- There is diversity in sexual preference (same-sex or opposite-sex) but most people are at corner solutions.
- The ideal temperature in San Diego is 66F. You will worry in the morning when its cloudy but once the marine layer burns off the sun by itself will keep you warm. The air will keep you cool.
- It is not possible to define ‘fitness’ in a way that doesn’t make “survival of the fittest” into a tautology.
- People who argue that tenure should disappear should begin by saying what they think the market failure is that prevents that from happening by itself.
Cheap Talk 
8 comments
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August 12, 2010 at 6:47 pm
twicker
Re: #4: Very interesting …
yrs,
twicker
August 12, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Anonymous
According to my iPhone, the ideal temperature is 73 degrees. I think it is right.
August 12, 2010 at 11:12 pm
jeff
how do you get your iPhone to tell you that? all my iPhone ever tells me is that my wife wants me to pick up the kids on the way home.
August 13, 2010 at 2:24 am
Laurel Fulovit
The problem with tenure is that the demand for professors is changing. Back when tenure was made available there was a scarcity of trained scholars to match growing enrollments. Now you have a surplus, for example in fields such as English or Philosophy. Don’t tell me it’s easy to get a tenure-track position in Maths or Physics. Would it be politically feasible to have tenure available only in disciplines where there was demand based on increasing enrollments in those areas? If there was a market failure, it would be trying to house these “knowledge workers” from various disciplines under similar contractual arrangements. Why not just create separate institutions and surgically remove the not-in-demand fields from the University? How politically correct is that?
August 13, 2010 at 10:22 am
C.H.
On your third proposition : since fitness is a generic concept which means “everything that enhance an organism’s probability of survival and/or rate of reproduction”, it seems that “survival of the fittest” is tautological… until we realize that fitness plays no causal role in the selection process. What determine the result of the selection process are the causal factors which are of an empirical nature (and vary in space and time). Fitness is just a word to synthetize those causal factors.
In other words, in each empirical cases, we should not say “the survival of the fittest” but “the survival of the [factors of fitness]” (say the taller, the more veloce, etc.). This is an empirical proposition, not an analytical one and therefore not a tautology. I believe that Elliot Sober made this point, see also the recent book of Peter Godfrey-Smith.
August 13, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Noah Yetter
People who argue that tenure should disappear should begin by saying what they think the market failure is that prevents that from happening by itself.
Path dependence.
August 14, 2010 at 8:20 pm
wheninrome15
To put another perspective on it, “Survival of the fittest” is a lot like “no such thing as a free lunch.” Indeed there’s no such thing as a free lunch…when we’re at a Pareto optimum. This is the context it’s usually invoked in, but of course then it’s tautological, because what’s a free lunch but a Pareto improvement?
Tautological, both, but powerful concepts which so many people fail to realize are tautological, which so frequently people need to be reminded of. There is a special pedestal in the Great Hall of Science for tautologies that took thousands of years to be recognized.
March 18, 2014 at 11:44 pm
Carlo
hi anonymous,its so easy to pass jgmeudents on others.why should i be proud of anything? i am neither an engineer, nor a doctor nor anything else worth mentioning.iam just an average humanbeing. i just stated my opinion.u have a right to disagree with me,just as i have to not like the idea of any reservations.is it not about time we forgot about caste and religion and got on with the serious business of life?if you do not agree then you are most welcome to hang onto it for eternity. all the best.prgya.