My AI policy

I’ve been wondering what to allow and what to disallow in terms of AI. I decided to treat AI as basically persons and I put this in my Metaphysics syllabus:

Even though (I believe) AI is not a person and its products are not “thoughts”, treat AI much like you would a person in writing your papers. I encourage you to have conversations with AIs about the topics of the class. If you get ideas from these conversations, put in a footnote saying you got the idea from an AI, and specifically cite which AI. If you use the AI’s words, put them in quotation marks. (If your whole paper is in quotation marks, it’s not cheating, but you haven’t done the writing yourself and so it’s like a paper not turned in, a zero.) Just as you can ask a friend to help you understand the reading, you can ask an AI to help you understand the reading, and in both cases you should have a footnote acknowledging the help you got. Just as you can ask a friend, or the Writing Center or Microsoft Word to find mistakes in your grammar and spelling, you can ask an AI to do that, and as long as the contribution of the AI is to fix errors in grammar and spelling, you don’t need to cite. But don’t ask an AI to rewrite your paper for you—now you’re cheating as the wording and/or organization is no longer yours, and one of the things I want you to learn in this class is how to write. Besides all this, last time I checked, current AI isn’t good at producing the kind of sharply focused numbered valid arguments I want you to make in the papers—AI produces things that look like valid arguments, but may not be. And they have a distinctive sound to them, so there is a decent chance of getting caught. When in doubt, put in a footnote at the end what help you got, whether from humans or AI, and if the help might be so much that the paper isn’t really yours, pre-clear it with me.

Teaching virtue

A famous Socratic question is whether virtue can be taught. This argument may seem to settle the question:

1. If vice can be taught, virtue can be taught.

2. Vice can be taught. (Clear empirical fact!)

3. So, virtue can be taught.

Well, except that what I labeled as a clear empirical fact is not something that Socrates would accept. I think Socrates reads “to teach” as a success verb, with a necessary condition for teaching being the conveyance of knowledge. In other words, it’s not possible to teach falsehood, since knowledge is always of the truth, and presumably in “teaching” vice one is “teaching” falsehoods such as that greed is good.

That said, if we understand “to teach” in a less Socratic way, as didactic conveyance of views, skills and behavioral traits, then (2) is a clear empirical fact, and (1) is plausible, and hence (3) is plausible.

That said, it would not be surprising if it were harder to teach virtue even in this non-Socratic sense than it is to teach vice. After all, it is surely harder to teach someone to swim well than to swim badly.

Minor inconveniences and numerical asymmetries

As a teacher, I have many opportunities to cause minor inconveniences in the lives of my students. And subjectively it often feels like when it’s a choice between a moderate inconvenience to me and a minor inconvenience to my students, there is nothing morally wrong with the minor inconvenience to the students. Think, for example, of making online information easily accessible to students. But this neglects the asymmetry in numbers: there is one of me and many of them. The inconvenience to them needs to be multiplied by the number of students, and that can make a big difference.

I suspect that we didn’t evolve to be sensitive to such numerical asymmetries. Rather, I expect we evolved to be sensitive to more numerically balanced relationships, which may have led to a tendency to just compare the degree of inconvenience, in ways that are quite unfortunate when the asymmetry in numbers becomes very large. If I make an app that is used just once by each of 100,000 people, and my app’s takes a second longer than it could, then it should be worth spending about two working days to eliminate that delay. (Or imagine—horrors!—that I deliberately put in that delay, say in the form of a splashscreen!) If I give a talk to a hundred people and I spend a minute on an unnecessary digression, it’s rather like the case of a bore talking my ears off for an hour and a half. In fact, I rather like the idea that at the back of rooms where compulsory meetings are held there should be an electronic display calculating for each speaker the total dollar-time-value of the listeners’ time, counting up continuously. (That said, some pleasantries are necessary, in order to show respect, to relax, etc.)

Sadly, I rarely think this way except when I am the victim of the inconvenience. But it seems to me that in an era where more and more of us have numerically asymmetric relationships, sometimes with massive asymmetries introduced by large-scale electronic content distribution, we should think a lot more about this. We should write and talk in ways that don’t waste others’ time in numerically asymmetric situations. We should make our websites easier to navigate and our apps less frustrating. And so on. The strength of the moral reasons may be fairly small when our contributions are uncompensated and others’ participation is voluntary, but rises quite a bit when we are being paid and/or others are in some way compelled to participate.

One of my happy moments when I actually did think somewhat in this way was some years back when, after multiple speeches, I was asked to say a few words of welcome to our prospective graduate students. There were multiple speeches. I stood up, said “Welcome!”, and sat down. I am not criticizing the other speeches. But as for me, I had nothing to add to them but just a welcome from me, so I added nothing but a welcome from me. I should do this sort of thing more often.

Testing masks for teaching

I had three family members turn away from me while I read two prepared philosophical sentences, using three different masks and no mask, and they ranked each reading for comprehensibility. The scale is:

1. Incomprehensible
2. Somewhat comprehensible
3. Mostly comprehensible
4. Comprehensible
5. Completely clear

Here are the results:

• No mask: 5.0
• Cheap ebay "KN95": 4.3
• Sonovia cloth antiviral mask (modified with nose wire): 3.7
• Surgical mask: 4.7

The ordering between these also matches how I sounded to myself. Since the surgical masks provide very little in the way of protection--I can feel lots of air leaking around the edges--I think I will teach in the "KN95". Maybe I will try to tighten the straps on it for better fit.

For pictures and further descriptions of the masks, see my mask collection.

I would love to hear comments suggesting other options. Those of us who are not in a high risk category are expected to be teaching in person in the fall--with students and faculty all wearing masks, and with social distancing apparently less than 6 feet--and if anyone has ideas that balance comprehensibility with protection, I would love to hear them. Unfortunately, I don't project well normally when I speak.

Online teaching

In case anybody is curious how I am teaching right now, it’s like this. When we were first informed we would be teaching online, I emailed my students whether they had any strong preference for video vs. written modes of presentation. Nobody responded, so I took it that there is no strong preference, and went with what was more convenient, namely written.

I recorded one video mini-lecture for each of my classes just to be friendly, but beyond that all my teaching works as follows. I break up a lecture into 3-6 pieces, and then post each piece on a discussion board as a separate thread. I require each student to comment at least once for each lecture (but not for each thread). The result is entirely asynchronous, and I hope easy on the students’ timetables (my students are scattered across multiple timezones now, I expect, and have various new responsibilities).

I am teaching two classes: Philosophy of Love and Sex (an intro-level class) and Metaphysics (an upper-level undergraduate class). Here is what I am finding so far:

• the discussion is better in both quantity and quality than when we were meeting in person, and this is especially visible in the intro-level class; while all I require is a substantive comment/question of two sentences, most comments are a well thought-out paragraph

• not everyone is participating, but more people are participating than were in person, probably as a result of the fact that the participation is required

• my two video mini-lectures were also posted as threads, but one thread generated a single comment and the other none; I don’t think the quality or intrinsic interest of the topics for the two video ones was lower, so I have some evidence that written mini-lectures are at least as effective at generating discussion, and of they are more time-efficient for both production and consumption

• it’s easier to just stand and talk than to write a careful mini-lecture, because in speech I was often sloppy in my formulations, while in writing I try not to be sloppy while at the same time aiming for accessibility, which is a difficult combination

• the amount of time spent on teaching is greater, largely because there is more discussion

• whereas previously I had my teaching concentrated on two days each week, I now participate in the online discussion forums for the classes five days a week

• the amount of out-of-classroom interaction with students, which used to be office hours plus email and is now email only (I think I offered to teleconference if anyone wanted), is about the same as before (alas, it’s not much)

• one class (metaphysics) has weekly papers; the quality of these is typically on par with the quality from when we were meeting in person, except in the case of a few papers that seem more rushed, perhaps because the students are struggling with family and personal hardship.

I am currently scheduled to teach intermediate logic in the second summer session, which is currently still planned to be online-only. If we get enough enrollment to make that go, I won’t be able to be asynchronous in that class, since logic requires much live back-and-forth demonstration.

Creative suggestion to improve my Leibniz and Spinoza seminar

I looked at my teaching evaluations from the fall.  There were some useful suggestions.  And one that was particularly amusing: background mood music.

Wiimote board

A colleague mentioned how nice it would be to have a SMART Board in one of our classrooms for when he teaches philosophical writing, so he could put student papers up and annotate them on screen.  But, my oh my, these SMART Boards are expensive.  They seem to start at around $1000.  I had vague recollections that I once saw that one could do something quite similar with a Wii Remote, and I told my colleague that I was pretty sure I could put together a solution for about $100.

So, I went home and searched the Internet.  The Wii remotes have cameras that track infrared points.  Johnny Chung Lee wrote free software that works like this: you get a pen with an infrared LED at the tip, point the Wii Remote camera at the screen, calibrate quickly, and then the pen operates the mouse.  Simple and cheap, though you still need software for annotating whatever you want.  There is also shareware Smoothboard software, for under $30, that is more polished and elaborate, allows using two Wii remotes in case one can't see the pen, and includes software that lets you annotate what's currently on the screen.  You don't need a Wii, just a Wii remote, which sells for $33.  And you need a Bluetooth adapter if your PC doesn't have one.  The infrared pens can be bought for less than $10, and if you use a single Wii remote, the project easily comes in under $100 (you may also need to buy a mounting bracket, or make your own).  With two Wii remotes, the project is a little over $100.

We have a Wii and I have a large collection of scrap materials, and that included an infrared LED, an AA battery holder and I had bought a bunch of momentary switches for a now-abandoned project (from Tayda Electronics, in Thailand--surprisingly, their shipping was really cheap, and their components are super cheap), so I quickly made a little infrared pen out of a plastic 35mm film canister, set up our video projector and ran the shareware software.  And, yes, it worked.  It was a bit fiddly to find positions in the room where the Wii remotes' cameras could see all of the screen, and the film canister often obscured the LED.  But it worked.

I also made a second generation infrared pen that made the LED stick out more, out of a piece of bamboo whose hollow was just the right size to take an AA battery.  I didn't try that with the projector, but it works really nicely with the big home laptop.  I eventually stood the Wii remote on my set of Harbor Freight helping hands, and it turns out I didn't need to use a second Wii remote.  It works nicely, except when the kids are using the other remote with the Wii as the Wii grabs the remote when I turn it on.

I was hoping the kids would enjoy it.  With the free driver software (which, granted, is not as polished and much more crashy than the shareware version--but I am cheap), it makes a great controller for Crayon Physics (you need to put Crayon Physics in a double-click erase mode) and works well with the kids' favorite Tux Paint as acceptable with World of Goo.  But surprisingly my daughter prefers the mouse.

I had a lot of fun with the project over the weekend.  I am not sure my own teaching would benefit from the setup.  I don't use Powerpoint very often, and when I do, I don't think I need to annotate on screen.  And if I did, I wouldn't mind doing it with a keyboard and mouse.

Basically, the whole thing is a modern take on a light pen, except that the light pen technology was tied to CRT displays.

The problem of the stone

I like to use the stone argument as a warm-up in a philosophy of religion class. But it's actually kind of tricky to use. Here's a natural way to put it:

1. Either God can or cannot make a stone he can't lift.
2. If God cannot make such a stone, then there is something God can't do.
3. If God can make such a stone, then there is something God can't do, namely lift the stone.
4. So, there is something God can't do.

But in this formulation, (3) can be easily rejected. It does not follow follow from God's merely being able to make such a stone that there is something God can't do, just as it doesn't follow from God's being able to make a unicorn that there is a unicorn. The correct conditional is:

5. If God does make such a stone, then there is something God can't do, namely lift the stone.

But if we replace (3) by (5) in the argument, the argument ceases to be valid.

This means that the stone argument isn't actually an argument against omnipotence. If all that was in view was omnipotence, one could say: "Sure, God can create such a stone. Were he to create it, he wouldn't be omnipotent. But he hasn't created such a stone and he is omnipotent." Rather, we should take the stone argument as an argument against essential omnipotence. And that makes the argument a little less suited for warm-up classroom use, because one has to introduce the notion of an essential property.

What I actually did in class today is I gave the argument in the invalid form. Alas, nobody caught the invalidity. Though, interestingly, one student was unsure of disjunction-elimination in general.

I also emphasized that the stone wasn't really a problem for omnipotence, but for particular attempts to define omnipotence. I think it's important to to distinguish those atheological arguments that are problems for theism from those that are problems for particular ways of defining theism. The inductive problem of evil is an argument against theism; the stone argument is only an argument against particular formulations.

Augustine quote

Just came across this in Augustine's The Teacher:

Who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks?

Teaching logic

I am teaching logic, for my first time. It's a tools course for grad students, covering the basic logical tools that are of general applicability (plus three lectures on meta-theory): First Order Logic (FOL), basic (ZFC) set theory, basic (Kolmogorovian) probability theory and modal logic, using Barwise and Etchemendy. I've really nervous about the FOL portion, because I've never taken, TA'ed or taught a class on FOL. (There is a joke about how two Jesuits, who taught in a high school, teachers were talking. One says: "Do you know any chemistry?" The other says: "No, I haven't even taught it.") As a mathematics/physics undergraduate, I took a model theory class (with John Bell and William Demopoulos) and did an independent study on topos theory (with John Bell). I then did independent study in category theory and topos theory as a math grad student, and as a philosophy grad student I took an oral exam in logic (covering through the Goedel theorems). It comes by nature to me to approach logic always as yet another branch of mathematics, with languages being an algebraic structure like groups and fields, which can be given a set-theoretic account: "A first-order language is a 12-tuple <L,.,S,C,P,V,a,e,m,o,c,n> such that..." This, however, wouldn't be a pedagogically very good approach for teaching students, and it isn't the approach of Barwise and Etchemendy. (And now that I am no longer a mathematician, I worry that the lucidity of the above approach is illusory, due to an illusion of thinking one knows what one is talking about when one is talking about sets.)

I've found Barwise and Etchemendy extremely difficult to understand. They are apt to say something like that john (I am using bold to render their sans-serif) is an individual constant, Sits is a predicate, and Sits" followed by a parenthesis followed by john followed by a parenthesis is an atomic sentence. And then I get really puzzled. Are the individual constants particular token inscriptions? It seems they are, since they can stand in spatiotemporal relations ("followed by") while types can't. On the other hand, they talk of the same individual constant reappearing in multiple sentences, and that doesn't work if it is a token (I believe multilocation is possible, but, except perhaps for elementary particles, it takes a miracle). So it's a type, but a type that stands in spatiotemporal relations. Weird. And what does an inscription like Sits(john) in the book refer to? Does it refer to the token? No. It refers to some type. But it's made up of several types: Sits, (, john, ). This is really confusing.

I think I finally have two consistent interpretations of the text worked out. But it was hard to get there.

Profession of faith and oath

In Canon 833, the Catholic Church requires various categories of persons to make a formal profession of faith and, by a later rule enacted by John Paul II, some of these are required to make an oath of fidelity to the magisterium. The text of the profession and oath is here.

Among the categories of persons required to make the profession and take the oath are "teachers in any universities whatsoever who teach disciplines pertaining to faith or morals [docentes qui disciplinas ad fidem vel mores pertinentes in quibusvis universitatibus tradunt]." It is striking that this is not restricted to professors in Catholic universities. Nor does this appear to be restricted, in the way that the requirement of the Mandatum is, to those who teach as theologians. For "disciplines pertaining to faith or morals" surely includes, at least, those who teach moral philosophy, and perhaps those who teach philosophy of religion as well.

But what is most striking to me is the title, which I assume is official, for the text of the profession and oath: "Profession of Faith and Oath of Fidelity on Assuming an Office to be Exercised in the Name of the Church". This implies that the Catholic professor may never teach disciplines relating to faith or morals on her own, even if she is at a non-Catholic university. What pertains to the Gospel must always be taught by her in the name of the Body of Christ. This is formalized for professors, but I think is true in everyday life, too. This is scary—but the flip side of this is that if we are speaking in the name of the Body of Christ we can draw on the Church's resources, intellectual and spiritual (and especially sacramental), and trust in the Holy Spirit when teaching, not worrying so much about what we are going to say (cf. Mt. 10:19—not that students are very much like Roman torturers!).

Plato on knowledge and teaching

For a long time, based largely on the Meno, I've been under the impression that Plato interdefines knowledge and teaching. Here is the idea:

1. Teaching is the imparting of knowledge.
2. Knowledge is what can be taught to every one who is willing and has sufficient learning abilities.

If this is right, then Platonic knowledge is never essentially private. It cannot be essentially indexical, since you cannot believe the same thing I do when I believe that I am six feet tall, arguably. Nor can it be of something essentially temporal: I cannot teach you that I am presently writing this post, because by the time you learn it, it may no be longer true, and hence it may not be knowledge. Neither can knowledge be of culturally relative facts. That this piece of jewelry is beautiful is something I may simply be unable to teach a Spartan, and she may be unable to teach me that that amphora is elegant.

Platonic knowledge thus must be of a non-indexical, atemporal, non-relative reality. And all this follows from Plato's understanding of teaching.

Moreover, teaching is not indoctrination. It is not the mere transmission of opinion or even the turning of knowledge into opinion. It is the imparting of knowledge, so that she who is taught can herself in turn teach. The evidence that the teacher has must itself be evidence that can be imparted to the student. Thus, the evidence, too, must be non-indexical, atemporal and non-relative, accessible to people of all times, cultures and social classes (think of the slave boy) who have sufficient ability. This does not require the theory of recollection--a divinely implanted faculty or knowledge that we receive by illumination at conception will do the trick, too--but does seem to require something special and universal like it.

Furthermore, a part of what it is to teach is to show how the knowledge withstands Socratic questioning--this questioning, thus, is a part of the teaching process, and the knowledge must be something that can survive this.

Or so, on this reading, Plato thinks. Whether it is all true is another question.

Cohabitation, marital quality and resistance to reason

Some background

Progressive folk in the second half of the twentieth century thought that cohabitation would improve the prospects for marriage, and eventually significant segments of the public have come to agree (e.g., in 1984, 77% of Canadians were accepting of cohabitation for those couples that "want to make sure that their future marriage will last"). Practice makes perfect, after all, and through cohabitation a couple might find that they are not "a good fit", so such cohabitation, they thought, would be a good thing for marital quality and duration. (Of course these arguments have defeaters: practice at cohabitation is not the same thing as practice at marriage, and close proximity might blind one to whether someone is a good fit.)

Then in 1988, Booth and Johnson published a study showing a strong correlation between premarital cohabitation and divorce--over the three-year course of their study 5% of those who had not cohabited divorced while 9% of those who had cohabited divorced. Moreover, while controlling for demographic factors decreased the disparity, it did not remove the disparity. Since then, a stream of sociological publications confirmed the correlation between cohabitation and subsequent divorce, as well as between cohabitation and poorer marital interaction style (lest one think that this is all an artifact of the fact that duration is a poor measure of marital quality).

There is no controversy that correlation is a fact. But correlation does not show causation. Although there are some studies that suggest causation (e.g., apparently the strength of belief in the permanence of marriage decreases with the length of cohabitation), and although several mechanisms have been proposed (e.g., the mechanism of drifting into a marriage with people whom one would not have married had one not cohabitated with them), we are not in a position to say that cohabitation causes poorer marital interaction or divorce.

However, we are in a position to see that there is no reason to believe the view that cohabitation in general improves marital prospects. That is just not what the data show.

My students

In my Philosophy of Love and Sex class at Georgetown, I would have my students read some of the sociological papers on the correlation between cohabitation and marital problems. Now, here is something interesting. Even after we have read and discussed all of that research, I would still hear a student saying that they couldn't marry someone they hadn't lived with, because it would be too risky.

Now, I could understand not being convinced by the case for cohabitation causing these problems (I am not completely convinced myself). But that one would continue to think that cohabitation helps with marriage after having seen the data is rather disappointing.

I think one thing this shows is just how resilient deeply ingrained social beliefs, especially ones supported by plausible-seeming arguments (the practice and test-for-fit arguments), are in even quite intelligent people (my students were generally very smart). No surprise there.

Another potential mechanism could be a dismissal of the idea that statistical data on behavioral patterns has a bearing on one's own decisions. We have free will, after all, so we might think that the fact that the statistics do or do not show something about patterns of behavior is irrelevant--we can, with our own free will, choose to be exceptions to the statistics. Now, I believe in incompatibilistic free will, but I also accept the indubitable fact that our behavior is influenced by all kinds of factors, some of them amenable to statistical study--the free-will argument just isn't very good here. Moreover, the free-will argument would equally undercut the idea of cohabiting for the sake of improving future marital success--for if our behavior is all really up to us, with no external influence, then whether the couple cohabits or not, marital success is in the hands of the couple.

Double Effect

In case anybody's thought that the trolley problem is made-up, here it is, for real, with even higher stakes.