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Others have already pointed this out, but it’s worth highlighting.

Terence Tao – recent winner of the Field’s medal (a sort of Nobel prize for mathematics) – has written some really interesting career advice. It’s aimed at mathematicians, but lots of it is more generally applicable, and certainly lots of strikes a chord with academic philosophy. It’s also not just for graduates: e.g. I’m a recent-graduate, and I’m sure there’s lots there that I’m not doing, which it’s good to be reminded of.

The advice to “use the wastebasket” is going to be more difficult now that the University of Leeds has decided to remove all wastebackets from our offices…

HT: Shawn Standefer, Richard Zach

p.s. here’s one thing that struck me as particularly transferable:

“Don’t prematurely obsess on a single “big problem” or “big theory”. This is a particularly dangerous occupational hazard in this subject – that one becomes focused, to the exclusion of other mathematical activity, on a single really difficult problem in a field (or on some grand unifying theory) before one is really ready (both in terms of mathematical preparation, and also in terms of one career) to devote so much of one’s research time to such a project. When one begins to neglect other tasks (such as writing and publishing one’s “lesser” results), hoping to use the eventual “big payoff” of solving a major problem or establishing a revolutionary new theory to make up for lack of progress in all other areas of one’s career, then this is a strong warning sign that one should rebalance one’s priorities. While it is true that several major problems have been solved, and several important theories introduced, by precisely such an obsessive approach, this has only worked out well when the mathematician involved (a) has a proven track record of reliably producing significant papers in the area already, and (b) has a secure career (e.g. a tenured position). If you do not yet have both (a) and (b), and if your ideas on how to solve a big problem still have a significant speculative component (or if your grand theory does not yet have a definite and striking application), I would strongly advocate a more balanced approach instead: keep the big problems and theories in mind, and tinker with them occasionally, but spend most of your time on more feasible “low-hanging fruit”, which will build up your experience, mathematical power, and credibility for when you are ready to tackle the more ambitious projects. “

Courtesy of Brit over at Lemmings

you can find the originals from the link here

We had a great time in St Andrews, by the way. Two good conferences, lots of fun time spent with interesting people. And conference-accommodation to die for…

Back in Atlanta waiting to reboard a flight to the UK. Trying not to miss the flight this time (interestingly, the plane from SF was an hour out on the “local time” it displayed on board, which might explain the previous problems).

The APA was really fun. Highlights for me included the Hudson-fest, featuring comments from Josh Parsons, Mark Heller and Michael Rae, and interesting replies to each from Hud. Also the author-meets-critics session on dialethism which Brit mentions here. I’ve been thinking a lot about open futures following Brit’s talk on sea battle semantics, and may have some thoughts to post soon (on the plane over to Atlanta, my frantic drawing of dots and arrows trying to figure out how counterfactuals interact with open future semantics convinced my neighbour I was an astrophysicist. Must be the big axes with “time” and “reality” on them…). Andy Egan gave two really interesting papers, on fragmented minds and aesthetic disagreement, and I really enjoyed Alyssa Ney‘s talk on how different theories of causation fit together (or not). And lots more nice people met and good stuff talked about!

It was fun also meeting various bloggers for the first time in the flesh.

The tale of the 14 philosophers and the limousine is already legendary, I gather (I wasn’t there).

San Francisco! I’m staying at a hotel with a very posh lobby, the Sir Francis Drake, just down the street from the APA venue. I’ve enjoyed a hour-long double-decker train journey, and am just being struck once more about the strangeness of being in a different country.

I think food may be in order, then recovery before the hard philosophical slog restarts…

The Boise metametaphysics conference finished today. A really fun event! I gave quick versions of my comments on Ted’s naturalness paper this morning.

One thing that was kind of surprising to me is that there weren’t many people defending the sort of “realist Quinean” view that I (along with a lot of people) took to be the orthodoxy. Carnapians (of various flavours), Aristotelians, and the like were more in evidence.

I found the framework and ideas in Dave Chalmers’ “Ontological anti-realism” paper particularly stimulating. It suggests to me some nice ways of extending some of the views I have on ontic vagueness. Lots to think about.

Anyway, I’m now about to get on a plane for San Francisco, for the Pacific APA. It was very exciting seeing the Pacific for the first time as I flew in to SF on the way to Boise; I’m really looking forward to seeing the city and attending the conference.

I’m currently in Atlanta airport.

I didn’t mean to be still here. A combination of tiredness, lack of care with a watch, and (I suspect) there being different timezones in different terminals, mean that I missed my connecting flight.

On the positive side, I was happily making notes on excellent metametaphysics papers while missing my flight. Still, an all-things-considered bad, I think.

But the nice people at Delta rebooked me, and (modulo a taxi journey and quite possibly sleeping at San Jose airport) my travel plans are back in the swing.

So long as I don’t miss another flight through blogging…

I’m off very soon to the INPC metametaphysics conference in Boise. Many other fun people will be there (not least fellow CMM-er Andy McGonigal, fresh from a spell at Cornell).

Together with Iris Einheuser, I’m going to be responding to Ted Sider’s paper “Which disputes are substantive?”. It’s been great to have a serious think about the way that Ted thinks of this stuff, and how it relates to the Kit Fine inspired setting that I’ve been working on lately.

Anyway, the whole writing-a-response thing got way out of hand, and I’ve ended up with a 7,500 word first draft. I do think there’s a couple of substantive issues raised therein for the kind of framework (otherwise really really attractive) that he’s been pushing here and in recent work. The worry centres around quantification into the scope of Ted’s “naturalness” operator. For any who are interested, I’ve put the draft response up online.

After the INPC, I’ll be in San Fran for the Pacific APA, along with many other CMM and Leeds folks.

Things have been very slow on the blogging front recently: a product of hecticity in all aspects of life over the last few weeks. Apologies in particular to those who have left comments

On the research side, I was down in Oxford on Friday giving a talk to the departmental Philosophical Society on “Semantics for nihilists”. This is a paper that’s turning into a more general project of showing how to get truths about macro-objects, or sets, say, without having to having to admit macro-objects into ones ontology. As I think of these things, the real issue here concerns the nature of ontological commitment (Agustin Rayo‘s recent papers convinced me of this). I’m planning to write up this stuff at the next available opportunity. I’m giving it again at a “Structure in Metaphysics” workshop here in Leeds, soon.

I’m also in the process of organizing my trip to Boise, Idaho, for the metametaphysics conference there.

Finally, on the news front: I’m going to be on research leave next year, courtesy of those nice people of the AHRC. It’s for a project called “Intrinsic survival, multiple survival, vague survival”, which takes on a cluster of issues, including intrinsicality, ontic vagueness, fission cases, and the problem of the many. One part of the application was to give regular research updates on this blog, so I’m committed to keep this active while on leave!