Like this.

John McCain's campaign manager today accused Barack Obama of practicing politics as Hurricane Gustav bears down on the Gulf Coast....

"Look at what happened today — did Barack Obama attack John McCain or Sarah Palin?" Davis asked.

Told Obama had criticized McCain and Palin on the campaign trail over pay equity, Davis continued: "So he attacks us while there's a hurricane going on and John McCain suspends his convention basically. What bigger contrast can you have about putting your country first?"

I don't know, Rick, you could have a contrast in which you don't attack Obama while there's a hurricane going on. Which, in case you didn't notice, you just did.

(You could also have a candidate who didn't endanger lives and waste precious resources by giving a grandstanding speech in an area that people are trying to evacuate before a hurricane hits, but that's not a self-defeating assertion.)

If you were to point out that Obama has often gone negative on people for going negative, you might have a fair point as well.

"The source doesn't know who Obama ultimately chose, but confirms Sens. Joe Biden and Evan Bayh, along with Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine are all in the running."

The bit about "in the running" strikes me as a very weird thing to say. In some sense they aren't all in the running, since Obama has made his choice.

What the source presumably means to evoke is something like the use of 'might' that DeRose discusses: A test has been performed that either indicates that John does not have cancer or indicates that there is a 50% chance that John has cancer. B says to C, "I don't know whether John might have cancer, but the doctor who has seen the test results knows whether John might have cancer." (And if no one has seen the results, it may be that no one knows whether John might have cancer.)

In this case, the source can't confirm that as far as the journalist knows, those three haven't been eliminated. But the source presumably means something a bit strong than "As far as I know they haven't been eliminated." What is meant is presumably something like, "I know that they hadn't been eliminated as of X time before Obama made his choice." But it still seems odd to describe that as "They are in the running" rather than "They were in the running up till the end."

[I would be remiss not to quote the Talking Points Memo headline that linked to a related post: " Breaking: The Press Does Not Know The Candidates' Veep Picks"]

UPDATE: Maybe the source meant those three haven't/hadn't been called to say it was them.

McCain, asked to define what income level made you "rich," said:

How about $5 million? No, but seriously, I don’t think you can, I don’t think seriously that the point is I’m trying to make, seriously, and I’m sure that comment will be distorted but the point is…that we want to keep people’s taxes low, and increase revenues. … So, it doesn’t matter really what my definition of rich is because I don’t want to raise anybody’s taxes. I really don’t.

Obama's response:

“Maybe he was joking,” Obama said at the town hall this morning in a library, joking that by McCain’s standards, making $3 million must mean you’re "middle class."

Obama continued that McCain’s skewed idea of wealth "is reflected in his policies.”

From Team McCain:

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds responds: "As was immediately predicted by John McCain after he made the remark, Barack Obama is already distorting his comment about the definition of 'rich' in America. Remember when Barack Obama said he was 'tired of distortion, name-calling, and sound bite solutions to complicated problems?' Neither do we."

Bounds said McCain never said $3 million was middle class, but declined to elaborate on what McCain meant.

Never mind that Bounds doesn't say what the distortion was -- it seems to me that the uses of the words "joking" and "but seriously" are doing a lot of work here -- did Obama say McCain said that $3 million was middle class? Discuss.

Matthew Yglesias wrote, under the title "The Transitivity of Timetables":

So if McCain likes Maliki's timetable, and Maliki likes [Obama]'s timetable, then logically McCain has to like Obama's timetable.

A commenter going by "pedant" responded:

The "likes" relation is not transitive, nor are timetables (whatever that could mean). What we have here is the following inference:

McCain likes Maliki's timetable.
Maliki's timetable = Obama's timetable.
So, McCain likes Obama's timetable.

Whether or not the inference is good depends on whether McCain knows Maliki's timetable = Obama's timetable (he does), and whether McCain is rational enough to draw the relevant conclusion (questionable).

Taking that pseudonym as a personal challenge, I replied:

It doesn't even necessarily depend -- it depends on whether in "McCain likes Obama's timetable" the term 'Obama's timetable' appears de dicto or de re. In "John flew to X" X is always de re; if John flew to Hesperus then he flew to Phosphorus, even if he doesn't know that Hesperus and Phosphorus are the same thing (Venus). In "John intends to fly to X" then X can be de dicto; if John wants to go to Hesperus but wants to avoid Phosphorus (not realizing they're the same), then we can say that he intends to fly to Hesperus but that he doesn't intend to fly to Phosphorus.

If "John likes Obama's timetable" is a de re ascription then the inference is good whether or not McCain knows that it's good. He may not think he likes Obama's timetable, but it's Obama's timetable he likes. I actually think that after 'likes' it has to be de re. I'm not sure we can make sense of "John likes aubergines, John doesn't like eggplants, but aubergines and eggplants are the same thing." Aubergines/eggplants are a vegetable, and either John likes that vegetable or he doesn't.

For more on de re and de dicto see here; as McKay and Nelson point out, nobody actually agrees on exactly what these things are.

I actually think that the problem of how to report speech is very important in politics, and the de re/de dicto distinction (and indirect discourse in general) is an important part of that. The interesting part does not extend to whether one should fix Yglesias's mind-blowing typos.

But how to "prepare"? If you can delay a full search, do so (searching selectively may make good sense, i.e., targetting jobs for which you are a perfect 'fit'). Do not defend your dissertation until a job offer is in hand--PhDs "go stale" quickly, and you don't want to be a 2008 PhD who, because of general market trends, is still looking for a tenure-stream position in 2011. (I must say this is a really crazy aspect of the job market: everyone knows the market is tight, that most philosophers are, in one sense or another, "under-employed" in their first position [even when it is tenure-stream!], and that multiple searches over multiple years are the norm--yet still there is a tendency to draw unfavorable inferences when the job seeker has a PhD that is several years old, and no tenure-stream job.)

I only have anecdotal impressions that PhDs go stale,* but that has been my impression, and Leiter is correct that it's crazy. This seems like a bigger problem because it exacerbates the contingencies of your first job search or two; if you don't get a job right away, each year on the job market digs you into a deeper hole. That wouldn't be the case if search committees were more likely to hire people who'd been out for a couple of years, and they'd also have more information to go on, because people are more likely to start publishing after they graduate. (Though that might make success contingent on the vagaries of the publishing process, not only whether a paper is accepted but how long it takes.)

Unfortunately, not everyone can follow Leiter's advice not to defend until they have an offer in hand; even aside from funding issues, my slightly less anecdotal impression there is that many hiring schools want you to have defended before the interview.

*These impressions are not derived from the searches I took part in, where we made an offer to someone who had been out for several years.

Shania Betrayed: How Shania Twain's 14-year Marriage was Shattered by Her Husband's Alleged Affair with Her Close Friend

This seems to be ascribing causal powers to an alleged affair. Which is interesting, because not only might an alleged affair not be an affair, but if the affair is only alleged then there's no event to which "alleged affair" refers. That facet of the word "alleged" is interesting in itself (a rubber duck or fake duck is still a thing, if not a duck; an alleged spy is probably still a person, if not a spy; an alleged event in many cases is nothing if the allegations aren't true). But it would be somewhat mysterious how an alleged affair could shatter a marriage, if there were no affair; there would be nothing to do the marriage.

There are two relatively straightforward interpretations here:

1) Allegations of the affair shattered the marriage
2) We want to say that the affair shattered the marriage, but the legal department made us put in "alleged"

Well, I think 2) is pretty clearly the case (though I also understand that using "alleged" is no defense against libel suits). But I wonder if there are similar cases that fall between 1) and 2).

So I was thinking of this the other day: You can say things like

No parking before 6
No parking after 6
No parking until 6
No parking during the day
No parking while school is in session

but while you can say

It is before 6
It is after 6

you definitely can't say

*It is until 6
*It is while school is in session

and I'm not sure you can say

It is during the day.

Why? What do you think?

Especially since 9/11, the Chronicle has allowed itself to become a forum for a small group of conservative think tanks and foundations, as well as an equally small group of conservative faculty pundits. ACTA has become a central feature in the changed landscape at the Chronicle, alongside the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Horowitz’s current institutional incarnation), the National Association of Scholars, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Center for Equal Opportunity. Those groups’ studies (being far too tempted to put that last word in quotation marks, I will refrain), to say nothing of their lawsuits and news releases, are automatically considered newsworthy and often are only superficially interrogated; their leaders’ quotations are guaranteed; and their inevitability in any story involving academic freedom, teaching, assessment, curriculum—or even Lawrence Summers—is far too predictable.... The Chronicle is helping a small group at the extreme right of the political spectrum set the news agenda.

I've noticed something similar, though I haven't followed the Chronicle's coverage of the AAUP. Disproportionately when I follow a link to the Chronicle, they're pushing a right-wing viewpoint. There's no excuse for taking David Horowitz seriously.

(Incidentally, when I write "the Chronicle's," should I italicize the "'s"?)

There then follows this paragraph, inserted by a defender of U-Haul if not an employee:

In U-Haul's defense, since there are over 15,000 dealers, their polices are difficult to enforce. It is common knowledge among independent U-Haul dealers that equipment that is marked as "unrentable" does not turn a profit for the dealer, and therefore minor safety issues are overlooked in the face of losing profit. In short, while U-Haul does their best to make sure their equipment is in the best condition possible, with the amount of trucks on the road and a lack of reporting of safety issues by independent dealers, the system is only as strong as the weakest link: the individual businesses that contract with U-Haul.

Do you notice anything about this? It's not a defense at all (except possibly legally). If equipment marked as "unrentable" doesn't turn a profit for a dealer, then of course dealers are going to rent unsafe equipment. If U-Haul doesn't do anything to alleviate this issue then they aren't doing their best to make sure their equipment is in the best condition possible. They are guaranteeing that their dealers will rent equipment in poor condition.

This is a basic business ethics issue; a company that really cares about some ethical issue (like safety) will arrange some incentives so that people are not hurt for taking actions that promote the issue. If central management makes it so that your dealers can't gain a profit without cutting corners on safety issues, then central management is morally responsible for the resulting safety issues.

And, in case I didn't mention it, U-Haul sucks. I haven't heard that Penske has similar safety issues (and they have always honored my reservations), so there's presumably a way to rent trucks safely. (I also haven't even found U-Haul to be any cheaper the last couple of times I moved.)

UPDATE: Wow, U-Haul is ridiculously unethical. I especially like this passage from the second link:

Further complicating matters is U-Haul's practice of booking reservations without knowing if it will have trucks and trailers when and where renters want them. The policy leads to long lines of overwrought customers, creating pressure to get equipment back on the road quickly.

And here's a little more about their reservation policy. One thing that's striking is how weak the available legal remedies seem to be.

John McCain would like us to believe that he was some kind of uber-prescient early critic of the Bush administration's tactics in Iraq but it's just not so. Barack Obama warned before the war that disaster was likely, McCain cheerleaded for war.

leading a commenter to write:

"Cheerleaded"? My respect for a Harvard education drops another notch...

Now, Yglesias just plain can't spell, but this raises the question: What is the past tense of the verb "cheerlead"? I'm pretty sure that "cheerlead" is backformed from the noun "cheerleader" (apparently first recorded in 1903). According to Steven Pinker, whenever an irregular verb is turned into a noun and then back into a verb, it becomes regular: "flied out" in baseball, "grandstanded." (I call fouls on "high-sticked" and "ringed" [UPDATE: That is, I don't think they're examples of the phenomenon he's discussing], given that the nouns those verbs are derived from aren't etymologically related to the irregular verbs -- note in fact that "ring" meaning "make a ring around" goes back to Old English.)

Blargh earlier mentioned "mini-break"/"mini-broke" in tennis as exception to Pinker's rule. What about the past tense of "cheerlead"? Googlefight tells all: "Cheerleaded" beats "cheerled" 6240 to 3580. So there's more support for "cheerleaded," but "cheerled" is out there; which I think contradicts Pinker's hypothesis. (Admittedly the first few screens for "cheerled" contain very few examples of actual use in sentences, but if you go deeper in people are using it.)

American Heritage recommends "cheerled," on what authority I don't know. Note that the past tenses of "cheerlead," and "cheerleads" are much less common than "cheerleader" -- not surprising, given the origin as a noun -- but also than "cheerleading" and "cheerlead," which I find slightly odd, given that both of those are verbal forms. (There are a lot of false positives in "cheerlead"; "to cheerlead" is about three times more common than "cheerleads," which makes it much less common than "cheerleading.")

Previous discussion of irregular verbs here.

On any yes-or-no question, the prior probability of being right by making a random guess is 0.5. So merely having reached the right conclusion once is no great sign of wisdom. The more you know and the smarter and more thoughtful you are, the more you can bias the odds in your favor. So having reached the wrong conclusion once is some evidence against one's smarts, knowledge, thoughtfulness, or all three. But it's not perfectly conclusive evidence. If you want to know whether Person X is likely to make correct guesses in the future based on X's guessing record in the past, you need to review X's approach to those previous questions, not just tot up right and wrong guesses.

I argued in the past that we should generally take truth of assertions as the yardstick for judging credibility, because (a) "it's usually much easier to judge truth than justification, and so judging credibility by justification (among other things) will lead you to give too much credence to smooth talkers who can come up with plausible-sounding explanations of why their past false assertions were justified," and (b) "[i]n a single case, justification may be a better indication than truth, but in the long run, truth is a better predictor of future credibility. Or rather, in the long run, they should converge, and if they don't that's an indication that your judgments of justification are going wrong." (That point was in comments, in response to my brother.) [More background here.]

Actually Kleiman and I agree partially. The part of his quote that I've bolded is right: Getting it wrong once is some evidence against your credibility, but it's not conclusive. But I disagree with the part in italics. If you've got an extensive record of someone's past predictions, and all you want to do is know whether their future predictions are likely to be true, you're probably better off totting up their successes and failures than trying to evaluate their methods. If their methods look good, but they always turn out poorly, that is likely to mean that you need a different way of evaluating their methods -- more likely the more of a track record you have. You should then look at methods to see why one person's methods works and the other's don't. (See Jonathan Kulick.) But if you're evaluating credibility, a long track record comes first.

There's another interesting issue here. Kleiman's correspondent casts aspersions on public policy schools in general. I don't know if most people in these schools got it wrong (I seem to remember Henry Farrell arguing that most political scientists got it right), but if they did, does that give us enough of a track record to say that public policy people are less credible?

Not necessarily, I think. Even if you have a lot of predictions about one event, there could still be something about that event that causes a lot of people who will be credible in the future to get it wrong this time. That is, what actually happens this time could be surprising. Most Oscar prognosticators didn't pick Marion Cotillard to win Best Actress, and most sports prognosticators didn't pick the Giants to win the Super Bowl. That's because there was good reason to believe Julie Christie/the Patriots would win. The fact that one expert gets this event wrong proves that another expert is likely to get this event wrong, not that experts are likely to get future events wrong. So I don't think that looking at lots of predictions by one class of person about one event will always give you enough data to draw meaningful conclusions about the credibility of that class.

On the other hand, I do think that getting the Iraq war wrong hurts your credibility, becuase I don't think there was a justification for the war available if you got the fundamental principle of war right: In Jim Henley's words, "War is a big deal. It isn’t normal. It’s not something to take up casually." There was never a reasonable case for war that addressed the fact that war is a terrible thing that is overwhelmingly likely to cause lots of death and suffering, and so you need a real cause; not just some speculation about the good effects it might have. Part of this is to say that when you're making a prediction, you have to be alive not only to the probability that the facts will be as you predict them to be but of the costs if you get it wrong. War supporters didn't realize how bad it would be if the war didn't work out (and in many cases, how unlikely the worst-case non-war scenario was, especially given the Administration's provable nonsense on nuclear weapons).

More mostly irrelevant Kleiman-specific stuff below the fold.

And he's acknowledged his error, which is important; making a false prediction is less pernicious than being unable to recognize an obvious disaster. (Compare Paul Berman, who I was complaining about the other day; in January 2004 Berman was still frothing about what a great blow had been struck against tyranny. It doesn't help that Berman's justification was transparently idiotic; he's utterly committed to seeing radical Islam and Baathism as two wings of the same movement, which conveniently ignores the fact that they were mortal enemies. And Poland! Gah.]

And in Kleiman's case, these posts about Iran don't look good; it's not just that they turned out wrong about what Iran was up to, but that they were wrong in pretty much the same way as the Iraq stuff. The same people were relaying false information about the same things. But I think here we can identify the method that went wrong and calibrate a new one for the future: don't trust anything a Republican government official says.

The Times should fire Kristol. Aside from his failure to check NewsMax's allegation, either he knows how unreliable they are or he doesn't. If he knows (more likely), then he's dishonest in reprinting their smears. If he doesn't, then he's too gullible to be given a platform. Either way, reading his column makes you less well informed.

But -- and this goes back to some pessimistic grumblings I had about epistemic responsibility -- they probably won't fire him over this. And this means that a normal reader of the Times just doesn't have access to the information that would allow them to judge the credibility of the things they read in it. Which is not the reader's fault, I think; it's too time-consuming to check who's right or wrong about what all the time. The newspaper should be doing the job for you, by hiring people with a track record of getting things right. But they don't.

So there's no epistemic penalty for the most brazen falsehoods; you can pass on any kind of discredited B.S. that helps your political side, and the evidence that you shouldn't be believed will remain well hidden. Most of your audience will have no more reason to doubt you than to doubt the people telling the truth. And this breeds more falsehoods, and more confusion, and in the end a government that carries out horribly misguided policies.

Don't even get me started on the Op-Ed retrospective on Iraq; they didn't solicit opinions from anyone who'd been right about Iraq,* but there was room for three separate people from the American Enterprise Institute! Who told us that the major surprise was either that those backward Iraqis weren't ready for the wonderful democracy we gave them, or that the war had turned out to be much more awesome than they'd expected.

*Slaughter may have been a sort of war opponent, I'm not sure; but this was pretty weak tea.

[UPDATE 3/23: New York Times Op-Ed Page, why are you printing Paul Berman's thoughts on radical Islam? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? You are literally killing people.]

Make sure to keep clicking right arrow at least until you get to the Czar of Accounting. (Which yields the philosophy connection, since I used to teach acccounting ethics.)

Instead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the two candidates who have drawn some of the sharpest criticism on progressive blogs, are the only ones who will make it to Super Tuesday.

It's weird partly because it ignores the obvious explanation why bloggers might focus their criticism on Obama and Clinton. But also because of this phrase:

the two candidates who have drawn some of the sharpest criticism on progressive blogs

What does that mean exactly? How do you figure out which are "the" two candidates that have drawn "some" of the sharpest criticism?

The "the... some" construction need not be impenetrable, as in:

the two Democratic candidates who have been endorsed by some sitting Senators

which picks out Obama and Clinton, as the only candidates who've been endorsed by any sitting Senators. (I think it reads better without "some," though.) But clearly Klain doesn't mean that, because the only way that makes sense is if there are (or could be) some Senators who didn't endorse anyone. And in the original example, there can't be any "sharpest criticism" that isn't directed at any of the candidates, since what we're talking about is criticism of the candidates.

Effectively, "the" makes it sound as though Klain is making a stronger assertion than he is; as though Clinton and Obama have a special place of disfavor. What I suspect happened is that he wrote or thought "the two candidates who have drawn the sharpest criticism" and realized that that was exaggerated, so he added "some of" without realizing that this made his definite description indefinite. (And yes, this is a nitpick.)

[Ari says to post more, to which I say in order to post more I'd have to post at all. And, if you ask me to post more, you get posts like this. And explanations about how I don't post.]