For an anti-reading list, I'd nominate "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. I'm not an expert on writing and don't detest it (I benefited from reading it, and I think their advice may be helpful for many people as a first-order approximation). But there's a lot of merit to the harsh criticisms from Geoff Pullum and others:
Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner's book "Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose" takes these sly digs at Strunk and White:
"What Strunk and White recommend is meant as good advice for the one style they have in mind; what Williams and Colomb recommend is good advice for the one style they have in mind." (p. 67)
"The best-known teachers of practical style are Strunk and White, in their ubiquitous Elements of Style. The best teachers of practical style are Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb, in Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace and a series of academic articles and technical reports." (p. 78)
And I love "I should have loved biology". My co-authors and I quoted it in the introduction to an essay on statistics and causal inference textbooks:
Yes, Strunk and White gives occasionally bizarre advice. I recently passed a heap of rubbish on the street with a copy of 'The Elements of Style' on top, which was darkly poetic. Personally I liked 'The Sense of Style', Pinker's style guide.
That essay sounds interesting, I will give it a read.
I'd be interested in your take, but a lot of "infinite ethics" work seems bedevilled by problems similar to those described in the classic essay "what colour are your bits?" TL;DR: Socially- and ethically-relevant variables (the original essay's example was "copyright status") are not a function of / do not supervene on the bits that actually make up a bit of software; not for spooky metaphysically-non-naturalist reasons, but for eminently comprehensible reasons to do with what people (in the original essay, lawyers) care about.
Carlsmith asking about the "locations of value" sounds to me a lot like asking "which bits encode the copyright status?": the thing he is asking about (value) is in actual fact not a function of the objects in his model (various physical facts and processes), again not for spooky non-naturalist reasons but for reasons about actual people's dispositions. As the original essay says, you can sometimes try to extend your model to incorporate these additional facts (you can add "metadata"), but these attempts are necessarily imperfect and will break down in extreme situations.
All the reasoning done under the heading "infinite ethics" seems like finding situations under which the attempt to incorporate ethics into the simple models of analytic metaphysics breaks down, but blaming the breakdown on the universe, rather than on the misguided assumptions made about "value". Again, I don't have to posit spooky non-naturalist value here, value supervenes on natural facts; but it does not supervene on the specific set of natural facts included in the model, and attempts to add a "tag" / "metadata" to the model that tracks value is not a solution, for reasons discussed in the classic essay about copyright.
"[B]laming the breakdown on the universe, rather than on the misguided assumptions"
In this, as with many things, I follow Seymoud Skinner: No, it's the children who are wrong.
It's a good point that "locations of value" are abstractions that we are supervening upon the world. But:
1) If we don't do this, isn't the problem of "it's impossible to say world X is better than world Y" even worse?
2) I think one of the topics that's interesting here is how minimal the assumptions about locations of value can be and still lead to contradictions, difficulties, and so on. Like proving that desiderata X and Y are incompatible, or that one assumptions leads to certain bullets we have to bite.
My latest idea, which may not work but I thought was pretty clever, was to link this with microeconomic modelling work that has to deal with infinities (e.g. modelling potentially infinite future utility streams). I think Frank Ramsey was essentially dealing with an infinite ethics problem shortly before he died in the 1930, which no one (to my knowledge) has explicitly pointed out yet.
As I've argued before (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8wWYmHsnqPvQEnapu/getting-on-a-different-train-can-effective-altruism-avoid), you don't actually have to face the problem of "it's impossible to say world X is better than world Y", if that problem is implicitly universally quantified. (If it's only existentially quantified, then I don't think it's a problem!) You can eg reject the claim that "is better than" is a total order while maintaining a partial order; and without the assumption that it's a total order, that you need an ordinal ranking of all possible worlds, you actually can't generate very many of these paradoxes.
Thanks for these amazing links!
For an anti-reading list, I'd nominate "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. I'm not an expert on writing and don't detest it (I benefited from reading it, and I think their advice may be helpful for many people as a first-order approximation). But there's a lot of merit to the harsh criticisms from Geoff Pullum and others:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1369
Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner's book "Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose" takes these sly digs at Strunk and White:
"What Strunk and White recommend is meant as good advice for the one style they have in mind; what Williams and Colomb recommend is good advice for the one style they have in mind." (p. 67)
"The best-known teachers of practical style are Strunk and White, in their ubiquitous Elements of Style. The best teachers of practical style are Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb, in Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace and a series of academic articles and technical reports." (p. 78)
And I love "I should have loved biology". My co-authors and I quoted it in the introduction to an essay on statistics and causal inference textbooks:
https://doi.org/10.1515/jci-2023-0073
Yes, Strunk and White gives occasionally bizarre advice. I recently passed a heap of rubbish on the street with a copy of 'The Elements of Style' on top, which was darkly poetic. Personally I liked 'The Sense of Style', Pinker's style guide.
That essay sounds interesting, I will give it a read.
I'd be interested in your take, but a lot of "infinite ethics" work seems bedevilled by problems similar to those described in the classic essay "what colour are your bits?" TL;DR: Socially- and ethically-relevant variables (the original essay's example was "copyright status") are not a function of / do not supervene on the bits that actually make up a bit of software; not for spooky metaphysically-non-naturalist reasons, but for eminently comprehensible reasons to do with what people (in the original essay, lawyers) care about.
Carlsmith asking about the "locations of value" sounds to me a lot like asking "which bits encode the copyright status?": the thing he is asking about (value) is in actual fact not a function of the objects in his model (various physical facts and processes), again not for spooky non-naturalist reasons but for reasons about actual people's dispositions. As the original essay says, you can sometimes try to extend your model to incorporate these additional facts (you can add "metadata"), but these attempts are necessarily imperfect and will break down in extreme situations.
All the reasoning done under the heading "infinite ethics" seems like finding situations under which the attempt to incorporate ethics into the simple models of analytic metaphysics breaks down, but blaming the breakdown on the universe, rather than on the misguided assumptions made about "value". Again, I don't have to posit spooky non-naturalist value here, value supervenes on natural facts; but it does not supervene on the specific set of natural facts included in the model, and attempts to add a "tag" / "metadata" to the model that tracks value is not a solution, for reasons discussed in the classic essay about copyright.
https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
"[B]laming the breakdown on the universe, rather than on the misguided assumptions"
In this, as with many things, I follow Seymoud Skinner: No, it's the children who are wrong.
It's a good point that "locations of value" are abstractions that we are supervening upon the world. But:
1) If we don't do this, isn't the problem of "it's impossible to say world X is better than world Y" even worse?
2) I think one of the topics that's interesting here is how minimal the assumptions about locations of value can be and still lead to contradictions, difficulties, and so on. Like proving that desiderata X and Y are incompatible, or that one assumptions leads to certain bullets we have to bite.
My latest idea, which may not work but I thought was pretty clever, was to link this with microeconomic modelling work that has to deal with infinities (e.g. modelling potentially infinite future utility streams). I think Frank Ramsey was essentially dealing with an infinite ethics problem shortly before he died in the 1930, which no one (to my knowledge) has explicitly pointed out yet.
As I've argued before (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8wWYmHsnqPvQEnapu/getting-on-a-different-train-can-effective-altruism-avoid), you don't actually have to face the problem of "it's impossible to say world X is better than world Y", if that problem is implicitly universally quantified. (If it's only existentially quantified, then I don't think it's a problem!) You can eg reject the claim that "is better than" is a total order while maintaining a partial order; and without the assumption that it's a total order, that you need an ordinal ranking of all possible worlds, you actually can't generate very many of these paradoxes.
excellent round up, thank you!
After only having heard of him as a political philosopher who I suspected I wouldn't like much, I became much endeared to Nozick after reading his paper where he introduced Newcomb's problem to the philosophical literature: https://web.archive.org/web/20190331225650/http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/nozick_newcomb.pdf
Very readable and can really feel his curiosity and genuine puzzlement come through!
Yep, that paper was on November's links roundup: https://samenright.substack.com/p/links-and-what-ive-been-reading-november. With a summary of some of the responses it engendered in December: https://samenright.substack.com/p/links-and-what-ive-been-reading-december.
His other famous book is 'Philosophical Explanations', which, to my knowledge, has none of the radical libertarian political philosophy...