kind of atheist who doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for religious folk. They either read or write books by people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, they call themselves sceptics or rationalists or humanists depending on how closely they follow the trends, and they basically think religious people are being silly.

I’m an atheist too, and I’ve got some sympathy for this way of thinking. Suppose you’ve got a pretty vanilla epistemology, and you apply the same kinds of critical thinking to the claims of religion that you apply to claims about miracle cures, the Rev James Jones, faster than light neutrinos and the garment industry in Mauritius. From that point of view it’s basically impossible to persuade someone else of much in the way of religious claims, and unless you’ve had some pretty out-there experiences you’ll have a hard time becoming very certain of them yourself too. Now, you might say that if you applied these kinds of critical thinking to everything then you’d end up believing not much at all, and if you’re jazzing up your epistemology anyway you might as well salvage your religion. That’s a caricature of Alvin Plantinga’s line – I haven’t read much of his work on this and don’t know how accurate it is – but maybe there’s something in it, or in something like it. But if you don’t buy into it, and I can see why people don’t, then most of the claims of religion can come over as pretty tenuous, and the believers can seem pretty silly.

The kind of atheist I’ve got in mind responds by saying all the billions of religious people should wise up, stop going to church, stop praying, stop believing that there’s been divine intervention in human affairs, evolution, cosmology or whatever, and just become straight-up atheists. And in fact, about twelve years ago I did just that. I stopped going to church, stopped praying, stopped attributing things to divine action and went from committed Christian to convinced atheist. I went back and forth a bit, and the process took about a year.

So if I can do it, why can’t everyone? Well, I think that what these unsympathetic atheists are disregarding is the fact that they’re asking people to make  some really radical changes in their lives, and making radical changes in your life is difficult! Sure, they’ve heard the sceptics’ little arguments, and sure, they can’t really say what’s wrong with them, but so what? If you’re going to radically change your life in response to an argument, you’d better be damn sure it’s a good argument, and who has the time to put in that much thought? And if even they did put in the thought, let’s not forget that some of the greatest minds in history have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about pretty much these same issues, and a lot of them come out of it disagreeing with Dawkins. The so-called new atheists might like to pretend there’s no serious debate here, but this only indicates that they haven't got the expertise or the inclination to engage with it. The debate's there, it's serious, and there are smart people on both sides. One might try to claim that one side isn’t arguing in good faith, but I don’t think this claim can be made in good faith except from a position of extreme ignorance.

So anyway, I’ve got a lot of sympathy for people who don’t want to radically change their lives in response to a simple argument. And in fact, I think this follows a general pattern: I try not to be unsympathetic towards people for not doing something that is very difficult to do, and as I said, radically changing your life is very difficult. Of course, it’s sometimes very difficult to be sympathetic even with people in a difficult position, and I try to be sympathetic with people who don’t follow this pattern.

Perhaps people’s sympathies could be jiggered along a bit by considering another simple argument for radically changing your life: Peter Singer’s arguments about charity. Regular readers might remember me writing about these a couple of times before. You’d save the life of a child drowning in front of you if you could do it at a small cost to yourself, so why not save the life of a child dying of famine or diarrhoea or whatever far away? You can argue it back and forth, but the fact is that people are dying every day who wouldn’t be if someone middle class spent less time on Amazon and more time on Givewell. If you’re middle class, then today you could be that person! But if you follow Singer’s arguments through, you end up giving away most of your disposable income, and that’s hard. Or at least, it seems to be hard. So, what have the atheists’ arguments got that Singer’s haven’t? If you’re so smart, why are you rich?