Purpose This paper aims to provide a non-academic perspective on the research reports of the JICES “Post-Snowden” special edition, from the viewpoint of a privacy advocate with an IT background. Design/methodology/approach This paper was written after reviewing the country reports for Japan, New Zealand, PRC and Taiwan, Spain and Sweden, as well as the Introduction paper. The author has also drawn on online sources such as news articles to substantiate his analysis of attitudes to technical privacy protection post-Snowden. Findings Post-Snowden, (...) the general perception of threats to online privacy has shifted from a predominant focus on commercial threats to a recognition that government activities, in the sphere of intelligence and national security, also give rise to significant privacy risk. Snowden’s disclosures have challenged many of our assumptions about effective oversight of interception capabilities. Citizens’ expectations in this regard depend partly on national experience of the relationship between citizen and government, and can evolve rapidly. The tension between legitimate law enforcement access and personal privacy remains challenging to resolve. Originality/value As a “viewpoint” paper, this submission draws heavily on the author’s experience as a privacy and technology subject-matter expert. Although it therefore contains a higher proportion of opinion than the academic papers in this issue, his hope is that it will stimulate debate and further research. (shrink)

Many thinkers believe that the next transformational change in human organisation will be the onset of human-level artificial intelligence, and that the most likely method of achieving this will come through brain emulations or "ems": the ability to scan human brains and program their connections into ever faster computers. Taking this as his starting point, Hanson describes what a world dominated by these ems will be like.

What if we someday learn how to model small brain units, and so can "upload" ourselves into new computer brains? What if this happens before we learn how to make human-level artificial intelligences? The result could be a sharp transition to an upload-dominated world, with many dramatic consequences. In particular, fast and cheap replication may once again make Darwinian evolution of human values a powerful force in human history. With evolved values, most uploads would value life even when life is (...) hard or short, uploads would reproduce quickly, and wages would fall. But total wealth should rise, so we could all do better by accepting uploads, or at worse taxing them, rather than trying to delay or segregate them. (shrink)

For Kant and Hill, self-respect is a morally central and morally powerful concern. Both have also had some things to say in moral praise of humility and in condemnation of arrogance, a trait widely regarded as the vice to which the virtue of humility is the prevention and cure. Arrogance can easily be seen as a failure to respect both other people and oneself. It might be thought, however, that humility and self-respect are in tension, if not at odds with (...) one another, for the one is widely thought to involve a low opinion of one’s worth and the other a high regard for it. My essay focuses on understanding, with the help of Kant and Hill, relations among various kinds of humility, arrogance, and self-respect. I argue that humility is not the virtue opposing arrogance, but rather, self-respect is, and that humility is at best an ancillary, instrumental, contextual virtue and the servant of self-respect; but at worst, it is as serious a vice as arrogance, indeed, an aspect of it. (shrink)

Human behavior regarding medicine seems strange; assumptions and models that seem workable in other areas seem less so in medicine. Perhaps we need to rethink the basics. Toward this end, I have collected many puzzling stylized facts about behavior regarding medicine, and have sought a small number of simple assumptions which might together account for as many puzzles as possible.

Este libro es el resultado del trabajo póstumo de compilación y selección de los papeles de Collingwood.

A world product time series covering two million years is well fit by either a sum of four exponentials, or a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) combination of three exponential growth modes: “hunting,” “farming,” and “industry.” The CES parameters suggest that farming substituted for hunting, while industry complemented farming, making the industrial revolution a smoother transition. Each mode grew world product by a factor of a few hundred, and grew a hundred times faster than its predecessor. This weakly suggests that (...) within the next century a new mode might appear with a doubling time measured in days, not years. (shrink)

A simple exogenous growth model gives conservative estimates of the economic implications of machine intelligence. Machines complement human labor when they become more productive at the jobs they perform, but machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At first, expensive hardware and software does only the few jobs where computers have the strongest advantage over humans. Eventually, computers do most jobs. At first, complementary effects dominate, and human wages rise with computer productivity. But eventually substitution can (...) dominate, making wages fall as fast as computer prices now do. An intelligence population explosion makes per-intelligence consumption fall this fast, while economic growth rates rise by an order of magnitude or more. These results are robust to automating incrementally, and to distinguishing hardware, software, and human capital from other forms of capital. (shrink)

Spanish Translation of "He/She/They/Ze" (Ergo, 2018).

Phaedrus is widely recognized as one of Plato's most profound and beautiful works. It takes the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus and its ostensible subject is love, especially homoerotic love. This new translation is accompanied by an introduction and full notes that discuss the structure of the dialogue and elucidate issues that might puzzle the modern reader.

The Conjectural Body combines continental philosophy with musicology, popular music studies, and feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories to offer a unique perspective on issues of gender, race, and the philosophy of music. It is one of the few books in philosophy to take popular music seriously, and is one of the few books in continental feminism to privilege music over the visual.

We shall consider a formulation of generalised quantifiers using type theory with records (TTR). TTR follows closely the development of record types in Martin-L¨of or constructive type theory but differs in that the type theory is defined on a classical set theoretic basis. This means that the classical set-theoretic approach to generalised quantifiers can be imported into the type theoretic framework. The result is, I believe, equivalent to the proposal for dynamic generalised quantifiers in Chierchia (1995). The use of dependent (...) types provides us with an elegant approach to the formulation of dynamic quantifiers. We use a notion of hypothetical context which we have used elsewhere to give accounts of intentional identity, answers to questions and information state updates in dialogue management. We suggest that this points towards a general theory of hypothetical context in natural language. We suspect also that our analysis using records will support analyses of common noun phrase and verb-phrase anaphora and also facilitate representations which are underspecified with respect to quantifier scope, though we leave the investigation of this to future research. (shrink)

We present a sketch of a formulation of an analysis of clarification ellipsis using dependent record types as they have been developed in Martin-Lof type theory. Record types provide a semantic formalism which at the same time..

If we are not to conclude that most planets like Earth have evolved life as intelligent as we are, we must presume Earth is not random. This selection effect, however, also implies that the origin of life need not be as easy as the early appearance of life on Earth suggests. If a series of major evolutionary transitions were required to produce intelligent life, selection implies that a subset of these were “critical steps,” with durations that are similarly distributed. The (...) time remaining from now until simple life is no longer possible on Earth must also be similarly distributed. I show how these results provide timing tests to constrain models of critical evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes has recently been cast as one of the forefathers of political realism. This article evaluates his place in the realist tradition by focusing on three key themes: the priority of legitimacy over justice, the relation between ethics and politics, and the place of imagination in politics. The thread uniting these themes is the importance Hobbes placed on achieving a moral consensus around peaceful coexistence, a point which distances him from realists who view the two as competing goals of (...) politics. The article maintains that only a qualified version of the autonomy of the political position can be attributed to Hobbes, while arguing more generally that attending to the relation between ethics and politics is central to assessing his liberal credentials from a realist perspective. Against the prevalent reading of Hobbes as a hypothetical contract theorist, the article proceeds to show that the place of consent in his theory is better understood as part of his wider goal of transforming the imagination of his audience: a goal which is animated by concerns that realists share. (shrink)

Situation Theory grew out of attempts by Jon Barwise in the late 1970s to provide a semantics for 'naked-infinitive' perceptual reports such as 'Claire saw Jon run'. Barwise's intuition was that Claire didn't just see Jon, an individual, but Jon doing something, a situation. Situations are individuals having properties and standing in relations. A theory of situations would allow us to study and compare various types of situations or situation-like entitles, such as facts, events, and scenes. One of the central (...) themes of situation theory of meaning and reference should be set within a general theory of information, one moreover that is rich enough to do justice to perception, communication, and thought. By now many people have contributed by the need to give a rigorous mathematical account of the principles of information that underwrite the theory. (shrink)

In his posthumously published lectures, Politics in Commercial Society, István Hont argues that Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith should be understood as theorists of commercial society. This article challenges Hont’s interpretation of both thinkers and shows that some of his key claims depend on conflating the terms ‘commercial society’ and ‘commercial sociability’. I argue that, for Smith, commercial society should not be defined in terms of the moral psychology of commercial sociability, before questioning Hont’s Epicurean interpretation of Smith’s theory of (...) sociability. I then turn to Rousseau and outline some of the difficulties involved with classifying him as a theorist of commercial society, the most important of which is that he often appeared to be more deeply opposed to commercial progress than Hont suggests. I conclude by highlighting some of the most salient differences between Rousseau’s and Smith’s views of the politics of eighteenth-century Europe. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology is the definitive, comprehensive, and authoritative text on this burgeoning field. With contributions from over fifty experts in the field, the range and depth of coverage is unequalled. It will be an essential resource for students and researchers in psychology.

This article analyzes the relationship between the ideas of cruelty and injustice in Judith Shklar’s political theory. Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice is sometimes read as an instantiation of the liberalism of fear, which regards cruelty and the fear that it inspires as the summum malum. I challenge this interpretation and instead argue that her account of injustice should be read independently of her commitment to the liberalism of fear. In doing so, I show how her exploration of the faces (...) of injustice—especially the importance she accords to passive injustice and the sense of injustice—raises important challenges for the liberal case for putting cruelty first. Although democratic attitudes and institutions constitute the best available remedy for the sense of injustice, on Shklar’s account, those who focus too much on the requirements of democratic citizenship risk treating injustice as a greater evil than cruelty, which could, in turn, facilitate cruelty and undermine liberal democracy. I conclude by suggesting that the republican-inspired theory of citizenship from The Faces of Injustice, which Shklar outlines in response to the problem of passive injustice, reflects a distinct strand of her political theory that goes beyond the more familiar defense of law-bound constitutional government associated with the liberalism of fear. (shrink)

Claudia Card had a long and distinguished career as a philosopher that began at a time when being a woman in philosophy was not an easy matter and ended much too soon with her passing in 2015. Starting with her first and still widely-cited article, “On Mercy,” she published ten monographs and edited volumes and nearly 150 articles and reviews on topics in moral, social, and political philosophy. She is is most widely known for her influential work in analytic feminist (...) philosophy and on evil. She was a pioneer in feminist and lesbian philosophy whose trailblazing work has influenced generations of philosophers; and in her 25 articles and two monographs on evil and evils such as rape, domestic violence, child abuse, war, terrorism, and genocide, she proposed a new way of understanding evil that made a profound contribution to philosophical thinking about these topics. This volume brings together eleven of her articles, including seven essays on war, genocide, and evil, and four essays on topics in feminist ethics. In addition, the volume includes nine essays by other authors that explore and expand upon Card’s philosophical legacy. This unique volume combines Card’s own mature voice with the best in recent scholarship on issues central to her own philosophical concerns. (shrink)

In recent years philosophers have done impressive work explicating the nature and moral importance of a kind of self-respect Darwall calls “recognition self-respect,” which involves valuing oneself as the moral equal of every other person, regarding oneself as having basic moral rights and a legitimate claim to respectful treatment from other people just in virtue of being a person, and being unwilling to stand for having one’s rights violated or being treated as something less than a person. It is generally (...) agreed that such self-respect is something all persons have a right to and ought to have and that it is morally objectionable for a person or a society to preclude or injure someone’s self-respect. But scant attention has been paid to another kind of self-respect, the kind that has to do not with the fact that you are a person but with the kind of person you are, that has to do not with rights but with character. I call this kind of self-respect “evaluative self-respect.” The central task of this paper is to explicate the moral value of evaluative self-respect. I do this by looking at the role it plays in the life of someone who is sincerely concerned to be a good person. This is not to deny that evaluative self-respect can go wrong, and I look at how it can go wrong. In particular, evaluative self-respect is, like everything else in human life, vulnerable to the distorting forces of oppression. But, I argue, evaluative self-respect can have moral value even when it goes wrong, and it can be a liberatory resource in the lives of the oppressed. (shrink)

Hypertext publishing, the integration of a large body (perhaps billions) of public writings into a unified hypertext environment, will require the simultaneous solution of problems involving very wide database distribution, royalties, freedom of speech, and privacy. This paper describes these problems and presents, for criticism and discussion, an abstract design which seems to solve many of them. This design, called LinkText, is presented both as a specification and as design approaches grouped around various levels of electronic publishing.

Within the community of researchers applying type theory to natural language there have been proposals to use contexts from type theory to model information states and to use context extension to model information updates. Examples of this are Ranta (1994) and research conducted in the DenK project (e.g. Ahn, 1995, Ahn and Borghuis, 1998).

In a recent paper Asher and Pustejovsky propose a type theoretical approach to account for cases of copredication which had motivated Pustejovsky to introduce dot types in the Generative Lexicon. In this paper I will propose an alternative treatment to that given by Asher and Pustejovsky using type theory with records. I will suggest that using record types not only gives us a simple and intuitive account of dot types but also makes an important connection between copredication and the use (...) of hypothetical contexts in dynamic generalized quantifiers I have proposed in earlier work. More generally it allows us to preserve the intuitive feature structure based accounts of lexical analysis proposed in Pustejovsky’s original work on the Generative Lexicon while at the same time introducing functions and binding in the way that is necessary for giving formal accounts of compositional semantics. (shrink)

The temperature is 90◦F The temperature is rising..

The work reported here is of two sorts. One the one hand, we attempt to consolidate a lot of recent work on situation theory into a workable version, one that researchers can use and add to in ways that might be suitable for various applications. On the other, we attempt to solve a representational problem with situation theory: how can we represent complicated situation-theoretic objects in a way that is perspicuous. Our way in to the latter problem comes from an (...) on-going project aimed at bringing insights from Discourse Representation Theory and Situation Theory to bear on one another. In terms of this project, this paper represents a rather modest contribution. Our goal is to design a language for representing situationtheoretic objects that is based on Kamp's discourse representation structures. This was where we started but we found that working on the notation and its semantics led us to clari cations of various aspects of situation theory. A major part of the clari cation in the theory comes from our use of the work on parameters and abstraError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapError: Illegal entry in bfrange block in ToUnicode CMapction by Aczel and Lunnon AL]. (shrink)

Giving money to others feels good. It is now standard to use the label ‘warm glow feelings’ to refer to the pleasure people take from giving. But what exactly are warm glow feelings? And why do people experience them? To answer these questions, we ran two studies: a recall task in which participants were asked to remember a donation they made, and a donation task in which participants were given the opportunity to make a donation before reporting their affective states. (...) Correlational and experimental results converge towards the conclusion that, if the nature of the warm glow is straightforward, its source is multifaceted. Regarding the nature of the ‘warm glow’, the pleasure people took in giving was mainly predicted by one particular type of positive emotion and was indeed described by participants as ‘warm’. Regarding the underlying psychological mechanisms, warm glow feelings were elicited by positive appraisals regarding the donor’s moral character, positive appraisals regarding the actual impact of the donor’s donation on the welfare of others and a feeling of communion with others. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that decolonial theory can offer a distinctive and valuable ethical lens. Decolonial perspectives give rise to an ethics that is fundamentally global but distinct from, and critical of, moral cosmopolitanism. Decolonial ethics shares with cosmopolitanism a refusal to circumscribe normative commitments on the basis of existing political and cultural boundaries. It differs from cosmopolitanism, though, by virtue of its rejection of the individualism and universalism of cosmopolitan thought. Where cosmopolitan approaches tend to articulate abstract principles developed from (...) within a particular Western tradition, decolonial approaches reject abstract global designs in favour of inter-cultural dialogue amongst multiple people, including peoples who deem collective and non-human entities to be of fundamental moral importance. In addition, decolonial global ethics rejects universality in favour of ‘pluriversality’. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 31, Issue 1, pp 30 - 47 In this article, I show that Hobbes’s account of the generation of the commonwealth in both _The Elements of Law_ and _De Cive_ relies on ideas that he would come to theorise in terms of authorisation and representation in _Leviathan_. In this respect, I argue that the _Leviathan_ account is better understood as filling in gaps and resolving equivocations in Hobbes’s theory, rather than marking a decisive break in his thinking. (...) This argument is developed by substantiating two more specific theses. First, while Hobbes only explicitly distinguishes between the “alienation” and “authorisation” clauses of the covenant in _Leviathan_, the earlier versions of his theory rely on a two-clause account. Second, in the earlier versions of his theory, Hobbes equivocates between suggesting that the relation between the state and sovereign should be understood in terms of representation or identity; an equivocation that he would only resolve in _Leviathan_. (shrink)

We are economists with a long-standing interest in evolutionary psychology, who recently came to appreciate the rich collections of relevant data cultural anthropologists have spent decades collecting on the social environments of a wide range of human societies. While we found some systematic collections of these observations, we could not find a systematic summary of the social environment of the subsample of societies that most resemble the social environment where most human psychology seems to have evolved: small bands of nomadic (...) foragers. This short paper therefore represents our attempt to create such a summary. Using an existing dataset aggregated from diverse ethnographies, we collect statistics on the social environment of the studied cultures which most closely resemble our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Compared with relatively modern societies, nomadic foragers had similar levels of food and disease, and less murder and suicide. They did not fight over land or resources, and they enforced justice directly and personally. They avoided class divisions like rich vs. poor, shared food more, and their leaders had no formal powers. Polygamy, premarital sex, and extramarital sex were all widespread, divorce was easy, and men and women were generally considered equal. Kids were taught to be more generous, trusting, and honest, and were never punished physically. (shrink)

Compared with non-union workers, union workers take more of their compensation in the form of insurance. This may be because unions choose democratically, and democratic choice mitigates adverse selection in group insurance. Relative to individually-purchased insurance, we show that group insurance chosen by an ideal profit-maximizing employer can be worse for every employee, while group insurance chosen democratically can be much better. The reason is that democracy can fail to represent the preferences of almost half the group.

Artificial Intelligence Research Branch NASA Ames Research Center, Mail Stop 244-17 Moffet Field, CA 94035, USA Email: @ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov..

People have long noticed that speculative markets, though created for other purposes, also do a great job of aggregating relevant information. In fact, it is hard to find information not embodied by such market prices. This is, in part, because anyone who finds such neglected information can profit by trading on it, thereby reducing the neglect.1 So far, speculative markets have done well in every known head-to-head field comparison with other forecasting institutions. Orange juice futures improved on National Weather Service (...) forecasts,2 horse race markets beat horse race experts,3 Oscar markets beat columnist forecasts,4 gas-demand markets beat gas-demand experts,5 stock markets beat the official NASA panel at fingering the guilty company in the Challenger accident,6 election markets beat national opinion polls,7 and corporate sales markets beat official corporate forecasts.8 Recently, some have considered creating new markets specifically to take. (shrink)

Economic growth is determined by the supply and demand of investment capital; technology determines the demand for capital; while human nature determines the supply. The supply curve has two distinct parts; giving the world economy two distinct modes. In the familiar slow growth mode; rates of return are limited by human discount rates. In the fast growth mode; investment is limited by the world's wealth. Historical trends suggest that we may transition to the fast mode in roughly another century and (...) a half. Can some new technology switch us to the fast mode more quickly than this? Perhaps; but such a technology must greatly raise the rate of return for the world's expected worst investment project. It must thus be very broadly applicable; improving almost all forms of capital and investment. Furthermore; investment externalities must remain within certain limits. (shrink)

It is said you can trap a monkey by putting a nut through a small hole in a gourd. The monkey reaches in and grabs the nut, but then his fist won’t fit back through the hole. Greedy monkeys will literally let themselves be caught rather than let go of the nut. So far, no commenter on my essay seems willing to let go of the nut of effective medicine, held in the gourd of the second half of medical spending.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the determinants of quantity of health insurance in the context of employer-based health insurance using the micro-level data from the 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey (NMES). It extends the previous research by including additional factors in the analysis, which significantly affect health insurance offers by employers. This paper emphasizes two determinants of employers’ insurance offer decisions that are particularly relevant: union membership and selfinsured versus not self-insured health plans. The conducted empirical analysis reported (...) in this paper reveals the following predictors of higher health insurance coverage: union membership, not self-insured health plan(s), union membership in Midwest or South, as well as self-insured union membership. Further, other factors such as: age, male, income, for profit and other employer organizational forms, and firm’s size determine a higher level of health insurance. (shrink)

Will we have more or fewer deadly wars in the new few decades? Until recently it has been very hard to say much about what makes wars more more frequent or deadly. It doesn't seem to have much to do with levels or changes in population density, whether the economy is booming, how dependent a nation is on trade, or on the number of great powers around. Wars seems only weakly if at all correlated across space and time, seeming for (...) example to be a bit more deadly when they are less frequent. More democratic nations may if anything be more likely to fight wars, though perhaps they less often fight each other, and perhaps join wars more often just after an election [1]. (shrink)

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is a private notebook of philosophical reflections with universal significance. Drawing on Stoic philosophy, Marcus confronts challenges that affect us all in our struggle to live meaningful lives. This edition includes a selection of Marcus' correspondence with his tutor Fronto which complements the Meditations.

Thomas Hobbes has recently been cast as one of the forefathers of political realism. This article evaluates his place in the realist tradition by focusing on three key themes: the priority of legit...

In the 1920s, scientists at the University of Cambridge’s Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry made major contributions to the emerging discipline of biochemistry while also devoting considerable time and energy to the production of a humor journal entitled Brighter Biochemistry. Although humor is frequently regarded as peripheral to the work of science, the journal provides an opportunity to understand how it contributes to the social infrastructure of scientific communities as modern workplaces. Taking methodological cues from cultural history, ethnography, and (...) humor studies, this essay conducts a close and contextual reading of Brighter Biochemistry. This reading demonstrates how humor served as a central means through which members of the Dunn confronted workplace issues, including creating cooperative work teams, responding to gender discrimination, addressing funding anxiety, and defining professional identity. These conclusions provide a new perspective on the well-documented history of the Dunn and also offer a model for how historians of science can approach humor when its traces are encountered in other settings. (shrink)