An odd one - most pages are merely charming, merely show him pulling off some cool stunt or listing some past or recondite academic process or other. An odd one - most pages are merely charming, merely show him pulling off some cool stunt or listing some past or recondite academic process or other. But in aggregate they form a life of baffling breadth and taste.
As well as changing analytic philosophy for the better (through good writing, science, and a hefty dose of fun) and writing some of the best popular work and inspiring thousands of people to break free of their religion, he was an amateur sculptor, an amateur early music singer, an amateur art historian, an amateur sailor, a square dance caller, an accordionist, a farmer, a fisher, a jam-maker, cider presser and bootlegger. An amateur of everything. A natural aristocrat.
I have (so far) led a remarkably adventurous and fulfilling life, way beyond the most extravagant fantasies of my youth—and I was a cocksure young man with vaulting ambition. How did it happen? Was it all just luck, or “connections,” or may I claim some credit for getting myself into my current happy state? Do I in any sense deserve the benefits I now enjoy?
...My main destination was Rome, where, thanks to an Exeter faculty wife, Nina Fish, I had arranged to work in the sculpture studio of Pietro Consagra, recent winner of the Venice Biennale prize, whose wife was Nina’s sister... A recent googling of “ancient Roman bronze” showed me some photos of pieces I daresay we made; they’re still pretty cheap.
She saw a new sculpture of mine in a rather different style and medium than I had been working in, and she asked the gallery owner who the sculptor was. “Oh, that’s a new work by a very exciting young Italian sculptor, Danielo Dennetti.” This is a main reason I am not heavily involved in the art world now. I love the company of artists, but I can’t stand gallery owners, art critics, or—sad to say—many of the people who can afford to buy original art. Selling a piece to them often seemed to me like a betrayal—like giving them a child of mine. I did have a show of my “haptic whittles” in the Underdonk Gallery in Brooklyn in 2017, but none of the pieces were for sale.
Some years later, when we were both Harvard students, we ran into each other in Paris in the summer and went to Le Chat Qui Pêche, where Chet Baker and his band were playing. I stayed until after midnight, when Ron egged me on to ask to sit in. This was granted, and I giddily did perhaps ten choruses of blues in F with these immortals and returned, flushed, to our table. Then Ron got up and began playing, and they really paid attention. I left after one o’clock in the morning with Ron still sitting in, and he showed up at my Left Bank hotel while I was having a late breakfast at about ten the next day. When I remarked that he was up early, he said he was just then getting back from the jam session. He was brilliant but insecure, and sadly a few years later he committed suicide. I never found out the details.
I hope the cheese album he recorded as a teen (as the Peadquacs) turns up. Or his mature work with the New England Classical Singers.
He has read more broadly than me or you. He has a strong misreading of Husserl. The bigoted giants of the last century - Gould, Searle, Chomsky, Penrose, Lewontin - all shrink to fit in his hand.
Many people are eager to protect “real magic” in one way or another, and many of them find philosophy to be the ideal profession for this campaign. I’d say it is the distinguishing characteristic of one kind of philosopher. But then there are the antiphilosophers, who look at the mess made by the others and say to themselves, “Fie! I’m going to try to clear this all up!” My guides and heroes have been the folks—scientists and philosophers—who have hunches about how the tricks are done, how the illusions are generated. They are not just skeptics and debunkers but constructive explainers, groping for models or theories to replace the armchair verities of the philosophers with testable ideas...
I’m a pack rat, a magpie—to slices of what strike me as the most exciting or thought provoking tidbits and leaving the rest of the interpretation to the scholars. I think I have learned a lot from Husserl, but some distinguished Husserl scholars think my reading is irreparably ill-informed. I don’t care. I turned to Husserl to figure out how the mind works and got some valuable help from that reading; if Husserl himself would be aghast at my construal, too bad for Husserl. I am happy to give him credit, but if Husserlians want to reject my gift, they are welcome to do so. I’m not going to spend days or weeks wrangling over hermeneutics.
I read Chomsky’s famous review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, which had just appeared, but —unlike most budding cognitive scientists—I also read Skinner’s book, and I decided that Chomsky’s review was a masterpiece of misleading polemics. That was my earliest encounter with deliberate caricature in academia, and it was an eye-opener.
The physicist Wolfgang Pauli famously dismissed another physicist’s ideas as “not even wrong,” and I have opportunistically tried to fix some of the wrong ideas presented by physicist Roger Penrose, linguist Noam Chomsky, neuroscientist Christof Koch, and evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and David Sloan Wilson, among others. Then there were my long-standing battles with my fellow philosophers Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, John Searle, and David Chalmers. Where would I be without all these brilliant mistakes to correct, with the help of my thinking tools?
(One wonders what they would say of the exchange.)
One of the other things I love about it is that it shows the total dislocation of the 60s. He's married by 20. He sails to England because flying is still too expensive.
It’s a warm old man’s book but there’s an edge on it. This is the guy who was willing to hold bizarre positions against approximately the entire world. He was in several ways more radical than Dawkins, who took the heat instead. He talks about his youthful insecurities (in the face of people like Nozick) here - but modesty was for special occasions.
as Gilbert Ryle, my thesis supervisor at Oxford, told a colleague of mine over a few beers in Salzburg back in the ’60s, “There are much cleverer chaps than Dennett, but he has a fire in his belly.” I’ve gratefully leaned on that crutch now for more than half a century.
One mathematician who vigorously participated (I forget his name, alas) was enticed into reading Quine’s Word and Object, and asked me at lunch one day why it was that whenever Quine got into real metaphysical issues he “cracked wise,” jocularly evading the problems. It had never occurred to me that Quine did this, but I was soon persuaded that the fellow was right. I ventured a diagnosis: Quine started out as a mathematical logician and had never been quite sure that philosophy was a proper career for a grown-up; it was his residual discomfort with the field he was in that explained his arm’s-length approach to metaphysics. Years later, I told Quine this story, and he readily confirmed my diagnosis: Quine was a philosopher malgré lui. Me too, I thought.
Cultured up the wazoo, an argument for the academy (if you could only fill it with people as grounded and principled as this, which you can't). A life more complete than complete.
(On the other hand, inspired as I am, it's not easy to follow him. He walked into Oxford with a weak application, walked from there straight into Ryle's care, got a PhD in passing, and then collected the unfathomably huge orchard of low-hanging fruit - evolutionary theory, cognitive science, computer science - that the other philosophers were studiously ignoring. Is there anything left for us? Yes, surely, but where?)
A good book about maximally important ideas. She invites various technical experts to write some info boxes about mathematical matters, which is extreA good book about maximally important ideas. She invites various technical experts to write some info boxes about mathematical matters, which is extremely admirable since the meat of Ramsey is all in the maths and the logic. Here's an essay with my gushing thoughts on his work.
We can evaluate the various outlooks on life and see which have the best consequences. In his assessment, the key to meaning in life is to be optimistic, thrilled, and actively try to improve conditions for people now and in the future. Live as fully and as ethically as you can, was his conclusion. Ramsey understood that inequalities get in the way of being thrilled by life. He put much effort into trying to make the world a fairer place. He also understood that individuals’ psychological makeups have an impact on whether one is depressed or not. His own tendency was to be cheerful—he was remembered as always smiling and looking rather pleased, not so much with himself but with things in general. He knew that Wittgenstein was not so disposed. But Ramsey too had periods of crippling anguish, and he thought that one should try to improve one’s life by engaging with what clinical psychology has to offer and by trying to be happy. If psychology can help change our outlook for the better, we should avail ourselves of it, as he had.
* I only spotted Misak being fatuous once, taking the usual liberty where philosophers speak shit about utilitarianism as if it was for idiots:
Ramsey was not a full-out utilitarian, to whom discounting is the obvious and correct thing to do.
* How bloody erotic the (defiance of the) old morality seems from my safe remove. If you're caught you lose your job, like Empson, fired for owning condoms.
* It is tragic that he wasted months of his life (2% of it) with Freudians who were unfit to treat him -- among all people they were unfit to treat. Misak repeatedly refers to Frank being 'cured' by them. This seems inapt: at the time of the analysis, he was physically distant from his forbidden crush for 6 months and was forbidden from writing to her. Seems enough to get over it! Talking to the funny Austrian was just sauce. Maybe.
He also suggested to Frank that he had an Oedipus fixation, drawing on the Freudian contention that every son wants to kill his father so that he can have sex with his mother. Glover told Frank to have a talk with Margaret, and that seems to have helped: ‘I did and she was awfully nice.’ But his three months or so with Glover were on the whole not working: ‘It wasn’t really improving my mind very much, so I decided to stop it and go back to sea.’ Margaret too was being psychoanalysed, by Dr James Glover, the brother of Frank’s therapist. James Glover was also psychoanalysing Dick and Geoff. Their analysts had no qualms about discussing a patient’s analysis not only amongst themselves, but also with other patients.
[Wittgenstein] had never before said of anyone that they had understood the [Tractatus] and, as far as I know, he would never say it again.
The book is another reminder of Wittgenstein's cruelty and shallowness. But his mistakes were emotionally rich, and so we keep talking about him. I cannot forgive Wittgenstein's obituary for Ramsey:
Ramsey’s mind repulsed me. When I came to Cambridge months ago I thought that I would not be able to have dealings with him, for I had such unpleasant memories of him from our meeting years ago with Keynes in Sussex... I could communicate quite well with R. about some things. But in the course of time it did not really go well, after all. R’s incapacity for genuine enthusiasm or genuine reverence, which is the same, finally repulsed me more & more... his criticism didn’t help along but held back and sobered... one labored arduously for a long time in vain to explain something to him until he suddenly shrugged his shoulders about it & said this was self-evident... He had an ugly mind. But not an ugly soul. He truly relished music & with understanding. And one could see by looking at him what effect it had on him. Of the last movement of one of Beethoven’s last quartets, a movement he loved perhaps more than anything else, he told me that it made him feel as if the heavens were open.
Or this
Frank’s sisters remembered that he wrote a terrible letter to their father, saying that Arthur had failed to get Frank proper medical treatment and so was responsible for his death. The gratuitous cruelty leaves one aghast. Wittgenstein was notoriously and severely self-critical. But he seems not to have understood that extending his brand of moral self-criticism to others was itself not very moral.
This surprised me though: on the death-bed he told jokes, with either reading (agitation or kind deflection) uncharacteristic of him:
Frances said that it was clear that Wittgenstein shared with her both an immense personal sadness, as well as sympathy for Lettice. But he made poor and flippant jokes, perhaps to disguise emotions he couldn’t cope with, or perhaps to help Lettice keep her composure.
probability is not really about numbers, it is about the structure of reasoning
-Glen Shafer
By no means an introductory book; even chapter 1 will
probability is not really about numbers, it is about the structure of reasoning
-Glen Shafer
By no means an introductory book; even chapter 1 will mean little to you if you haven't tried to model situations with both formal logic and probabilities before. (Some set theory wouldn't go amiss either.) Parts of it treat nearly-irrelevant dead controversies, just because he was still fighting off the McCarthy / production systems programme in the late Eighties. (For instance, I learned Dempster-Shafer theory in class, and it is sorta interesting and neatly evades Cox's theorem, but I still expect never to have to use it. It gets more than 50 pages here.) Bayesian networks, ingenious and progressive as they were, have peaked in use, though theirchildren are still cutting edge and invaluable for human and nonhuman reasoning.
All that said: Pearl thinks very hard about ultimate matters. He didn't develop Bayesian networks (and causal models) as a hack, but instead as a consequence of showing probabilities to be better than the alternatives when tweaked for computation, subjective Bayesianism to be capable of handling causal inference, graphs as the natural data structure for both relevance and cause, and the causal/evidential decision theory distinction as primal.
On the surface, there is really no compelling reason that beliefs, being mental dispositions about unrepeatable and often unobservable events, should combine by the laws of proportions that govern repeatable trials such as the outcomes of gambling devices. The primary appeal of probability theory is its ability to express useful qualitative relationships among beliefs and to process these relationships in a way that yields intuitively plausible conclusions… What we wish to stress here is that the fortunate match between human intuition and the laws of proportions is not a coincidence. It came about because beliefs are formed not in a vacuum but rather as a distillation of sensory experiences...
We therefore take probability calculus as an initial model of human reasoning from which more refined models may originate, if needed. By exploring the limits of probability in machine implementations, we hope to identify conditions under which extensions, refinements and simplifications are warranted.
Building AI as feedback for formal epistemology! My favourite philosophers are technical like David Lewis; my favourite technical people are philosophical like Pearl.
He's also very good at taking us through a derivation and underlining the big implications (e.g. P(A) = \sum P(A|B_i) P(B_i) as a model for hypothetical reasoning: belief in event A is a weighted sum over belief in all the ways A can obtain). There's plenty of maths in here but I never struggled much, probably because of this qualitative care of his.
PRIS beats the arse off his own 2018 effort, perhaps because at this point he was still working incredibly hard to understand and synthesise competing approaches. Hard to rate. But if you want to seriously think about AI, you'll want to read it at some point.
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Misc notes
* McCarthy is to probabilities as Minsky is to neural nets. He sent us down a rabbit hole, chasing nonmonotonic logic solutions to a numerical problem. (See also Chomsky vs prob language models.) * Others have used Pearl's vision to explain the ideal form of rationality, which humans depart from. * His discussion of extensional (hacking out a generalised logic) vs intensional (possible-world counting) approaches to uncertainty seems fundamental to me, bedrock. * The heart of the matter: Bayesnets are O(n) in variables, but actually with some complicated tweaks so are Dempster-Shafer galleries. * Dempster-Shafer is an interesting example of the contingency of (the context of discovery of) mathematics. It didn't have to be developed (since probs are adequate for so much), and yet it was, and it evades the normal arguments against other uncertainty measures and is thus alive, if unpopular. (Compare noneuclidean geometries.) What other dominant calculi would get similarly competing theories, if we threw a few decades of brilliance at them?...more
A pleasure to spend time with. Stone's arguments are complete without being bloated, and he has a keen eye for philosophical
rigour follows insight
A pleasure to spend time with. Stone's arguments are complete without being bloated, and he has a keen eye for philosophical and intuitive implications ("Why does maximum information look like pure noise?", "What exactly does half a bit mean?", and much more). This completeness means that he sometimes repeats definitions or lemmas, but I defy you to find this unhelpful.
The bibliography is also excellent, ranking a hundred books by their specialty and difficulty.
(Quibble: at the end he suggests that Shannon's originality was so strong that he "single-handedly accelerated the rate of scientific progress, and it is entirely possible that, without his contribution, we would still be treating information as if it were some ill-defined vital fluid". But his work seems so natural and elementary that this would surprise me. Weak evidence: Konrad Zuse independently invented Shannon's boolean circuit theory...)...more
Ah! I am a sucker for this form in pop science: “primary research into some unjustly obscure thing, pulling together the historical and scientific strAh! I am a sucker for this form in pop science: “primary research into some unjustly obscure thing, pulling together the historical and scientific strands, revealing the excitement and transcendence in the unsexy, un-Arts thing, and making the reader feel smarter and more solidly located in the modern world”. Here it's information technology very broadly construed – so African talking drums, Morse, bioinformatics, memetics, Hawking radiation, Wiki, and so on.
Unbelievably, I’d never heard of the hero of the tale, Claude Shannon, because he was quiet and didn’t make any metaphysical claims for his profound work. Loads and loads of tasty gobbets to boot
“I do not believe that my father was such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst (& Metaphysician)…” - Lovelace
“A theoretical physicist acts as a very clever coding algorithm.”
“Across the centuries they all felt the joy in reckoning: Napier and Briggs, Kepler and Babbage, making their lists, building their towers…”
Shot through with the joy of discovery, and all of it unbleached by the drudgery, familiarity, and commercialism evoked in “I.T.”.
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