Adrienne Martin & why philosophy is hopeless

The concept of regret is singularly fecund for Economics and Machine Learning and Game theory and so forth. Utility maximization should be replaced by Regret Minimization where Knightian Uncertainty obtains- i.e. where all possible states of the world are not known and no probability distribution is accessible.

Hannan Consistency is something which comes out of the mathematics itself. We can link it to the sort of multiplicative updating weighting algorithm we discover in Evolutionary Game theory.

If regret is 'in the Science', what about Hope? I suppose one could look at 'Hopeful monsters' or otherwise speak of explorations of the fitness landscape. Perhaps, there is already some formalism which fits the bill- or soon will be.

Philosophy, however, can only mislead because it is ignorant and foolish. This, at any rate, is the conclusion I am forced to draw on looking at this brief review, by Ben Sherman, of Prof. Adrienne Martin's 'How we Hope- a Moral Psychology

The introduction and the first two chapters are dedicated mostly to conceptual analysis. Martin proposes a novel conception of hope, and raises objections to what she calls the “orthodox definition” of hope (in the analytic tradition), as well as several recently proposed alternatives to the orthodox definition, arguing that these definitions cannot properly account for the phenomenon of hoping-against-hope. Her conceptual analysis lays the groundwork for her to answer some of the pressing ethical questions about hope, and in the final three chapters she turns to some of the special roles hope is thought to play in ethical life, and considers to what extent hope is really suited to playing these roles.

'Hoping against hope' works because Knightian uncertainty obtains. Miracle cures really are possible coz smart peeps do STEM subjects and only cretins publish philosophy books.

The orthodox definition holds that hope is “a combination of the desire for an outcome and the belief that the desirable outcome is possible but not certain” .

This is fine because it can include Knightian uncertainty.

Martin’s own account of hope is as follows: “to hope for an outcome is to desire (be attracted to) it, to assign a probability somewhere between 1 and 0 to it, and to judge that there are sufficient reasons to engage in certain feelings and activities directed toward it” .

This is completely shit because Knightian uncertainty is ubiquitous. Only a professional gambler or an Actuarial Scientist or a Fintech maven would be permitted to hope- though even then the Casino might be destroyed by an earthquake or some 'black swan effect' might occur falsifying the actuary or Econophysicist's predictions.

Everybody knows this because of Nessim Taleb and the 2008 crash and endless chatter about how Arrow Debreu securities could become 'financial weapons of mass destruction' because they ignored Uncertainty and weren't regret minimizing.

Why did this silly woman publish this ignorant nonsense six years after the crash?

The answer is that those stupid analytical philosophers thought they were in the licencing business.

Thus, the element she thinks is crucially missing from the orthodox definition is a judgment that the probability of the desired outcome licenses certain ways of thinking about that outcome.

So only people trained in probability theory should be allowed to hope. However, the better they are trained, they less they would hope because they would realize that Knightian uncertainty obtains.

An initial problem with this added element is that it seems to rule out the possibility of having hopes we regard as unreasonable. We certainly sometimes struggle to repress hopes for outcomes we reflectively recognize are nigh-impossible (as when I hope there will be no rush hour traffic on the day I am running late). Martin suggests that what we feel in such cases is “not full-fledged hope, but potentially worth calling ‘hope’ anyway”.

to whom would it be worth it? The thing is too trivial.

She also bites the bullet in accepting that, according to her analysis, small children cannot hope until they develop a sufficiently robust conception of reasons and justification, and non-human animals lack the capacity for full-fledged hope .

But she and her colleagues are closer to sheep than people with half a brain. 

Insofar as she means to be analyzing our shared, common-sense conception of hope, these are costly bullets to bite.

What's more, there is no pay off whatsoever. The woman isn't curing cancer or discovering zero point energy or even writing sensibly.

I think most dog-owners would be surprised to hear that the creature lurking alertly under the dinner table is not really hopeful. Martin claims, though, that there are even greater costs to accepting the orthodox definition; in particular, that this definition leaves us “unable to distinguish hope from despair,” at least in cases where the desired outcome is highly improbable .

I haven't verified that the woman actually wrote anything so nonsensical. I may hope she didn't. But it is a forlorn hope.  This does not mean I despair that this cretin wrote this cretinous nonsense. After all, she is an academic and the most we expect from them is that they don't masturbate or shit themselves in public.

She proposes several test cases in which two people desire an outcome equally, and recognize it as equally improbable, but take very different -attitudes; one hopes for the outcome because it is possible, whereas the other despairs because the outcome is so improbable.

while a third farts while betting it happens and a forth shits his pants while betting the other way.

This proves that farting is indistinguishable from shitting your pants. 

This is her most persuasive objection to the orthodox definition, but it involves too many moving parts to be at all decisive.

There is no necessary connection between an emotion- or an underpants even involving the gaseous expulsion of fecal matter- and the calculation of a probability distribution.

Shame on soi disant savants who say this type of stupidity is 'persuasive'.  It is obviously fucked in the head.

For one thing, it is not clear we would want to call a state despair unless it involved thinking the desired state is impossible.

We don't want to link emotions to the calculation of probability distributions. Suppose I'm in a plane which has experienced engine failure under adverse atmospheric conditions. The pilot is probably calculating our odds of survival under different scenarios. I don't want the guy to experience either hope or despair. I want him to keep a cool head and act in an objective manner. Once he has committed to a particular action, he is welcome to broadcast a message of hope. Under no circumstances do I want him screaming 'we're all gonna die!' into the intercom.

Emotions can be considered 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind' which have strategic and mimetic effects and signal preference intensity or epistemic confidence.
It may be that 'Hope' will be as useful as 'Regret'. But Philosophers are simply too stupid and ignorant to contribute anything.