A Million Little Gods

Ben and Aaron, their families, and their colleagues and students at the University of Hamburg wish everyone in America a Happy Thanksgiving. Here's a little tone poem, so to speak, for the holiday. Stay safe everyone.

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Is the margin of error the same thing as the percentage of certainty you can have in that margin of error? Can a prediction ever happen in a vacuum without affecting the thing it's making a prediction about? Can we even distinguish between a deterministic universe and one in which we have free will? Does that have anything to do with time? Can two dudes drinking beer under bed comforters at home answer these questions? Let's find out!

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Continuing the theme from Episode 9, we closely examine:

1. how machine learning works,
2. how our subconsciouses—both individual and collective—learn from the past, making ad hoc categories based on contingencies,
3. how those categories are the origin of basically all of the things that populate the world,
4. how technologies that use augmented versions of our own rational capacities are quickly altering baseball, and rendering it nearly unrecognizable in the process!

Our guests are:

• Ben Lindbergh, staff writer at The Ringer, co-host of both Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast and the Ringer MLB Podcast
• Prof. Dr. Heiko Becher, director of the Institute of Medical Biometry and Epidemiology, Medical Faculty, University of Hamburg
• Adam Darowski, creator of the Hall of Stats, a website dedicated to repopulating the Hall of Fame using a statistical formula

Here is a link to Ben Shaver's intuitive medium.com article on MCMC methods which we reference in the episode. 

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We flip to the B-Side of Season 2, as we enter a section of the season devoted to statistics and mathematical modeling. In this episode we examine the life and career of baseball great Ted Williams and consider how adding new variables to a model can change what the model shows, for better or worse.

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Today we begin part two—or, as we're calling it, the B Side—of season two, "Race: Is That a Thing?" To kick things off we're re-releasing the last episode of part one, Episode 8: "The Holy Family in a Pane of Frosted Glass" together with Episode 9: "Ballpark Figures Part I."

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To set the stage for part two of our series, “Race: Is That a Thing?", we take a deep look at a recurring metaphor that has permeated our entire series.

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Once again, this is a set of material that we couldn’t fit into Episode Seven: “Categorical Declarative” proper. Consider the contents of the appendix the audio footnote podcasts—or “footcasts”—to that episode. We will be releasing Episode Eight: “The Holy Family in a Pane of Frosted Glass” on Monday, March 18.

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According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he “is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields.”

But did Immanuel Kant create the spurious concept of scientific race? We ask Boston College Professor of Philosophy Susan Shell, author of Kant and the Limits of Autonomy and The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation and Community.

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When people talk about things as social constructs, should we understand that as derision or dismissal? Do socially constructed human kinds, like races, get realer over time, the more those who supposedly fit a construct begin to behave as if they naturally fit it?

We ask Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Ron Mallon of Washington University in St. Louis these questions and more.

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Can there be a plurality of concepts of race floating in the social air? If so, are we okay with that? Are there pragmatic uses for one or more of those concepts in the areas of medicine or public policy? In this episode we speak with Robin O. Andreasen, philosopher and Associate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware.

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