Philosopher Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State University) and psychologist Norbert Schwarz (University of Southern California) have won a $3.4 million grant for their project, “Humility in Inquiry”. “The project focuses on humility in inquiry—the practices and processes that encourage humble, open-minded thinking,” says Professor Ballantyne. “The project’s aim is to support intensive collaborations between philosophers and scientists, and ultimately to establish a new paradigm of interdisciplinary research.” The grant supporting the research was awarded by the John Templeton Foundation. Professors Ballantyne and Schwarz will in turn be distributing subawards totaling $1.3 million. These will support research by multidisciplinary teams with members drawn from philosophy, psychological science, and related fields to address one or more of the themes of “Applying Epistemic Ideals, Science and Organizations, and Mindsets and Metacognitive Perspectives”.
Philosophy
Reminder: if you are running a summer program or summer school in philosophy, there is a place to list it to make it more visible to potentially interested parties. If you’re running a summer program in philosophy for graduate students or recent PhDs, list it in the comments here. If you’re running a summer program in philosophy for undergraduates, list it in the comments here. If you’re running a summer program in philosophy for high school students, list it in the comments here. Everyone else: if you know students who might be interested in these programs, please pass along the relevant post(s). Thanks!
A project is underway to study self-control in contexts of poverty in the Global South, directed by professor of philosophy Juan Pablo Bermúdez (Universidad Externado de Colombia & Imperial College London). The project is supported by a $300,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Professor Bermúdez provides the following description of it: Research suggests that poverty reduces our ability to pursue long-term goals, but it is yet unclear how this effect occurs. Does poverty make temptations greater, and self-control failures more frequent? Or do agents respond to poverty’s harsher conditions by abandoning their longterm aspirations, choosing shorter-term goals instead? To our knowledge there is no direct test of these two possible mechanistic explanations. Using a method that allows us to take ‘psychological snapshots’ of everyday experiences, we will map out the influence of context on people’s decision-making process, in order to better understand the mechanisms of self-control in contexts of poverty. Our study will include the most diverse population yet in self-control studies: people from high and low SES backgrounds in urban Colombia.
If a society consisted of human beings who had been partly engineered or edited, would we think about human life in the same way or would we lose a sense of reciprocity with others?
‘They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence’, rasps Kyle Reese in The Terminator, referring to the Skynet computer system that launched a nuclear attack against humanity in the catastrophe known as Judgment Day. The trope is as old as science fiction itself, and shadows the genre with all of the tenacity of an Uzi-toting T-800.
Steven Rieber, a former philosopher who is now a program manager at Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a part of the United States government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is heading up a new research program that might be of interest to philosophers. The program, “Rapid Explanation, Analysis, and Sourcing Online” (REASON) aims to “develop novel technologies that will enable intelligence analysts to substantially improve the evidence and reasoning in draft analytic reports.” It is seeking research teams to fund that will build systems to help “analysts discover valuable evidence, identify strengths and weaknesses in reasoning, and produce higher quality reports.” Here is some more information about the project: Intelligence analysts sort through huge amounts of often uncertain and conflicting information as they strive to answer intelligence questions. REASON will assist and enhance analysts’ work by pointing them to key pieces of evidence beyond what they have already considered and by helping them determine which alternative explanations have the strongest support.
Philosophy, AI, and Society (PAIS) is a listserv that aims to “connect philosophers working on AI and related digital technologies, with a particular focus on their societal dimensions.” Run by the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab (MINTLab), PAIS “is open to anyone with an interest in those topics, and members can post to the list to contact other members. The goal is to help build the Philosophy, AI and Society Network, particularly to share news about events, opportunities, and research activities.” You can sign up for PAIS here. While we’re on the subject, the director of MINTLab, Seth Lazar (Australian National University) will be delivering the Tanner Lectures at Stanford next month on “AI and Human Values.” Further details here.
Apropos last week’s “We’re Not Ready for the AI on the Horizon, But People Are Trying,” here is economist and policy analyst Samuel Hammond on what the near future holds: You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything. Bots will slide into your DMs and have long, engaging conversations with you until it senses the best moment to send its phishing link… Relationships will fall apart when the AI lets you know, via microexpressions, that he didn’t really mean it when he said he loved you. Copyright will be as obsolete as sodomy law, as thousands of new Taylor Swift albums come into being with a single click. Public comments on new regulations will overflow with millions of cogent and entirely unique submissions that the regulator must, by law, individually read and respond to. Death-by-kamikaze drone will surpass mass shootings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, meanwhile, will be flooded with lawsuits because who needs to pay attorney fees when your phone can file an airtight motion for you?
Jennifer Morton, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, has been selected as the winner of the 2022 Grawemeyer Award in Education. Professor Morton was recognized for the ideas put forward in her 2019 book, Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press). The Grawemeyer Awards, administered by the University of Louisville, “pays tribute to the power of creative ideas, emphasizing the impact a single idea can have on the world.” Bestowed in several fields, each award includes a prize of $100,000. From the award announcement: The dream of achieving success by attending college is deeply flawed for some, says Morton, a first-generation college student who left Peru to attend Princeton.
Recent additions to the Heap of Links… “While I’m still on the fence about eyes, I don’t think legs, strictly speaking, exist” — the question of whether there are more eyes or legs in the world “has profound implications for our understanding of certain fundamental matters at the heart of our ongoing debates about scientific realism,” says Justin E.H.