Choice & Inference

A very warm welcome to our new contributor here at C&I, Branden Fitelson!

As you can see, Choice & Inference has recently undergone a major update. The old version of the blog was plagued with a growing number of technical issues. For example, authors and commenters might have noticed that quotation marks were duplicated every time a post / comment was saved or published — thus, “Bob’s” would be published as “Bob”s”. This was one of several headache-inducing issues that discouraged participation. Well, I’m happy to announce that the blog is running perfectly now on a new host and with a new theme to boot. In making this change, past authors have had to sign up with an account on the new site and not everyone has been transferred over yet. So, a couple orders of business…

1. If you were an author on the old version of C&I and are not yet listed as an author on the new version, please contact me and I’ll instruct you on how to get linked to the new blog straightaway.
2. If you have never yet been involved on the blog, but would like to start contributing, contact me and let me know you’re interested. We are always on the lookout for more participation!

For authors and commenters, check out the new instructions page linked above; these instructions have changed slightly since the update. As always, I would appreciate any feedback readers may have on the new look, blog content, etc. Feel free to leave comments!

NOTE: THIS POST AUHORED BY RACHAEL BRIGGS:

I’m delighted to be a member of Choice & Inference. It’s great to have an online forum to discuss formal epistemology and decision theory with all the clever people listed on the list of authors.

At the moment, though, something worries me about our author list. Out of 24 contributors, only two of us are women, and both are fairly junior women. Decision theory may be skewed in terms of gender, but this does not strike me as an accurate representation of the demographics. (If it is an accurate representation, we need to be even more pro-active about increasing women’s participation.)

Jake and Jonah have both been very open to suggestions that we do something to remedy the gender imbalance. Jonah has volunteered to email several prominent women in the field, inviting them to join our list of contributors. Our mailing list was hastily assembled and no doubt incomplete, so feel free to suggest potential contributors in the comments section (or volunteer yourself).

The comments are open for your suggestions about how we can be more inclusive.

Welcome to the new group blog, Choice & Inference! This blog provides a platform for dialogue and news within the fields of formal epistemology and decision theory, broadly construed. Topics include (but are not limited to) uncertain and ampliative inference, frequentist statistics and modeling, coherence, paradoxes of belief and / or action, belief revision, disagreement and consensus, causal discovery, epistemology of religion, etc. And the formal tools used to pursue questions within these topics include (but are not limited to) game theory and decision theory, formal learning theory, probability theory and statistics, networks and graphs, and formal logic.

All news items are published on a separate page. You can easily update yourself on the recent news relevant to the topics of this blog by clicking on “News” at the top of this page. Note: The blog is designed in such a way that these news posts will still show up in the site’s main RSS feed (subscribe to this feed by clicking here).

Choice & Inference is run with the support of its external affiliates: Carnegie Mellon University; the Formal Epistemology Project, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; the LSE Choice Group; and the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Tilburg University. The site is jointly maintained by Jake Chandler (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) and Jonah Schupbach (University of Pittsburgh). Anyone working in the field who is interested in becoming a contributor to Choice & Inference is welcome to contact either of us (you can find our email addresses on our respective websites).