Very charitable. My guess is that he has some magical notion of willpower in mind after watching "Life is Beautiful."

Word.

Rebecca: My point was just that it should be unsurprising that there's a disproportionate distribution of responses given that there's a disproportionate distribution of comments to begin with. You seemed to think that this was surprising, since you put it in boldface.

Thanks for raising these interesting and troubling questions, Rebecca. I'm in the middle of my second year of post-doc-hood. I also took a couple of grad seminars through a continuing education program before applying to graduate school, so I guess you're basically writing about me. On question 1: it's hard to say whether the new state of affairs makes for better philosophy getting done. I'm fairly confident that my research has improved from year to year (certainly my publications-per-year has gone up), but presumably that would have happened whether I was doing a post-doc or starting an assistant professorship. The main difference is that, if one has a research post-doc, one has more time to devote to reading, thinking, and writing, so there's a prima facie case that post-docs have more of a chance to improve their research chops. On question 2: as you mention, there's no mystery to people's taking post-docs when they're offered. My first year on the market (2010-11), I applied to 200 positions (!), had a number of interviews, a few fly-outs, and exactly one offer: a post-doc at Notre Dame. If I hadn't received that offer, I would be in a different career right now. The second year on the market was better: I accepted a TT position at the University of Oregon, which I deferred for a year (with their generous permission) to do a post-doc at Princeton. It should be no surprise that these were a stressful couple of years. Something that's sometimes remarked on, but probably not given enough emphasis, is how much of one's time and energy go into getting a job. If one has to do this several years in a row, it really cuts into one's ability to research (and, presumably, the quality of one's teaching). Many (most?) grad students are also under-funded and many have children, this is even more of a problem for them. I know of two couples who put off having kids because the philosopher was in a precarious job situation. If I were to make recommendations (who's listening?...), I would argue that the main things that can be done to blunt the precariousness of many would-be philosophers' situations are: a) don't allow un-funded or under-funded terminal MA programs to get started at your university b) fully-fund your PhD programs, if at all possible c) try to offer multi-year post-docs, if at all possible (if the post-doc is only one year, then the person will spend half of her time frantically going back on the market rather than doing the research she's been hired to do)

Kahneman's advice is of course quite sensible, and should be followed not only by those working on priming but by all right-thinking experimentalists. The silliness of null hypothesis significance testing has been decried for decades. Without replication and meta-analysis, it's hardly better than scribbling some hypotheses on a wall and throwing darts in their general direction while blind-folded. I'm not sure why Eddy singles out the social psychological on character traits, since many situational influences are well-documented by careful meta-analysis (e.g., mood effects, the Milgram paradigm, the Asch paradigm, the unresponsive bystander effect), but it seems to me that a lot of the work in xphi would also benefit from the daisy-chains that Kahneman recommends.

Someday (soon, I hope), claptrap like McGinn's won't even be taken seriously. There are only three ways of relating to the empirical: you can be empirically informed, empirically uninformed, or empirically misinformed. There is no fourth option.