The Five Daniels Podcast

Daniel Rubio, Daniel Munoz, Daniel Greco, and Dan Williams walk into a bar

This article was inspired by the fact that Daniel Muñoz, Daniel Greco, Dan Williams and Daniel Rubio all have the same name. Also in some broader sense by the Biblical author Daniel. Apologies to all the Daniels involved! All the Daniels in question are awesome, and you should read all of their blogs, especially—and his is among my favorite blogs, if not my favorite blog—Daniel’s.

Daniel: Good evening and welcome to the five Daniels podcast. I’m your host, Daniel. I’m here with philosophers Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, and Daniel. On the five Daniels podcast, we discuss philosophy, and other Daniel-related issues. Previous hosts included Victor Kumar and Richard Y Chappell, but they were kicked off when it scandalously came to light that they were not named Daniel. For obvious reasons, the questions we’ll ask of Munoz will be in braille. So, Daniels, good to have you.

The Daniels in unison: Good to be here, I’m Daniel!

My first question is about Bayesianism. What is it? Should we be Bayesians? Why or why not?

Daniel Munoz: I’ll start. I bet you think that, as a deontologist, I hate numbers and mathematical models and can’t even count to 12. But that isn’t so. I love numbers. I love mathematical models. I can count to over 100. One model I like is Bayesianism, which I like because it has numbers, which, even though I’m a deontologist, I can enjoy. In fact, I like numbers so much that while this podcast was starting, I was thinking of derivatives—and not just first derivatives. Also second and third, and perhaps even fourth derivatives.

Essentially the way Bayes’ theorem works is you start with a prior which is how likely some hypothesis is before you consider the evidence. Then you multiply by the evidence strength, which is how many times likelier the evidence is given the hypothesis than given it not being so. This gives you your posterior.

Dan Williams: Now, Sander van der Linden said that it was misinformation to believe in Bayes’ theorem. But this isn’t so. In fact, misinformation isn’t really a virus that spreads but instead mostly just consumed by a small percentage of the population. As I explain in my 39-part series about misinformation, when we really think about the evolutionary origins of falling for misinformation…

Daniel Greco: Bayesianism has this big problem where it assumes that you’re certain that you have your evidence. But this conflicts with probabilism, which says credences shouldn’t be zero or 1.

Daniel Rubio: However, this has been solved by mathematical advancements in hyperordinal set theory. As was proved by the Lubholtz-Skoelberg theorem, one can make them work by taking a measure over their credences. An upside of this is that the ontological argument is sound, but God doesn’t have any moral obligations.

Everyone else pauses because it sounds like Rubio was asking a question. But he was not. Daniel Munoz continues pausing because he is thinking about numbers, which he likes quite a bit.

Daniel (moderator): Okay, very interesting stuff everyone! My next question: who do you think is the Danielic son of man?

Daniel Greco: Well, I don’t think there is one, because the Kolmogorov complexity is too high for God to exist, so he probably doesn’t. Also, to have a disembodied mind, there must be qualia, but those are illusions.

Daniel Rubio: Well, I think it’s Jesus. This is because I went to a Catholic Church, and I really liked the bells, so I concluded Catholicism must be true. The only challenge was squaring Catholicism with consequentialism, universalism, and the falsity of half of Catholic dogma. But overall, I concluded the bells had more evidential force.

Daniel Munoz: Well, I’m pretty undecided about this. I’m undecided about whether second-order meta-prospectivism about axiology is true or false, which is what it hinges on. Caspar Hare has a really good paper on this which I highly recommend, where he constructs a model. And even though I’m a deontologist, I like models. Let’s dispense with this fiction that deontologists can’t do math. In fact, when I was in seventh grade, I got an A+ in geometry.

Daniel (Moderator): Okay, very interesting guys. My next question is: we’ve already booted Richard Y Chappell and Victor Kumar off the island, even though they were Daniels in spirit, because their names weren’t Daniel. Similarly, should we boot Dan Williams off the island, because Dan isn’t Daniel? It’s missing an iel.

Daniel Munoz: No, I don’t think we should. As a deontologist I’m very big on respecting persons, which is my next favorite thing after formal models, so we shouldn’t kick him off.

Daniel Rubio: As a consequentialist, I support killing him and giving his organs to five people. I mean (emits whirring sound as he calculates) this would actually not be utility maximizing because it would increase the probability of going to hell by a small amount, which is vastly more consequential.

Daniel Greco: Yes! In contexts where the question isn’t merely about permitting inquiry, but supporting it, it’s impossible for all views to be equally supported, and anyone allocating limited resources needs to make substantive decisions about which projects are the most promising.

Daniel (moderator): Good stuff! My next question is for the Daniels other than Daniel Rubio. My question is: does it bother you that Daniel Rubio knows math that you don’t know, e.g. about hyperreals and surreals?

Daniel Greco: Well, it made me sad at first, but then I remembered that I could beat him up. How will his theorems do against these fists?

Daniel Munoz: Hmm, I was going to make some comment about as a deontologist liking equations, but I’m worried that joke might be getting stale. So instead, I’ll say that because inequality isn’t the problem, it doesn’t matter if Daniel Rubio knows about hyperreals or whatever.

Dan Williams: Well, you see, as a big Trump supporter (which you know I am because I criticize misinformation research), I don’t care about your highfalutin numbers.

Daniel moderator: Okay my next question: if Richard Chappell’s name was Daniel Chappell, would he be allowed on the podcast?

Dan Williams: Well, as an empiricist, I think that’s an empirical question.

Daniel Rubio: I’m a modal skeptic, so I don’t think we can make confident modal claims about worlds very distant from our own.

Daniel moderator: Okay, question for Daniel Greco. Who the heck is Wansley? Does he write things? Is he an imaginary friend of yours? A second personality?

Daniel Greco: No, no, Wansley is real! Trust me. He just, um, lives in Canada and so doesn’t have time to write.

Daniel moderator: Alright gents, that’s all we have time for. Tune in next week where we’ll discuss whether or not the nothing noths and whether Daniel Munoz is blind. We’ll also debate whether he really graduated from MIT.