Richard Kimberly Heck

Blog Moved

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Kimberly Heck) — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 17:49:00 +0000

Due to my name change, this blog has been moved to a new location.

Fascinating Reflection on Transexuality

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 21:38:00 +0000

My friend Anne Eaton directed me to this fascinating but in some ways deeply puzzling essay by Andrea Long Chu, who is (I take it) a graduate student in Comparative Literature at NYU. It's a lengthy investigation of the fraught, and too little discussed, relationship between identity and desire in the experience of trans women, specifically. Probably, Chu right restricts her discussion to that case: the one she knows from the inside. But I strongly suspect that her reflections have something much broader to teach us about gender, and our experience of it. Certainly, as someone who is genderqueer, it rang a lot of bells with me.

Published: The Logical Strength of Compositional Principles

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 21:31:00 +0000

Abstract

This paper investigates a set of issues connected with the so-called conservativeness argument against deflationism. Although I do not defend that argument, I think the discussion of it has raised some interesting questions about whether what I call compositional principles, such as "A conjunction is true iff its conjuncts are true", have substantial content or are in some sense logically trivial. The paper presents a series of results that purport to show that the compositional principles for a first-order language, taken together, have substantial logical strength, amounting to a kind of abstract consistency statement.

Find it on Project Euclid, or download the pre-publication version here.

The paper is a kind of companion to "Disquotationalism and the Compositional Principles" (PDF) and is basically the philosophical side of the paper "Consistency and the Theory of Truth" (here).

The Inadequacy of Sexual Consent?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 21:32:00 +0000

Earlier today, I fell down one of those Internet rabbit holes reading reflections about the Aziz Ansari story. (I confess to having previously had no idea who he was.) In truth, I jumped in myself, once I realized what was really at stake here, since it's something in which I've been increasingly interested myself over the last couple years. The best piece I read was by Amanda Alcantara, on The Lily. Here's the crucial bit:

[This] story...pushes us beyond the parameters of what we've been saying about consent: That "no means no", or to seek an active "yes". This form of teaching consent focuses on feelings of power during intimacy. It's a response to a request—"will they let me have sex with them?"—rather than seeing sex as something mutual. The question should be, "Do they want to have sex with me?" That is essentially where this conversation lies. Is consenting about "wanting" or about "letting"?

That's almost right, I think. But the real lesson, which seems to run just under the surface of a lot of these discussions, concerns the limitations of the notion of consent. In fact, this is not a new idea. See this piece by Rebecca Traister in The Cut, for example. But perhaps it's an idea who time has come.

The problem with the notion of consent, I want to suggest, is that it is basically a legalistic notion. It's well-enough suited to helping us distinguish legal sex from criminal assault. But it has turned out to be very ill-suited to helping us distinguish ethical sexual interactions from unethical ones, even when it's prefixed with "affirmative" and "enthusiastic". Think about the kinds of things to which we consent: Surgery; having your car (or person) searched; having private information shared. In short: You consent to violations. Paradigmatically, consenting is indeed about letting.

But surely sex shouldn't (morally, ethically) be like that. If someone "gets consent" and then goes about taking their pleasure with absolutely no concern whatsoever for the experience of their sexual partner, then the mere fact that such sex is legal doesn't make it right. It's still a shitty thing to do to someone. It's just using them, and it makes them feel used and disregarded and awful. (See this piece on Feministing from a few years ago.)

It is already very dangerous if sex is conceptualized in terms of 'letting'. That is about half a step away from thinking in terms of pursuer and pursued, predator and prey. But the truth is that this model of what (heterosexual) sex is runs deep.¹ Sex is something women have and men want. Sex is something men do to women and women do for men. Sex is something for which men ask and to which women consent (or not).

In the piece from The Cut I mentioned above, Traister quotes Maya Dusenbury, then editorial director at Feministing, as having suggested that feminists need "to put forth an alternative vision for what sex could be [but] isn't". But, unless I'm missing something, there has been far too little discussion of what an alternative model might be like. At least in the popular press—and the discussion around the Ansari story is as good a reminder of this as any—people still try to parse it all in terms of consent. That just the lines again between what's criminal and what's decent: As long as there was consent, it's as if anything goes. But it doesn't.

In a way, what most struck me (and what was most depressing) about even the best pieces I read is the fact that no-one seems aware that a really impressive discussion about this topic has been going on in a number of different circles recently. There are lots of resources on which to draw here.

There's a wonderful piece by Thomas Macaulay Millar in Yes Means Yes that takes up these issues. He rails against what he calls the "commodity" model of sex and proposes instead a "performance" model, which analogizes sex to a jam session (an idea wonderfully developed in this video by Karen K.B. Chan). On one level, what Millar is trying to highlight is just the importance of mutuality. But the real question is what that means, and on that issue Millar is not as explicit. The beginnings of an answer are implicit in the jamming analogy: Mutuality requires a sensitivity to another's experience, a modulation of one's own activity in response to that sensivitity, and so forth. But there's a lot of work still to be done developing the theoretical tools we need to discuss these things sensibly. So I'm going to gesture in the direction of some of that.

Most fundamentally, "ethical" sexual interactions require a full appreciation of the other's subjectivity, and it's far from clear what that actually involves. I'm inclined to think that Jessica Benjamin's notion of 'recognition' could prove invaluable here, but this is a really difficult topic.

The philosopher Ann Cahill has done some really good work on sexual ethics. See, for example, her papers "Recognition, Desire, and Unjust Sex" and "Unjust Sex vs. Rape". Cahill herself draws heavily on work by the psychologist Nicola Gavey, whose book Just Sex is required reading for anyone interested in these matters.

There's also been some really interesting discussion recently inspired by the paper "Faking to Finish", by Emily J Thomas, Monika Stelzl, and Michelle N Lafrance. The paper highlights, more than anything, the lack of an adequate vocabulary for people to articulate sexual experiences that don't constitute rape or assault but are nonetheless experienced as not really wanted. (For an early attempt to articulate that distinction, see this paper by Zoë D. Peterson and Charlene L. Muehlenhard.) Indeed, Thomas et al aren't quite sure what to call the sorts of interactions in which they're interested, settling upon the neutral term 'problem sex'.

There are some terrific commentaries awaiting proper publication, including this one by Hannah Frith and this one by Melanie Beres, both of whom have been poking around in the same area for some time. There's also a fascinating follow-up by the original authors, in which they reflect on their experience discussing these things with the press. They remark that "... many pieces reproduced the very problem our article intended to clarify, collapsing all negative experiences of sex
into either 'rape' or 'just sex'...".

At some point, I hope to wade into this territory in my own work. For now, though, I'll be satisfied if I can just bring the great work that is being done to wider attention.

Minor update: "Any conception of sex that doesn't also consider, and consider very carefully, how our actions in the bedroom affect each other—even if we don't want to marry one another; even if we're super sex-positive poly bad-asses and don't believe in marriage; even if we don't know our partners' last names—is bad sex. It's not about being touchy-feely-romantic. It's about being socially just and emotionally respectful." (Reina Gattuso)

¹ I'll limit my discussion here to heterosexual sex involving two people. Such dynamics also play out in other sexual interactions, to be sure, and I'm sure there is much to be learned from studying them. But that's not a topic on which I'm qualified to speak.

Lacuna in "Is Frege's Definition of the Ancestral Adequate?"

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 16:19:00 +0000

Ran Lanzet has pointed out a significant lacuna in the proof of the main result in my paper "Is Frege's Definition of the Ancestral Adequate?" This has been repaired in the 'pre-publication' version of the paper, which can be downloaded here. See p.21 of that document.

I had certainly thought of the missing case, and seem to recall that at some point I'd introduced a 'simplifying assumption' that allowed me to ignore it. But that assumption is not mentioned in the published version of the paper, and it isn't nearly as easy as I'd supposed to see that it's permissible (which is perhaps why I removed it, but without fixing the affected part of the proof).

Have Fun With René, Jerry

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 07:12:00 +0000

I did not know Jerry Fodor at all, personally. But when you spend as much time with someone's work as I did with his, you feel like you did know him.

When I got to MIT in 1987, Jerry had already left, a year before. But his influence was still ubiquitous. There were a lot of older graduate students who were still working with him, and many of those a year before me clearly seemed like they wished they were.

Still, I was not quite ready to feel Fodor's influence myself. I'd grown up a bit of a Wittgensteinian, and the very idea of a 'language of thought' gave me a belly ache. I have no idea, to be honest, how or why that attitude changed. But somewhere along the way I actually sat down to read The Language of Thought, and then for some crazy reason decided to teach it in a tutorial at Harvard. Then I obsessed over A Theory of Content and Other Essays, every damn page of it; and then The Modularity of Mind; and The Elm and the Expert; and then, not too long after it appeared, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. And then, somewhere in the early 2000s, I taught Concepts in a graduate seminar against Christopher Peacocke's Theory of Concepts. A whole ton of fun that was.

I remember when Jim Higginbotham (one of my dissertation advisors) left MIT to go to Oxford in 1993. A friend of mine told him: Good, you need to go teach them about Davidson. His response was: No, I need to go teach them about Fodor. Damn right!

It wasn't until around 2005 that I really started to understand the influence Fodor had somehow had on my thinking. I had just moved to Brown, and I was working intensively on what would become one of my favorite papers of mine, "Solving Frege's Puzzle". As I mention in a footnote in that paper, for most of the time I was writing it, I thought of it as a defense of Frege's notion of sense against a series of familiar objections. But the paper kept frustrating me, because there was this one line of objection that I never felt I could quite get past: that 'sense', as I was understanding it, might just as well be understood in purely computational (syntactic) terms.

This was a suggestion that traced directly to The Language of Thought, though it was made more explicit in Fodor's work later. For years, I thought I know how to answer this objection. But the truth was that I kept coming up with different answers, each of which would soon be shot down, usually after reading Fodor again. (The crucial texts here are all cited in the paper mentioned.) Eventually, I gave up. Fodor was right, and I had been wrong. (Not any more!!) But the great thing about philosophy is that this was not nearly as much of a crisis as it might otherwise have been. I could just turn my argument for p into an argument for ~p.

I wish to thank, publicly, all the teachers who made that possible. I had worked on that paper for years, and it would have totally sucked for it to have disintegrated completely.

The depth of Fodor's influence, not just on me but on so many of us, is the sort of thing that marks him as a great philosopher. So many of us have lived with his ideas over a very long period of time, and we just keep learning from him, even when we have thought we must surely have read him enough times, finally! I taught another seminar, just a few years go, even more tightly focused on Fodor's work on concepts, and it was every bit as much fun as the previous one. And I learned every bit as much, at least.

I have no idea whether I believe in an afterlife. But some years ago, my friend Jim Stewart (who was trained as a philosopher) gave a transcendental argument for the afterlife in a sermon he gave at my (ridiculously leftist) church. His thought was that, if we are to do God's work, then we have to believe that the arc of the universe bends towards justice.

If we are to believe that, he argued, then we have also to believe that all those who have struggled and sacrificed along the way will one day know the fruits of their sacrifice: Emmett Till and Dr King and Sojourner Truth and Mary Magdalene and millions of others. We have to believe that, so that we can be confident that we will one day know the fruits of our sacrifice. (Jim has spent much of his adult life as the director of the First Church Shelter for Homeless Men, so he knows whereof he speaks.) Otherwise, his thought was, 'we' could not make the sacrifices that God requires of us. We might think or hope otherwise, but if so then that is probably because we under-estimate what is required of us, i.e., we fail to appreciate our own privilege. (Think for a moment: When precisely are you willing to give your life for someone else? Are you sure that moment has not yet arrived?)

It may only be when we are gathered around the table with Christ himself---or whatever equivalent another faith tradition might provide---but Jim's idea was that there must be a just reckoning in the end. And, given the profundity of human injustice, only a divine reward will do.

As I've said, I didn't know Jerry well, but I doubt he believed in an afterlife. Nonetheless, I choose to think of him as now enjoying the fruits of his own unique and important contributions to human freedom. I hope Jerry enjoys the opportunity to talk to Hume and Descartes and Darwin---what a lot they have to figure out!---and to re-unite with his old friend Hilary Putnam and his old enemy B.F. Skinner (who's no longer thus).

Interview in 3AM Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 25 Nov 2017 16:06:00 +0000

Thanks to Richard Marshall for the invitation. The interview is here.

Statement Concerning Allegations By Heidi Howkins Lockwood

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 16:29:00 +0000

Last week, Heidi Howkins Lockwood publicly accused me of groping her after a colloquium at Yale in October 2007.

I categorically and unequivocally deny having groped Lockwood on that occasion or on any other.

Lockwood asserts that I was so drunk that night that I would have been unable to find my way to my hotel, apparently implying that this is why I had "no recollection" of groping her. Both claims are false. I have vivid memories of the entire evening. When I deny groping Lockwood, it is not because I do not remember doing so; it is because I positively remember not doing so.

When Lockwood confronted me with these allegations (almost six and a half years later), I did apologize to her, but not because I thought I might have done what she alleged. She was clearly distraught, and it is possible to apologize for the role you played in causing someone to be upset, even if you know that you did not do anything wrong. This is something that decent people do. My apology was intended in that spirit, as an expression of sympathy, not an admission of guilt.

Let me emphasize that I am not accusing Lockwood of lying. Nonetheless, she is mistaken. I did not grope her on that occasion or any other.

Questions and Answers About the Lockwood Allegations

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 16:28:00 +0000

A few people have asked me not unreasonable questions about my response to the Lockwood allegations. Here they are, with answers.

Why did you wait so long to issue a denial?
Please try to imagine being publicly accused of such a thing yourself. I was shocked, upset, angry, and confused. It took me three days to calm down enough to think straight.
Lockwood claims you took no interest in her work after this incident.
The following spring, I read and commented on material that Lockwood intended to include in her dissertation: a formal argument in provability logic. I had no obligation to do this. She was not (and never has been) my student, and I was not on her committee. Lockwood has not shared any of her work with me since that time. Over the next few years, though, I did occasionally correspond with her about sexual harassment and related issues in the profession. But I stopped having any contact with Lockwood in March 2014, when she accused George Boolos of molesting her.
Why would Lockwood fabricate such a story about you?
If "fabricate" means "intentionally invent something in order to deceive", which it does, then I repeat that I am not accusing Lockwood of lying. Why would she have such a false belief about me? That is an interesting question, but she has many views about things in this vicinity that I personally find it difficult to believe are true. (Again, I'm not saying she's lying about those things, either.) And many of them concern a man about whom Lockwood clearly has very strong feelings and with whom I am closely identified. Someone once joked that I'm George Jr. (I wish.) Why Lockwood decided to share all this stuff with someone she barely knew, that's what I find puzzling.
Do you have anything else to say?
People who know me know that I not only did not grope Lockwood, but that I would not and could not do such a thing. If you don't believe me, ask them.

I shall have no more to say about this matter publicly (though I may add a question or two, and already have). If you are a friend of mine, and would like to talk about it, however, feel free to contact me. As always!

Further Remarks on the Lockwood Allegations

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 16:27:00 +0000

Elsewhere, I have categorically and unequivocally denied Heidi Howkins Lockwood's allegation that I groped her in October 2007. Of course, I do not expect people to take my denial at face value. Anyone can deny anything. Well, there is a great deal more I could say here. For now, however, I offer just the following. My intention is to offer evidence that Lockwood is not a credible accuser. She has made many other "interesting" claims about her own experience of sexual misconduct.

After Lockwood "confronted" me with her allegations in February 2014, she continued talking to me (on the phone) for well over half an hour. The subject, which she seemed eager to discuss, was her "affair" (her word) with George Boolos (something of which she publicly accused him just six weeks later). She had first told me about this affair in October 2007, on the same night she alleges I groped her.

Among other things, Lockwood asked me why I had mentioned George's paper "On 'Seeing' the Truth of the Gödel Sentence" to her that night at Yale. I had no memory of mentioning that paper to her at all—it's a brief reply to Penrose, and I am not sure I would even have remembered it—but I just said that I didn't remember why I'd mentioned it. Lockwood then told me that she was happy that I had told her about the paper, because it turned out to contain a coded message from George, written shortly before he died, apologizing for how he had treated her.

The message was supposed to be:

But earthlier happy is the rose distilled
Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.
(A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act I, Scene 3)

These lines do not occur in the paper (unsurprisingly, if you are familiar with Boolos's work). They were supposed to be "encoded" in it, though it was not explained to me how. In the context of the play, they are usually taken to be an homage to the earthly pleasures (for women) of sex, as opposed to the heavenly rewards of the convent. But that was not how Lockwood was reading them. I will not say exactly what they were supposed to mean. Suffice it to say that it concerned an alleged detail of the "affair" that it would be cruel for me to reveal.

There were many other such details Lockwood shared with me. And I should emphasize further that I am far from the only person with whom Lockwood has shared these sorts of stories. Many, many people have heard such stories from her. I personally know of at least nine such people.

NOTE: This account is based upon notes I wrote the day after this conversation. (I shared the details of the conversation with many people at that time, as well.)

A Truly Incredible Story

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 19:14:00 +0000

From the Huffington Post UK. The title is "The Week My Husband Left And My House Was Burgled I Secured A Grant To Begin The Project That Became BRCA1". Just read it. And make sure you read the whole thing. You really have no idea.

DLNA Output for Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 19:30:00 +0000

Many of my favorite bands stream their concerts these days, sometimes live, sometimes afterwards. It's fine to listen on the computer sometimes, but other times I'd like to listen to the show over something a bit better-sounding, like my stereo. I figured there had to be a way to do this, and it turns out that, indeed, there is. The Logitech Transporter I use as a digital source will function as a DLNA renderer (i.e., you can send it a DLNA audio signal). And I know that Linux plays nice with DLNA, since I often stream video to my TV that way (using minidlna, aka, ReadyMedia). So the only question is: How can I convince Linux to send audio from the computer to the Transporter? (Note that something like this will work with any DLNA renderer.)

Assuming you are using Pulse Audio, this sort of thing turns out not to be very hard. (See here for another set of instructions.) First, you will need to install pulseaudio-dlna, which is a little program that sets up any DLNA renderers it finds on your network as PulseAudio output devices. (For Fedora, there is a copr repo, which you can read about here.) There are a ton of options to set the audio format and bitrate and so forth, so check the manpage, as usual.

That can be it, if you wish. Once pulseaudio-dlna is running, you can just start up whatever you want to 'cast' and use the PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol) to set the output device for that stream.

One note: To get this to work on my laptop, I have had to disable the firewall. I guess it would probably be enough to enable traffic on 8080, which is the port that pulseaudio-dlna runs on by default, but I've not bothered finding out. I only do this when home, and I'm not worried about the firewall then.

There's another useful trick I found, which is especially nice when you're trying to sort out problems, namely: You can bind two devices together with PulseAudio, so you get sound through both of them. In my case, what I wanted to do was have the audio output both from the computer and from the DLNA renderer. The command to do this will be something like:

pacmd load-module module-combine-sink sink_name=combined1 slaves=alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo,familyroomtransporter_dlna

Here, the sink_name is what this new device will be known as in PulseAudio. The 'slaves' are the devices to which that is, in effect, an alias. To figure out what names you need to use here, just do:

pacmd list-sinks | grep name:

where the grep part will limit the output just to the relevant names. Of course you can omit it to see more information.

New Paper: The Frontloading Argument

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 18:00:00 +0000

Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.

Maybe the most important argument in David Chalmers's monumental book Constructing the World is the one he calls the 'Frontloading Argument', which is used in Chapter 4 to argue for the book's central thesis, A Priori Scrutability. And, at first blush, the Frontloading Argument looks very strong. I argue here, however, that it is incapable of securing the conclusion it is meant to establish. My interest is not in the conclusion for which Chalmers is arguing. As it happens, I am skeptical about A Priori Scrutability. Indeed, my views about the a priori are closer to Quine's than to Chalmers's. But my goal here is not to argue for any substantive conclusion but just for a dialectical one: Despite its initial appeal, the Frontloading Argument fails as an argument for A Priori Scrutability.

You can find the paper here.

New Paper: Speaker's Reference, Semantic Reference, and Intuition

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 18:00:00 +0000

Forthcoming in The Review of Philosophy and Psychology.

Some years ago, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich reported the results of experiments that reveal, they claim, cross-cultural differences in speakers' `intuitions' about Kripke's famous Gödel-Schmidt case. Several authors have suggested, however, that the question they asked they subjects is ambiguous between speaker's reference and semantic reference. Machery and colleagues have since made a number of replies. It is argued here that these are ineffective. The larger lesson, however, concerns the role that first-order philosophy should, and more importantly should not, play in the design of such experiments and in the evaluation of their results.

You can find the paper here.

LaTeX Notation for Numerals

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Mar 2017 19:30:00 +0000

It is common in meta-mathematics to use the notation n to mean the numeral for the number n, that is: S...S(0), where S is a symbol for successor and there are n S's in the numeral for n. In LaTeX, one can typeset this notation using \overline{n} in math mode. Unfortunately, this does not always look very good: The height of the bar will vary with the height of the contained character(s), so the heights of the bars in \overline{n} and \overline{k} will not match.

The solution is to use a 'strut': an invisible (because 0 width) rule that functions only to set the height of the bar:

\newlength{\numheight}
\setlength{\numheight}{\fontcharht\font`0}
\newcommand\numeral[1]{\overline{\rule{0pt}{\numheight}#1}

It would perhaps be better to use the current font in \numheight, but I've never had a problem with this in practice.

A Bound in Gödel 1931

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 02:33:00 +0000

When teaching Gödel's famous 1931 paper on the incompleteness theorems this semester, I got hung up on one of the bounds he gives in the course of the 45 definitions of primitive recursive notions. This is the case of concatenation. Recall that Gödel here codes finite sequences via prime factorization, so the sequence <a₁, ..., a_n> is coded as: 2^a₁ × ... ×p_n^a_n, where p_n is the n^th prime. The 'star function' is then defined as follows:

x * y = μz≤Pr[l(x) + l(y)]^x+y {∀n≤l(x)(n Gl z = n Gl x) &

∀n≤l(y)(0<n → (n + l(x)) Gl z = n Gl y)}

Here, l(x) is the length of the sequence x; n Gl x is the n^th element of that sequence. So the definition says that x * y is the least number coding a sequence that agrees with x on its first l(x) elements and agrees with y on the next l(y) elements. Of course, there is such a number (and, actually, given how "Gl" works, there are infinitely many). The bound is needed to guarantee that * is primitive recursive.

The question, though, is how the bound is supposed to work. Gödel does not often discuss his bounds, which tend to be pretty loose, but he does explain one of them in footnote 35. And if one follows the sort of reasoning Gödel uses there, then it is difficult to see how to get the bound in the above.

I asked a question about this on the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list, and Alasdair Urquhart took the bait and replied with an elegant proof showing why Gödel's bound works. I thought I'd record a version of it here, in case anyone else has a similar question.

First, we show, by a straightforward induction on n, that 2^a₁ × ... ×p_n^a_n ≤ p_n^{a₁ + ... + a_n}.

Now let <a₁, ..., a_n> and <b₁, ..., b_m> be two sequences. The code of their concatenation is:

2^a₁ × ... ×p_n^a_n × p_n+1^b₁ × ... × p_n+m^b_m ≤ p_n+m^{a₁ + ... + a_n + b₁ + ... + b_m}

Moreover,

a₁ + ... + a_n ≤ 2^a₁ + ... + p_n^a_n ≤ 2^a₁ × ... × p_n^a_n = x

and similarly for the other sequence. (Note that the last inequality depends upon the fact that none of the a_i = 0, but Gödel's coding of sequences only works for positive integers.) So

a₁ + ... + a_n + a_n+1 + ... + a_n+m ≤ x + y

which gives Gödel's bound.

Donald Trump is Gaslighting America

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:06:00 +0000

"The good news about this boiling frog scenario is that we're not boiling yet. Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner until America realizes that the temperature is too high. It's on every single one of us to stop pretending it's always been so hot in here."

Read the rest at Teen Vogue. (Yes, Teen Vogue, and see this article in Slate Outward for more on the rise of Teen Vogue.)

Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Hate Crimes and our Trumpist Future

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 14:59:00 +0000

"Muslim Americans are our friends and family members, our doctors and nurses, our police officers and firefighters. They own businesses and teach in classrooms. Thousands of them have fought for the American flag. Many have died defending it. And yet, too often—especially in the last year, following a number of tragic terrorist incidents, and amidst an increase in divisive and fearful rhetoric—we have seen Muslim Americans targeted and demonized simply because of their faith. And to impose a blanket stereotype on all members of any faith because of the actions of those who pervert that faith is to go backwards in our thinking and our discourse, and to repudiate the founding ideals of this country."

Read more at Slate.

Really Great Piece About Male Sexual Entitlement

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 18:29:00 +0000

At Role Reboot.

Abortion: An Allegory

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 19:38:00 +0000

Angelina Rosario went into Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in Santa Cristina, California, last week for a minor procedure to help with her dysmennorhea and walked out pregnant. The hospital is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. There was also another woman, Rosaria Angelino, there that day. Ms Angelino had been undergoing fertility treatment and was scheduled to have several embryos implanted in her uterus. Somehow, their charts got mixed up as they were taken into adjoining operating rooms. (There was a small earthquake about that time, and there is some evidence that the charts were knocked off the women’s gurneys.) The error was not discovered until the two women woke up in recovery. Ms Angelino was surprised to find that she had gotten an ablasion, but not nearly as shocked as Ms Rosario was to discover that she was pregnant.

Ms Rosario immediately demanded that the hospital undo its mistake. The doctors, however, refused to do so. The only way to undo what they had done would be to perform an abortion, and Our Lady of Mercy does not perform abortions, on ethical and religious grounds. Ms Angelino and her husband, though they had some sympathy for Ms Rosario’s plight, pleaded with her not to abort the pregnancy. They had been through a very long process, they explained, and the embryos that were to have been implanted in Ms Angelino were the only viable ones that had resulted. It must, they understood, be difficult for Ms Rosario unwittingly to have become a surrogate mother, and Ms Rosario ought no doubt to be compensated by the hospital. But none of that, they said, changes the fact that Ms Rosario was now carrying their unborn children, who have as much of a right to life as any other human being.

It is clear that Ms Rosario has a legal right to abortion if she should choose one. But her personal, moral situation is quite complicated. Raised a Catholic, Ms Rosario has always believed herself that life begins at conception and so agrees with the Angelinos that she is now carrying ‘unborn children’ who have a right to life. But, in statement released by her attorney today, Ms Rosario insisted that this does not settle the question what she should do.

“It is true”, she wrote, “that the embryos I am now carrying have a right to life. But I have rights, too, and their right to life does not give them the right to use my body to sustain themselves. It does not give them the right to put my life and health at risk so that they might grow and develop. It does not give them the right to make me give birth to them so that they might live independent lives. It is tragic that, through no fault of their own, these unborn children have come to be in my uterus. But they have no right to be there, and it is not my fault that they are.”

She concluded, “I do not want these embryos to die. If they could be removed from my body and put in someone else’s, that would be fine with me. But that is not possible. I do not want the Angelinos, who seem like nice people, to lose the children for which they have struggled so long, either. I wish I could help them. Maybe that would be the most honorable thing for me to do: to carry their children for them. But I cannot do it. I have my own life to live.”

I made that story up. None of it is true. But it might have been true, and maybe one day something like it will be true. But the lesson of the story is the same, whether it is true or not. Far too often, it is assumed in our public discussions that, if only we could decide whether “the fetus is a person”, we would know what to think about abortion, so we fight and fight over that unanswerable question. But, as my philosopher friends will already know, Judith Jarvis Thomson (one of my teachers at MIT) pointed out forty-five years ago in her now classic paper, “A Defense of Abortion”, that is wrong. And not just wrong but sexist, because it completely ignores the fact that, where there is a fetus, there is also a woman, with rights of her own.

Events relevantly like the ones in my story happen with terrifying frequency, even if people like Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin would have you believe otherwise. When a pregnancy results from rape, an embryo has, in the same way, though no fault of its own, come to be where it is not wanted and not welcome. It is, no doubt, a tragedy compounded. But such embryos, whatever right they may have to life, have no right to the use of their hosts’ bodies.

"Why Are There Lesbians?" Asks Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 15:47:00 +0000

Absolutely fantastic, and really quite funny, article over at Outward about arguments yesterday at the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals concerning what may turn out to be a landmark LGBTQ discrimination case.

Working Class Voters and the 2016 Election

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 17:07:00 +0000

The day after....

Today in my introductory logic class, we were supposed to start talking about formal deduction: one of the most important, and confusing, topics in the course. When 10am rolled around, there were a lot of missing people. And those who were there mostly looked half-asleep, and many of them looked as if they were about to cry, or scream, or something else. I canceled the class, and several students thanked me.

What happened yesterday? There will no doubt be a lot of punditry, but in reading the exit polls last night (I kept the TV off), it seemed to me pretty obvious what had happened. Here's my theory. (And it's apparently not just mine.)

The story of this election is really told in four states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That is where Clinton's famed "firewall" gave way. And why does she lose those four states? Because of Trump's absolutely huge advantage with, as the pollsters tend to put it, "whites without a college education", i.e., working class whites. Republicans have done well with that group for some time now, but exit poll data from the New York Times reveals the depth of the problem Clinton had. Obama lost this group by just 18 points in 2008 and 25 points in 2012; Clinton lost by a staggering 40 points. Along similar lines: Among people with household incomes under $30,000, Obama by 32 and 28 points in 2008 and 2012, but Clinton won by only about 12 points. (Obviously, there is some overlap between those groups.)

Might the fact that Clinton did less well with African-American and Latinx voters than Obama did in 2012 be partly for this same sort of reason?

Who are these relatively poor and less educated people who voted for Obama but have now voted from Trump? I'll hazard a guess that they are the same people who formed a group of which many of us had heard, but of which few of us could believe might exist: the people who wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders, but would vote for Trump over Clinton. Which is to say: Yes, obviously, there are plenty of racists and misogynists and xenophobes among Trump's supporters. But I doubt that they are who won him the election.

The truth is that, long before working-class voters turned out in historic numbers, seemingly fleeing from the Democratic candidate, the Democratic party had abandoned them. The recovery from the 2008 crash has been painfully slow, even non-existent from the point of view of that demographic. What exactly has the Obama administration done to help them? Or, allowing for Republican obstructionism, even tried to do?

But if you really want a poster child for the way the Democrats have taken working-class people for granted, you could do no better than to choose that other Clinton, Bill. It was Bill, together with the so-called "Democratic Leadership Council", who pushed the party in a 'pro-business' direction. That was a needed corrective, after the disasters of 1984 and 1988. But it did not have to go as far as embracing and even championing the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Bill did largely over the objections of labor, who predicted, rightly as it turned out, that it would lead to a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States. And many of those lost jobs were in the very states in which Clinton stunningly lost last night.

The good news, for Democrats, is that these voters may well not be lost to the party. As I said, I suspect that many of them would have been happy to vote for Sanders, who tirelessly called attention to their plight during the primary. Indeed, in so far as Clinton paid any attention to this group, it was because of pressure from Sanders. I'm not saying that Sanders would have won. Maybe, maybe not. But a Democratic party that took a turn back towards its roots and became once again a champion of labor, would, I think, stand a very good chance of luring at least many of those voters back into the fold.

The reason is that Donald Trump, although he has to be given credit for recognizing the depth of frustration among these voters, has absolutely no concrete plans to help them. Building his ridiculous wall (which Mexico still isn't going to pay for), or anything else that restricts immigration, has nothing to do with it. Probably the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead, but that, at most, will serve to prevent further erosion, not to restore the coastline.

Probably some other moves towards protectionism are likely, too. For example, Trump has talked about re-negotiating NAFTA and other trade deals. But it's far from clear that we can turn the clock back now, or that doing so would lead to a restoration of US manufacturing. What seems far more likely is that it would lead to a trade war that would cost the US economy dearly, since Mexico and Canada are two of our biggest export markets. Besides which, it's far from clear how many Republicans in Congress, who tend be a pretty pro-trade bunch, would be willing to go along with protectionist legislation.

And, speaking of the Republicans in Congress, what we're likely to get from them is a series of policies that will benefit the traditional Republican constituencies, which, to put it mildly, do not include the working class: Massive tax cuts for the wealthy, just to start; a partial repeal of Obamacare, which will deprive many working class people of health insurance; a privatization of Medicare, which will affect millions of older Americans, especially those less well-off.

Maybe, just maybe, there will be enough support for the sorts of investments in infrastructure that seemed, at one time, to be attracting bipartisan support. But that was really a core proposal of Clinton's. And it costs money, which means you need either revenue or debt. For which of those do the Republicans in Congress have an appetite?

Nothing else has even been mentioned at this point, certainly not by Trump.

So here's a prediction: Two years from now (at the mid-terms), and four years from now (at the next presidential election), the plight of working class people will not be any better than it is now and may well be even worse. And the `cross-over' voters who swept Trump into power are not going to be happy about it. They voted for Trump because they wanted concrete change, not just symbolic change, and they certainly did not want the usual offerings from the Republican establishment. But they are not going to get concrete change.

That gives the Democrats an opportunity. But only if they're willing to have their own reckoning and stop just pretending to care about the working class.

How To Be a Man in the Age of Trump

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 03:24:00 +0000

A man behaving as Trump does would be a pariah in any culture that did not actively and persistently enable men like him.

It sounds like an interesting article, but it turns out to be much more interesting than you might expect. It's written by a transman, who has a special perspective on what it is to be a man.

New Paper: Comments on Imogen Dickie's "Fixing Reference"

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 16:16:00 +0000

The main focus of my comments is the role played in Dickie's view by the idea that "the mind has a need to represent things outside itself". But there are also some remarks about her (very interesting) suggestion that descriptive names can sometimes fail to refer to the object that satisfies the associated description.

You can find the paper here.

Make New Files in Some Directory Be Accessible to a Group

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 15:47:00 +0000

My wife Nancy has finally let me move her over to Linux, so now we can easily share access a lot of files on our server, such as photos. But I want her not just to be able to read those files, but also to be able to write them. But, on the other hand, I don't want to make them world-writable. I just want them to be Nancy-writable.

Obviously, the solution is to create a group rghnlw of which we are both members, make that group own the files, and make them group-writable. That's easy enough for existing files. But what about new files? I'd like those also to be owned by the group and to be group-writable.

Making the new files be owned by the group is easy: All we need to do here is make the directory in which these files live setgid, and to make the group in question own that directory (and also any subdirectories). So let's say I've put our common files into /home/common/. Then the first step is:

# chgrp -R rghnlw
# chmod -R g+s /home/common

Now any new files created in /home/common/ will have group rghnlw.

Unfortunately, however, those files will not be group-writable---not if my umask, and Nancy's, are the typical 022. Changing that would be an option, but it would make all files that either of us create group-writable, which is not what I want.

The solution is to use access control lists. There are good discussions of how to use these for this purpose here and here, but I'll summarize as well.

First, we need to enable access control lists for whatever filesystem we are using. In this case, /home/ is mounted on its own partition, the line in /etc/fstab looking like:

/dev/hda3 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

We need to change this to:

/dev/hda3 /home ext3 defaults,acl 1 2

And then to activate the new setting, we need to remount:

# mount -o remount /home
# tune2fs -l /dev/hda3

The latter should now show acl as active.

Second, we need to establish the access controls.

# setfacl -d -m group:rghnlw:rw /home/common/
# setfacl -m group:rghnlw:rw /home/common/

The former makes rghnlw the default group, with read and write permissions; the latter applies this to existing files.