Plural Voting for the Twenty-First Century

Recent political developments cast doubt on the wisdom of democratic decision-making. Brexit, the Colombian people's (initial) rejection of peace with the FARC, and the election of Donald Trump suggest that the time is right to explore alternatives to democracy. In this essay, I describe and defend the epistocratic system of government which is, given current theoretical and empirical knowledge, most likely to produce optimal political outcomes—or at least better outcomes than democracy produces. To wit, we should expand the suffrage as wide as possible and weight citizens’ votes in accordance with their competence. As it turns out, the optimal system is closely related to J. S. Mill's plural voting proposal. I also explain how voters’ competences can be precisely determined, without reference to an objective standard of correctness and without generating invidious comparisons between voters

What's Wrong with Libertarianism: A Meritocratic Diagnosis

Some people may think that libertarianism and meritocracy have much in common; that the libertarian's ideal world looks like the meritocrat's ideal world; and that the public policies guiding us to each are one and the same. This is wrong in all respects. In this essay I explain why. After providing an overview of meritocratic justice, I argue that meritocracy is a more compelling theory of distributive justice than libertarianism. Meritocracy better protects the core value of personal responsibility; incorporates efficiency-enhancing regulation which libertarianism cannot; provides more positive liberty; and solves salient, real-world debates about distributive justice

Inclusive jet measurements in pp and Pb-Pb collisions with ALICE

Measurements of jet yields in heavy-ion collisions can be used to constrain jet energy loss models, and in turn provide information about the physical properties of deconfined QCD matter. ALICE reconstructs charged particle jets ($\textit{charged jets}$) with high-precision tracking of charged particles down to $p_{\mathrm{T}}^{\mathrm{track}} = 150$ MeV/$c$, and jets ($\textit{full jets}$) with the addition of particle information from the electromagnetic calorimeter down to $E_{\mathrm{cluster}} = 300$ MeV. By including low momentum jet constituents, ALICE is uniquely positioned at the LHC to measure jets down to low jet momentum, to determine the modification to the soft components of jets, and to measure medium recoil particles. New inclusive full jet measurements in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=5.02$ TeV with ALICE will be shown, over $R=0.2-0.4$ and extending to low jet $p_{\mathrm{T}}$. These will include the jet $R_{\mathrm{AA}}$ for different jet $R$, and will constitute the first such full jet measurements at low transverse jet momentum at this collision energy. The results are compared to several theoretical predictions.Comment: Proceedings of the International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions, 201

The Epistemology of Disagreement: Why Not Bayesianism?

Disagreement is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and philosophers have dutifully attended to it. One important question related to disagreement is epistemological: How does a rational person change her beliefs (if at all) in light of disagreement from others? The typical methodology for answering this question is to endorse a steadfast or conciliatory disagreement norm (and not both) on a priori grounds and selected intuitive cases. In this paper, I argue that this methodology is misguided. Instead, a thoroughgoingly Bayesian strategy is what's needed. Such a strategy provides conciliatory norms in appropriate cases and steadfast norms in appropriate cases. I argue, further, that the few extant efforts to address disagreement in the Bayesian spirit are laudable but uncompelling. A modelling, rather than a functional, approach gets us the right norms and is highly general, allowing the epistemologist to deal with (1) multiple epistemic interlocutors, (2) epistemic superiors and inferiors (i.e. not just epistemic peers), and (3) dependence between interlocutors

Colours, Corners And Complexity

"There is a philosophical question as to what one really sees". Wittgenstein's remark raises all sorts of questions: Does one see tables and chairs, people jumping up and down, their jumps, their sadness ? Does one see colours and forms, coloured forms, dynamic and static, that are above or to the left of other coloured forms ? If the latter, are these things one sees private entities or public entities as are, presumably, tables and chairs ? If both answers are legitimate (sometimes, or whenever we see ?) what are the relations between the people we see and the coloured forms that we also see ? In other words, is what is presented to me in my visual field private, public or partly private and partly public

The Great Divide

At the turn of the century, Russell, Husserl and Couturat singled out Leibniz the logician as an important precursor of the way they thought philosophy should be done. Like their most gifted contemporaries they conceived of philosophy as essentially argumentative and - as Russell put it in a 1911 talk in French - analytic. Unsurprisingly, the search for the best arguments and analyses meant that good philosophy was cosmopolitan. William James and Ernst Mach were read everywhere. James studied Mach and the pupils of Brentano, whom Stout introduced to Cambridge. Moore recognised the deep kinship between his work on ethics and that of Brentano. Russell was influenced by Peano, used and criticised Meinong and was attacked by Poincaré. Pragmatism was subjected to a series of criticisms by realists in German and in English but gradually began to win adherents, for example in Italy, where Vailati and Calderoni introduced both pragmatism and Austrian philosophy of mind

Geist vs Life - Scheler And Musil

Robert Musil (1880-1942), the Austrian writer, essayist and author of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (MoE), and Max Scheler (1874-1928), the south German realist phenomenologist, shared a number of philosophical convictions and interests. These convictions and interests distinguish them from almost all their contemporaries. They are by no means common today although more common than they were. At the centre of their work stand detailed anatomies of the human heart

Facts, Formal Objects and Ontology

What is a fact ? Are there such things