Zebras, Intransigence & Semantic Apocalypse: Problems for Dispositional Metasemantics

Apocalypse soon?

When the Lord smote the Philistines with emerods in their secret parts he left it to historians to debate the nature of this lethal affliction. Literally translated, emerods are haemorrhoids, but it is surely unlikely that so hardy a race would have succumbed to an epidemic of piles. Scholarly opinion seems to concur that the emerods were buboes in the groin, one of the agonising manifestations...

APOCALYPSE SOON † by

Based upon a simple vacuum Lagrangian, comprising cosmological and quadratic scalar field terms, a cosmological model is presented whose history is indistinguishable from that of an innocuous low-density cold dark matter (CDM) universe, but whose future is very much shorter. For sensible values of the deceleration parameter (0 < q 0 < 1), its age is greater than 85% of the Hubble time, thus res...

Career Concerns and Policy Intransigence

I investigate why a political leader (manager) may be reluctant to abandon her chosen project, when she is concerned both about social welfare and the electorate’s (shareholders’) beliefs about her ability. The quality of the project is correlated with her ability, and there is ex ante symmetric information. However, news regarding the project arrives gradually over time and is privately observ...

Pulmonology: horses and zebras.

Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence

We study the incremental learning problem for the classification task, a key component in developing life-long learning systems. The main challenges while learning in an incremental manner are to preserve and update the knowledge of the model. In this work, we propose a generalization of Path Integral [24] and EWC [7] with a theoretically grounded KL-divergence based perspective. We show that, ...