Men being artificially intelligent.

Lots of them. (Thanks, P!)

Conference
PT-AI 2013 – “Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence”
21-22.09.2013
Oxford, St. Antony’s College
http://www.pt-ai.org/2013

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NVITED SPEAKERS

Jean-Christophe Baillie (CSF, Aldebaran Robotics, Paris)
“AI: The Point of View of Developmental Robotics”
Theodore Berger (University of Southern California, L.A.)
Selmer Bringsjord (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY)
“What Does Watson 2.0 Tell Us About the Philosophy & Theory of AI?”
Daniel C. Dennett (Tufts University, Boston)
“If brains are computers, what kind of computers are they?”
Luciano Floridi (University of Hertfordshire/University of Oxford)
“Enveloping the World – How Reality Is Becoming AI-Friendly”
Stuart J Russell (UC Berkeley)
“Rationality and Intelligence”
Murray Shanahan (Imperial College, London)
“Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and the Frame Problem”
Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling, Scotland)
“AI and Extended Cognition”

Implicit bias and the old boys’ network

Kieran Healy has dramatically demonstrated just how much women are left out of citation networks in philosophy. I think it’s vital to do some hard thinking about what this means and what we can do about it. One reason it’s vital is that citation rates DO get used in hiring, tenure and promotion decisions. We need to make sure that the Healy data don’t just get used as a nice list of who should be getting job offers from leading departments. We need to see the data as what they almost certainly are: an illustration of implicit bias in action. We don’t have direct evidence for this, but it’s exactly what we’d predict from what we know about implicit biases. Just as the first names to leap to mind for your conference (or syllabus) are likely to be male, the first names to leap to mind for your bibliography are likely to be male.

Prompted by Healy’s work, Ross Cameron’s been reflecting eloquently on this on Facebook:

Looked at the bibliographies in my papers for the last few years. In almost all of them, I have citations to women, BUT (i) they are significantly outnumbered, more so than I expected and (ii) it tends to be the same women I’m citing again and again (more so, I think, than that it’s the same men I’m citing again and again).

Just like many of us have been making a conscious effort to invite women to workshops etc, and trying to think outside the box about who to invite (“Oh, Katherine Hawley, Karen Bennett and Laurie Paul are all busy. Better just have an all dude metaphysics workshop then!”) it seems clear that we need to also concentrate on making a conscious effort to cite women and to think outside the box about who to cite.

I am lazy about scholarship, no doubt about it, but there’s no excuse for laziness if that means you’re contributing to injustice. Time for the Gendered Citation Campaign!

I hereby urge you all to go look at your bibliographies, and– even more importantly– make sure you actively think about what women you should cite in current and future papers. Also: speak up when people use citation data to argue against hiring or promoting a woman. Show them the Healy data, and talk to them about implicit bias.

UPDATE: And when you’re refereeing, have a look at the references. If the author is leaving out women who should be in, suggest that they add them.

The old boys network, part 2

Kieran Healy has done some further analysis of his incredibly interesting citation graph – this time specifically about gender.  And the punch-to-the-gut headline has to be this:

Eighteen items in the top 500 are written by women, or 3.6 percent of the total. By comparison, 6.2 percent of the items in the top 500 are written by David Lewis.

In all, only thirteen fifteen female authors make it onto the graph. 13 15 women for a graph spanning 20 years. Nice.

*Update*: 

Kieran Healy writes:

“I have corrected several errors in the dataset, and made some changes to make the citation counts more accurate. First, a phantom item credited to “Anonymous” and notionally appearing on a single page of Philosophical Perspectives had a relatively high citation count (it was the 119th-ranked item). It has now been deleted. Second, the raw data from the Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge citation database contains twelve cases citing “Christine Korsgaard (1998) Naming and Necessity”. These are in fact cites to Kripke (1980). Third, I have taken the three different ways Naming and Necessity is cited in the database and amalgamated them into a single cite to Kripke (1980). Finally, based on some further analysis I changed the cutoff point from the top 500 to all items with at least ten citations, so as not to arbitrarily exclude some items with the same number of citations as other included items. Now we have 526 items instead of 500. These changes are reflected in the discussion above. I thank Juan Comesana, Gary Ostertag, Laura Schroeter, and Dave Chalmers for help identifying issues in the raw data. I welcome further corrections.

These corrections and changes mean the tables change slightly and the network is rewired a little. Naming and Necessity is now the most-cited item. Item ranks have shifted slightly due to existing items being able to move up into the vacant slots opened up by deleting mistaken items or merging cites, and some new papers enter at the bottom. Two of these items are authored by women. If you quoted from this post prior to these changes, please check to see whether the numbers you cited have changed slightly.

The main upshots are that we now have nineteen items by fifteen women, out of 526 highly-cited papers in the dataset. Korsgaard has one fewer item (due to the database error), and two new items by women have entered the list at the bottom: one by Linda Zagzebski and one by JJ Thomson. The overall percentages are almost identical, however, because we now have 19/526 (~3.6%) items by women. And the 26 new items included two papers by … David Lewis! That makes for 33/526 or ~6.3% of the total.”

So 15 women instead of 13 women, but the same percentage.

CFP: Sustaining and What Sustains

Second call — Deadline July 1st!

The Society for Women in Philosophy (Pacific Division) is inviting contributions for its annual conference.

November 9-10, 2013

Arizona State University

Tempe, Arizona

Keynote speaker: Margaret Walker (Marquette)

Sustaining and What Sustains

We invite papers that think broadly about the theme of sustaining and what sustains. When we think of what needs to be sustained, we might think of the environment, communities, cultures, friendships, family, self-esteem, trust, the humanities, human and animal welfare, and ourselves as knowers and cultural producers. In light of what humanly created or natural threats does the need to be sustained arise? In sustaining what matters, what ways of relating, activities, attitudes, and socio-political principles and structures are important? What is it that sustains us as individuals and collectively, bodily, epistemically, culturally, aesthetically, and spiritually?

Papers do not need to address the theme in order to be considered. We invite work from all areas of philosophy and all ways of doing philosophy. We are a friendly group and promise good conversation and lively debate.

In order to make our conference affordable we do not charge a registration fee. Some refreshments/food will be provided. Small travel stipends are available for graduate students and un/underemployed philosophers. Please let us know with your submission if you would like to be considered for one of these.

Deadline for submission: July 1, 2013

Please send your ~3,000 word paper suitable for a 30 minute presentation to: Nellie Wieland, Executive Secretary, PSWIP [nellie dot wieland at gmail dot com].  Any questions you may have about the conference can be directed to Nellie Wieland. Please see the conference web site for information and updates.

Sylvia Earle: Oceanographer, Conservationist, and Scientist Extraordinaire

On June 13, the National Geographic Society awarded Sylvia Earle the Hubbard Medal, their highest honor, “for distinction in exploration, discovery and research”.

On June 14, National Geographic “asked Sylvia to discuss her experiences as a woman in a field previously considered a man’s world”.

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We can also find this three minute discussion embedded in a National Geographic News Watch piece (by Jane J. Lee) titled:
In Her Words: Sylvia Earle on Women in Science (click here for the news piece)
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***HERE IS THE BEST ONE: Earle’s 2009 Ted Prize talk (reminding us about little things like action necessary to avoid extinction)***:

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Mission Blue (Sylvia Earle alliance)-click here!
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Plenty of excellent video clips available on the interwebs. This one seems very good:
Sylvia Earle: Legendary Explorer Fights to Save Underwater Paradise

The old boys network

Kieran Healy has constructed an extremely interesting co-citation index for philosophy, focusing on four top generalist analytic journals. And it hasn’t taken much time for people to start noticing some rather troubling gender issues. There will be more to come soon from Healy specifically about gender. Looking forward to more from this very revealing project!

Gendered intro syllabi

Helen de Cruz reports results of a study on the representation of women in intro philosophy classes. (Confirms what you might have suspected.)

On Lying about a gendered conference/volume

Berit Brogaard catches an organiser out.

New listserv for philosophers with psychological disabilities

Philosopher Joan Callahan writes:

I have managed (after a few false starts) to get up and running a listserv for discussion of inclusion in professional philosophy WITH SPECIAL ATTENTION TO PSYCHOLOGICAL DISABILITY.

If you want to subscribe to this list, just send a note to listserv@lsv.uky.edu with the message ” subscribe Inclusion ” in the body of your message.

Now, this will subscribe you under the personal name and address of the email account you are using. Since the topic of this list is in many ways a delicate one, if you want to maintain complete confidentiality, I suggest that you open a free email account with a name only you will know, such as Henry.Etta@gmail.com (or Yahoo, etc.) and subscribe to Inclusion from that account. This will keep your identity confidential, even from me, who is identified as the listowner.

I THINK this is all working. Please let me know if you have any problems.

I Guess We Need to Explicitly Say That Suicide is Not a Fashion Statement

I can’t add much else to the observation that, “this seems like some distinctive pinnacle of awfulness.”
(Thanks to RK for the heads up)

 

“Vice Published a Fashion Spread of Female Writer Suicides”
(Heads up: there are pictures of models depicting suicides.)

Okay, I can add this.  For all I know, inside a moral vacuum maybe implying that suicide is beautiful isn’t immoral.  But I feel confident in the assertion that in a social context where a segment of the population is encouraged to believe that they are only valuable members of society insofar as they are capable of being beautiful, emphasizing that such people can be beautiful and stylish while committing suicide is pretty damn immoral. And I am equally confident in asserting that we currently live in such a social context.

I’m going to take this opportunity to provide some links and quotes:
If you are feeling suicidal:
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/suicide_help.htm

(more after the jump)