Regression to the Mean and Judy Benjamin

Van Fraassen's Judy Benjamin problem asks how one ought to update one's credence in A upon receiving evidence of the sort ``A may or may not obtain, but B is k times likelier than C'', where {A,B,C} is a partition. Van Fraassen's solution, in the limiting case of increasing k, recommends a posterior converging to the probability of A conditional on A union B, where P is one's prior probability function. Grove and Halpern, and more recently Douven and Romeijn, have argued that one ought to leave credence in A unchanged, i.e. fixed at P(A). We argue that while the former approach is superior, it brings about a Reflection violation due in part to neglect of a ``regression to the mean'' phenomenon, whereby when C is eliminated by random evidence that leaves A and B alive, the ratio P(A):P(B) ought to drift in the direction of 1:1

On Equitable Non-Anonymous Review

Remco Heesen has recently argued in favor of the editorial practice of triple-anonymous review on the grounds that ``an injustice is committed against certain authors'' under non-anonymous review. On the other hand, he concedes that the information waste of triple-anonymous review does handicap editors, in particular sacrificing a boost in the average quality of accepted papers that would otherwise be conferred by non-anonymous review. In this paper it is observed that by devoting comparatively greater reviewing resources to the papers of unfamiliar authors, editors practicing non-anonymous review can, without loss of information, avoid subjecting authors to the sorts of injustices observed by Heesen. Thus they can reap the efficiency gains of non-anonymous review without sacrificing fairness

Random and Systematic Error in the Puzzle of the Unmarked Clock

A puzzle of an unmarked clock, used by Timothy Williamson to question the KK principle, was separately adapted by David Christensen and Adam Elga to critique a principle of Rational Reflection. Both authors, we argue, flout the received relationship between ideal agency and the classical distinction between systematic and random error, namely that ideal agents are subject only to the latter. As a result, these criticisms miss their mark

Existence is not Evidence for Immortality

Michael Huemer argues, on statistical grounds, that ``existence is evidence for immortality". On reasoning derived from the anthropic principle, however, mere existence cannot be evidence against any non-indexical, ``eternal'' hypothesis that predicts observers. This note attempts to advertise the much-flouted anthropic principle's virtues and workings in a new way, namely by calling attention to the fact that it is the primary intension of one's indexically-described evidence that best characterizes one's epistemic position

Unbounded expectations and the Shooting Room

Several treatments of the Shooting Room Paradox have failed to recognize the crucial role played by its involving a number of players unbounded in expectation. We indicate Reflection violations and/or Dutch Book vulnerabilities in extant ``solutions''and show that the paradox does not arise when the expected number of participants is finite; the Shooting Room thus takes its place in the growing list of puzzles that have been shown to require infinite expectation. Recognizing this fact, we conclude that prospects for a ``straight solution" are dim

A Note on Verisimilitude and Accuracy

M. Schoenfield has constructed examples of proper inaccuracy measures that value verisimilitude (in a certain sense) in spaces of worlds equipped with a particular variety of verisimilitude metric. However, Schoenfield left it as an open question whether `for every space of worlds, there is a proper inaccuracy measure that values verisimilitude.' Here we answer this question in the affirmative

Eva, Hartmann and Rad on Kullback-Leibler Minimization

We address problems (that have since been addressed) in a proofs-version of a paper by Eva, Hartmann and Rad, who where attempting to justify the Kullback-Leibler divergence minimization solution to van Fraassen's Judy Benjamin problem

An Eternal Con

Cian Dorr considered the case of a fair coin that is tossed every day throughout an infinite past and an infinite future (an ``Eternal Coin''). Against intuition, he argued that, conditional on the Coin having landed {\it heads} throughout the past, one should believe, with full probability, that it will also land {\it heads} today. In this paper, we critique Dorr's arguments, as well as part of a reply by Myrvold