Hello, welcome, and thank you for joining us. I'm Kathleen Acock, the Director of Communications in the Graduate Division at the University of California, Berkeley. I encourage all viewers of this lecture to interact with us in the comments section of YouTube. If you could take a moment to share with us where you're joining us from and describe a little bit about your interest in philosophy, we would appreciate it. You may also submit questions throughout the lecture using our Google Form, which I've linked in the YouTube chat. This Google Form is also linked from our Berkeley Graduate Lecture's event webpage. I'm thrilled to introduce our moderator, Professor John Campbell, the Willis S. and Marion Susser Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. Hello, good afternoon, and welcome. It's great that you're able to join us for this Howison lecture. Let me say something about what it means that it's a Howison lecture. George Holmes Howison was born in 1834. When he was 50, he came from the universe after an interesting sheckard career. He came from the University of Washington at St. Louis to take the first endowed chair in philosophy at Berkeley. And Howison built our philosophy department. He was clearly a gregarious, sharp, influential, generous, and much-loved individual. When he died, his friends and colleagues put together a fund, the fund that is funding today's lecture to continue his work. And the idea was to bring the most influential thinkers of the day out here to the rural wilderness of California. Now, for familiar public health reasons, today's session is remote. But of course, that brings opportunities as well as problems. And I very much hope that wherever you're writing from, you'll just let us know where you are and do that on the comment forum, as Kathleen suggested. And we're delighted to have Robert Stalnaker here with us today. He exactly fulfills the terms that Howison is thinking of. He is one of the most distinguished philosophers alive, having made many fundamental contributions to different areas of philosophy. Stalnaker received his PhD from Princeton in 1965. And over the next 50 years, he taught at Yale, Urbana-Champaign, Cornell, and MIT. His influence on generations of graduate students and faculty has been enormous. His work combines spare lucid rigor with great philosophical illumination and depth. He's worked on philosophy of language, particularly the foundations of pragmatics and metaphysics, issues concerning modality and conditionals, and epistemology, particularly the logic of knowledge and contextualism about knowledge. This talk today, I'm excited to tell you, is called Counterfactuals, Compatibilism, and Rational Choice. So please join me in sending vibrations of welcome to Professor Stalnaker across the ether, wherever you are. Professor Stalnaker. Thank you very much, John. And thanks to the House and Committee and the Department for inviting me. It's a great honor and a pleasure to have the opportunity to present these some development, present some ideas. So my talk, I have a handout which is available, normally, be passed out if we were all there, which is available on the website of the lecture. So if you haven't got it, you don't really need it, but it'll help a little bit to remind yourself some of the details. So there's been a lot of philosophical ink spilled over the years about the question whether determinism is compatible with free will. And I'll spill a little bit more on this issue later, but my main concern before getting to that will be with a more general and more abstract puzzle about counterfactual conditionals and determinism. A question about whether, in the context of determinism, we can make sense of the idea that history might have taken a different course from the one it is actually taking. Roughly stated, the puzzle is this. It seems that the assumption that we live in a deterministic world implies that a complete description of the intrinsic state of the world at any given time, together with the laws of nature that are true, entails all the truths about the state of the world at any other time. And this seems to imply that if the course of events had been different from the way it actually has been in any way, however trivial, then either some law of nature would have been false or else the intrinsic state of the world at every time would have been different, at least in small ways, at every time, no matter how far back. So, for example, if I had tied my left shoe before my right this morning, which is sort of the way I did, either some event that happened thousands of years ago would have happened differently or else the laws of nature would have been violated. Or as we'll see later is David Lewis's colorful way of putting this, a miracle would have occurred. Neither seems plausible. Now, the relevance of this puzzle to issues about the compatibility of determinism and free action is clear enough, but the puzzle itself is more general. Since even if the relevant counterfactual is about events that involve only inanimate objects where no issues about action were involved, the conclusion is still unsettling. It would be reasonable to believe that in some circumstances, what happened, my screen went, oh, there he's back, right there. It's reasonable to believe in some circumstances, if it hadn't rained last night, the streets would not be wet this morning. But this does not seem to imply, or it would be strange to say that it applies, that if it hadn't rained, then some intrinsic state of the world 2,000 years ago would have been different from the way it in fact was. Or else, some law of nature would have been violated. The general puzzle was made prominent by David Lewis' discussion of the semantics for conditionals, and by his application of that semantics to counterfactuals. On Lewis' general semantic account, a conditional is true in a given possible world, W, if and only if the consequence of the conditional is true in all of the possible worlds that are most similar in relevant respects to world W. The substantive task of a theory is to spell out the relevant respects of similarity. Now Lewis had a number of metaphysical axes to grind in carrying out this task, which we needn't necessarily share. First, his goal was a reductive analysis to specify the relevant respects of similarity in terms that are aimed to spell out the relevant respects of similarity in ways that are intelligible independently of any causal concepts. So that was one thing. Second, he was aiming in an account, a subsidiary aim, an account of respects of similarity that is temporally neutral. His thesis was that the temporal asymmetry of counterfactuals, obvious intuitively, the asymmetry, and so the temporal asymmetry of counterfactuals and derivatively of causation was the result of asymmetries in the global distribution of particular facts. So in particular, it was important for Lewis to make room for backward causation and time travel, even if our world does not exhibit those kinds of causation or events. So Lewis's formal semantics for conditionals helps to give the general puzzle a sharp formulation and his metaphysical aims and commitments help to explain his particular response to it, but the puzzle itself depends only on pre-theoretic intuitions about ordinary counterfactuals, intuitions that seem difficult to reconcile with determinism. Now the puzzle gets a thorough and careful discussion in a paper that was published about five years ago by Kian Dorr. After giving a rigorous definition of the metaphysical thesis of determinism, not exactly the way I'm gonna explain it, but close enough, Dorr states then three premises about a representative to using a representative counterfactuals as an example, three premises that seem intuitively plausible. And then he derives from them a conclusion that in effect reduces counterfactuals to triviality on the assumption that determinism in his sense he defines is true. That is trivial in the sense that all counterfactuals will turn out to be true. He then examines the premises in conclusion one by one, considering which bullet to bite. Should we reject premises one, two, or three, or should we accept the triviality conclusion in the counterfactuals really don't make sense? The choice is narrowed down to one, reject the premise that the relevant world in which counterfactual supposition is true must be worlds in which the intrinsic state of history, the past history is exactly as it was in the actual world. That's the first premise. Second premise, rejecting the premise that the laws of nature that are true in the counterfactual world must be true in the relevant counterfactual worlds. That no miracles occur in the counterfactual world. Dora's conclusion is that we should take option one and we should hold on to the second premise. There's reject option two. The argument proceeds by bolstering the second premise with examples that there are no miracles and arguing that we can get by with a weaker version of the first premise, one that assumes only that the past history of the counterfactual world must be approximately the same as they are in the actual world. Dora's argument was aimed at Lewis who chose option two and argued for it. That is Lewis wanted to defend the exact similarity of sequences of particular events of priority over small deviations from the laws of nature. Since Lewis had described law violating possible worlds as worlds in which a miracle occurs, Dora titled his paper against counterfactual miracles. Now, in the end, I will have to address, answer Dora's challenge on his terms. But in this talk, I'm gonna take a more indirect approach, aiming to set the problem up in a way that avoids choosing between the two options that he focuses on. And just to give you a spoiler alert, I'm gonna argue that we should reject both of the premises or at least it'll be a consequence of what I'm gonna argue, but once you reject both of the premises, the Dora asks us to choose between. So here's my plan for today. I'm going to first make some brief remarks about determinism, laws of nature, miracles. After this, I'm gonna put two examples of simple counterfactual situations on the table and use these examples to draw some intuitive conclusions about the relationship between determinism, counterfactuals, and other causal notions. I'll then digress to make a brief remark or two about the ways in which counterfactual conditionals are context dependent or context sensitive. And then, and about the relevance of context dependence to the puzzle. In the last part of the talk, I'm going to turn to the more specific tension between determinism and counterfactuals about voluntary action, arguing that getting clear about the general problem helps to clarify the question whether a version of compatibilism can be defended. In particular, I'm gonna argue that there is no incompatibility between determinism and the standard way in which decision situations are modeled in decision theory. I'm gonna conclude by looking at an example and an argument against this version, particular version of decision theory that I will put on the table. And it's an argument that involves the hypothesis that determinism is true. Okay, so now if you have a handout, we're on the section one on laws and determinism. Let's, and this is just really a sequence of quick definitions, not spelled out with any precision and qualification, but just a rough idea of what determinism says. So let's say that a dynamic theory is a theory that has the resources to define a notion of a state of some system, that is the system that's subject matter of the theory, at a time, so it defines the state at a time and it also has a set of laws that constrains the relationship between the states of the system at one time, any one time and the states at other times. Because that's what a dynamic, roughly what a dynamic theory is, a lot of the theories that scientists talk about are dynamic theories of this kind. Say that a theory of this kind is deterministic if and only if the propositions describing the complete state of the system at any one time together with a set of laws entails the state of the system at all other times. Or in some versions of determinism which are only forward looking, not backward looking, it entail the state of the system at all later times from that time to that state. Now we might say further that that's what a deterministic theory might roughly be defined, but we might say that a metaphysical thesis of determinism is true if and only if a deterministic theory of this kind is true and furthermore is comprehensive. Meaning by comprehensive that all the facts about the world are supervenient on determined by the state of the, by a theory of this kind. Okay, so of course, not all things we say about the world are stated in the language of a deterministic theory, but they got to be somehow a different way of talking about the same thing. We might say then further that a fact whether it's stated in the theory or not about a particular time is intrinsic to that time if it is supervenient on the state of the system at that time. Okay, this is a rough and ready characterization of determinism at least some questions open and it has some contentious metaphysical presuppositions but it's enough to raise the puzzle. I'm skeptical about some of the metaphysical presuppositions particularly concerning supervenience and comprehensiveness which I aren't as clear as people often take them to be but I set these worries aside here since I think the puzzle can be diffused without questioning the sort of metaphysical fundamentalism is involved in the definition of determinism. I do however want to point out that while my characterization of determinism does presuppose some kind of metaphysical fundamentalism it does not require the particular metaphysical foundation that David Lewis defended which he called humane supervenience. On Lewis's humane picture the fundamental properties that define the state of the world at a time are wholly independent of the laws of nature. On his account the basic purely natural properties on which the states of the world supervening have in themselves no causal or dispositional consequences. It's really the opposite of that. Some other people have defended the view that what it is to be a property at all fundamental property or not is to be defined in terms of causal powers. So Lewis takes the opposite line on this that fundamental properties have no causal consequences. The characterization of dynamic theories in terms of states at a time in laws and the general characterization of the thesis of metaphysical determinism does not rule out the possibility that there are metaphysically necessary connections even semantic connections between the laws and the states or that there are fundamental theoretical properties that are intrinsic to the things that have them at a time but are also dispositional meaning they have constitutive connections with the way things respond or the developers time goes on. If the fundamental natural properties were dispositional this would spoil Lewis's carefully developed reductive hierarchy essential it was kind of reductivist, humane subvenience. So the hierarchy goes first you explain laws of nature independently of any causal notions. Second, you define counterfactuals by giving criteria of comparative similarity of worlds that depend on the laws but don't depend on any causal notions. Then you define causal dependence in terms of rather counterfactual dependence in terms of counterfactuals and you define causation in terms of counterfactual dependence and each step involves a lot of back and forth. But anyway, that picture that reductive or hierarchical conceptually hierarch conceptual hierarchy is not something that we are going to assume and the puzzle still faces us even if we don't take that. Now I will assume following both Lewis and also most others including Dorr and his argument who talk at all about laws of nature that the laws are true. That is L is a law of nature in a possible world W if and only if L is true and not if and only if L is true in the world W. So it's a subset of the truths in that world. Laws are usually assumed to be contingent truths. So they are propositions that might be false but L would not be a law of a possible world W in which it was false. So if a miracle is defined as a violation of a law of nature then in a sense there can be no miracles. If L is a law of nature in world W then there are no violations of L in world W whether W is an actual world or a contractual world. And Lewis is perfectly clear on this point. He recognizes as a kind of playful misdirection in the very word miracle to describe a violation of the law of nature. But the upshot is that to characterize a possible situation or possible world as one in which a miracle occurs is to give it an essentially counterfactual characterization. To adapt Russell's famous example one might wish that one's yacht were longer than it is but this need not be a wish for the impossible. Similarly, one who wishes for a miracle in the literal and perhaps misleading sense in which it's taken in this puzzle is to wish that the laws of nature were different in a way that did not preclude a certain event that they in fact preclude. And I'll have more to say later about the idea of an essentially counterfactual characterization of a possible situation. Okay, now we're moving on to if you have the handout to the second section I'm just gonna give two examples, two simple examples. These aren't puzzle cases or wild and word counterfactual stories like Twitter or Swampman or something. They're simply straightforward stories of situations in which a counterfactual question naturally arises. But I'm gonna make two points about what I take the examples to show. Okay, first example and this is spelled out on the both spelled out on the handout. It's the last day of the tournament we're on the 18th green. Anika sets up for an 18 foot putt for a birdie which would give her a victory in the tournament. After careful consideration taking account of the wind conditions, the slope of the green and all that, as they always do, she sends the ball on its way and it looks like an excellent chance of reaching the cup and falling in. But when it is just a few feet away the droppings of a seagull who happened to be flying above land right on the ball, slowing and diverting it so that it stops a bit before its intended destination. I don't know what officials do in tournaments when things like this happen, but that's not what we're gonna talk about. Would the putt have sunk if it hadn't been for the bird? We can't know for sure since even putts that look like winners when they're just a couple of feet away sometimes stop just short of the edge of the cup or slide by, but it seems likely that it would have. And it seems certainly on the assumption of determinism that there's a factor of the matter in the actual world about whether it would have. But the spectators in the spectators later discussion of this question would putt have gone in or not, but the philosopher raises the following issue. In the counterfactual situation or situations we're considering what prevented the gull from being there and doing what it did? Did some small miracle intervene diverting the bird's course perhaps resulting in the dropping of its dropping, its load on a car in a nearby parking lot or should we assume that the history of the life of the gull was different at least in minor ways from its beginning? Or maybe because of a small difference in the distant past that gull never existed at all. The other spectators dismissed the philosopher's question as totally irrelevant. It's irrelevant they might have said because whatever explains why the bird happened to do what it did. That fact has no bearing on the event leading to the ball taking exactly the path that it took up to the point where the bird's behavior resulted in an intervention in that causal chain. Okay that's the first example. Second example, easier to follow if you're a poker player but that's not necessary. Sly Pete and Mr. Stone, these are two characters from a famous example and cocted by Alan Gibbard for a different purpose.  But this is a different story from Gibbard's with no cheating involved as his had. Pete has two pair, threes and tens and an ounce with an outside ace. Mr. Stone has the five, six, seven and eight of clubs along with a useless queen of diamonds. Pete deliberates about whether to trade in his ace in the hopes of turning his two pair into a full house but he decides to stand back. Mr. Stone trades in his queen, useless queen with a hope of turning his hand either into a straight if he draws any four or nine to complete the sequence of five cards in order of number or a flush if he draws any club turning it into a hand with all clubs. But since the top card on the deck is the 10 of spades his hand remains worthless after the draw. So he falls when Pete bets. But what would have happened if Pete had traded in his ace in order to try to get a full house? There's no question in this story no matter of debate, he would have drawn the 10 that in fact went to Mr. Stone, the top card on the deck and therefore he would have gotten his full house for three tens and two threes. Stone would have gotten the next card from the top of the deck which happened in fact to be the nine of clubs. So Mr. Stone would have gotten not just a straight or a flush but both, a straight flush. Both players would then have bet big since they both had excellent hands leading to a much more exciting finish with Mr. Stone's straight flush, beating Pete's full house. What the philosopher says, wait a minute we need to consider why Pete would have made a different decision in the relevant counterfactual situation. Was there a little miracle? Perhaps a tweak in his brain, alter his deliberation or was his past history different in perhaps minor ways from the beginning leading to a different thought process and a different decision? Once again, the others in the discussion dismiss his question as totally irrelevant. It's irrelevant they might have said because whatever factors might have led Pete to try for the full house they would not have changed the fact that the top two cards on the deck were as they were. Okay, now two observations about these stories. First, the judgment that the philosopher's questions are totally irrelevant seems intuitively to be completely correct. There is not a, this is not a response this observation is not a response to the argument given in stating the puzzle. We still need to answer it. And it's not a reason to dismiss the argument that Doran spells out in such detail. But it is a datum about counterfactuals on a par with the intuitions about the plausibility of the premises of the argument that are, it's a datum that our response to the puzzle should explain. That is we want to account of the respects and similarity to which there are counterfactual appeals to explain why the concerns of the philosopher, of the philosopher raises in these two examples play no role at all in our judgment about the counterfactuals, the truth or falsity of the counterfactuals that are at issue in these cases. Okay, that's the first observation. The second observation is really the main point is that the intuitive explanation of why the counterfactual questions have the answers they seem to have are entirely compatible with determinism. These explanations appeal to causal chains that are independent of each other, at least up to a certain point. That is to different sequences of events with causal stories that are independent up to a point at which they intersect. The notion of causation and causal independence may play no role at all in the characterization of a dynamic theory or in a definition of determinism, but causal distinctions can be made with the resources of such a theory. Determinism may imply that the state of the world as a whole, all the facts about a certain state of the world at a certain time, the state of the whole world at a certain time, contain the causes of the state of the world as a whole, any of the events at any subsequent time. So the cautious determinist, if asked for a determining cause of a certain event can safely say that it is to be found in a complete description of the state of the world at some time prior to the time in which the event occurred. In fact, at any time prior to the time in which that event occurred. One might, however, want a more informative answer that appeals to some more limited features of the prior state of the world that together with the laws suffice to determine the particular event in question. And while the thesis of determinism alone makes no claim beyond the global one, any specific dynamic theory deterministic or not can be expected to imply some more specific claims about ways that partial descriptions of the state of the world at one time constrain the state of the world at certain later times. And generalizations of this kind may contribute to characterization of notions of causal independence and causal change. And these may play a role in specifying the respects of similarity that are relevant to the interpretation of counterfactuals. In Lewis's reductive project with its hierarchy of definitions, causal and counterfactual dependence are defined in terms of counterfactuals. And any appeal to such notions in specifying the respects of similarity that are relevant to the truth conditions of counterfactuals would be circular. But we have left that project behind. And even if you go for that project, you've still got, then you've got analyses of these causal notions, but there still can be generalizations about the role of counterfactuals in relation to this relevant similarity notions. And so the compatibility with determinants is still one you have. Okay, we'll come back to the point, the second point, but I wanna digress now to say a little bit about context dependence because everybody agrees that counterfactuals are context dependent. And in particular, there are different kinds of counterfactual, famous examples of cases where an indicative conditional or the epistemic conditional has a totally different meaning from a counterfactual conditional. So the famous example of, if Shakespeare hadn't written Hamlet, nobody would have written it, but if Shakespeare didn't write Hamlet then somebody else did because Hamlet was written. So epistemic conditionals have different truth conditions from counterfactuals. And then there are so-called backtracking conditionals which sometimes have different truth values from forwards as where you say, if so and so it happened, that would have been because sudden such would have happened before we look back. But sometimes what is assumed is that the way in which counterfactuals are context-dependent is wholly determined by a general specification of respects of similarity used to interpret particular conditional sentences or thoughts. And it's sometimes also assumed that there's one standard compared to similarity relation that's relevant to the interpretation of the kind of counterfactuals, they give rise to the puzzle. One that contrasts with what are called backtracking conditionals and also with epistemic conditionals that are interpreted with a different comparative similarity relation. And while the comparative similarity relation is treated as a parameter determined by context, people making the point that counterfactual context-dependent say little about what a context is or what it is about the context that determines the value of this parameter relative to which counterfactuals are interpreted. Now, I think one has to look at the question, what is a context? I've defended the view in other places that conversational context should be modeled by the common ground, the set of possibilities that are compatible with what the participants in the conversation presume to be common knowledge. Common ground is a certain information state. It's definable in terms of propositional attitudes of a certain kind of the members of the relevant group, though it's not a propositional attitude of any one person, but rather something definable in terms of their attitudes. It's been suggested, and I'm in full agreement with this suggestion that an important element of certain propositional attitudes is this which understand them, both knowledge and belief, as an element of a propositional attitudes, a set of relevant alternatives determined by a set of questions at issue. So linguists have talked about this, Craig Roberts, for example, Jonathan Shaffer, contrastivism about knowledge in other places, talks about the partition of relevant alternatives. My favorite paper on this issue, defending this line is by Seth Yeltsin, which I put in a handout, references in the handout, talking about a kind of grain of representation. So you take a partition of a space of possibility as you're an element of what it is to believe. Believe is a matter of having a certain way of distinguishing between those relevant alternatives. A context set that models the common ground if you follow this suggestion is not just a set of possible total universes compatible with what is presupposed or taken to be common ground, but rather it's a partition of logical space that determines those distinctions, includes a partition of logical space that determines those distinctions between possible worlds that are relevant to the issues under discussion. So this assumption applies when we apply it to counterfactuals, that the parameter of interpretation of counterfactuals that context determines should be a comparative similarity in relation on the members of a partition of a set of possible worlds, the relevant alternatives. Now Saul Kripke among others has made the point that the formal apparatus, so if you can look at the formal models of these contexts and of attitudes and so on, the formal apparatus of possible world semantics applies naturally to cases in which what plays the role of the possible worlds are what Kripke called mini worlds, other people do, defined by perhaps a perhaps coarse-grained partition of a space of possibilities. Remember naming necessity in the introduction, Kripke talks about a little toy example of 36 possible states of the world. That are the possible ways that a pair of dice could land. And we do probability exercises with such a set of possible worlds. But as Kripke says, we just ignore the other differences, but the formal apparatus applies perfectly well. On this view, the context for interpretation of a conditional determines not just a particular comparative similarity relation, but also a set of elements on which the relation is defined. The context can be expected to determine some general constraints on the respects of similarity that should be held fixed in the most similar of the relevant alternatives. But the application of those constraints will depend on the particular partition of logical space that determines or is determined by the questions at issue. And the questions at issue may themselves help determine the general constraints that are relevant. Now, the hypothesis that the terms of the similarity relation are relevant alternatives modeled by a partitioned cells of logical space as consequences for both of the theses, the door asks us to choose between these discussion of the puzzle. First, that the past of the one of the assumptions that he wants to reject, the past of the counterfactual event must be exactly rather than merely approximately the same as it is in the actual situation. And two, that the actual laws of nature must be true in the counterfactual situation rather than just approximately true, permitting only small miracles. We might suppose without contradicting determinism, that the counterfactual past is exactly the same as the actual past with respect to the questions at issue. And that the causal relations between events in the counterfactual situation are fully compatible with all of the actual laws. But if we're talking not about the relevant alternative possibilities, but about the whole universes that realize those possibilities, then either of these similarities might be only approximate. The questions at issue and the assumptions that they are part of the context help to sharpen the kind of approximations that are permitted. I mean, one of the things when you move from exact similarity to approximate similarity, you immediately just open everything up because you can always sort of adjust what's approximately true to suit your purposes. But if you have questions at issue that helps to pin down, approximately means exactly with respect to those questions. Okay, in line of these, now we're moving on to section four and hand on. In light of these general considerations about counterfactuals, I'm gonna look at one particular kind of context in which counterfactuals as well as epistemic conditionals play a particularly a prominent role. Context of deliberation and context in which the decisions that are made are assessed. The main questions at issue in a context of deliberation are in the case of deliberation, which of the set of alternative actions to choose and what the consequences of deliberation are in the case of deliberation, which of the set of alternative actions to choose and what the consequences of those choices would be and in the case of assessment, whether the choice made was the right one and more generally, how that choice compares with alternatives to it. The way that decision theory, at least causal decision theory, models such contexts, the questions at issue and the notion of causal independence play an explicit role. Now, in David Lewis's way of spelling out the model and David Lewis is here. This is not connected with his humane supervenience and dependence project, but Lewis's way of spelling out a model for decision situation. There are two cross-cutting partitions of a space of alternatives. One determined by a set of actions that are presumed to be available to the agent and the other specified in terms of the action partition. The second partition, which Lewis labels the dependency hypotheses is defined as follows for a particular agent and time. A dependency hypothesis is in this quoting Lewis a maximally specific proposition about how things the agent cares about do and do not depend causally on his present actions. The idea is that the dependency hypotheses are propositions that are causally or counterfactually independent of the propositions in the action partition, but that when conjoined with one of the action propositions entails answers to all of the questions about things the agent values positively or negatively. So the grain or partition in this case is going to be the intersections of these two cross-cutting partitions. And that's a partition itself. So the main lesson I wanna take from a general discussion is that this kind of model of a decision situation and the notion of causal independence that it presupposes is not in conflict with determinism. If our general discussion succeeds in diffusing the general puzzle, I think it goes a long way toward diffusing the consequence of it. Though it must be acknowledged that I fully satisfactory compatible response to that argument will require that we say something constructive about the basis in a model of the kind that Lewis outlines, decision theory model for the basis for describing the first partition as the set of alternative actions or action propositions. That is for describing it as a set of alternatives that are in some sense available actions for the agent at the time. But getting clear about counterfactuals and their relation to determinism helps make room for a representation of a decision situation that clarifies and sharpens the challenge that a compatibilist needs to meet. Now most of this is further work that I'm here just trying to set up but in carrying out that further work the specter of determinism will continue to raise its ugly head. I'm going to conclude today by taking a quick look at an argument against the adequacy of this kind of model of a decision problem. At least in the context where the thesis of determinism is presupposed. Okay, so now we're on to the last part of the handout betting on the past. So Ari Amit has developed the most resourceful and imaginative critique of causal decision theory. And one of his arguments is that if we assume determinism this decision theory gives the wrong answer to what a rational agent should do in the following decision problem. Okay, so this is a quotation from him stating the problem. In my pocket says, Bob, I have a slip of paper on which you've written a proposition P. You must choose between two bets. You got a bet on P but you can do it at two different sets of odds. Bet one is a bet of P on 10 to one for a stake of $1. Bet two is a bet on P at one to 10 for a stake of $10, things of opposite odds. Before you choose whether to take bet one or bet two I should tell you what P is. It is the proposition that the past state of the world was such that such as to cause you now to take bet two. Amit suggests that we might make P this proposition more precise by identifying a particular time say one that is many years ago, many years before you and or Bob were born. You know, 1900s at just 1000 BC, whatever. He then argues that it's obvious you ought to take bet two. This is the normative premise, the intuitive premise about what rationality requires. And that causal decision, the second conclusion he draws is causal decision theory implies you should take that one by a principle of dominance that the causal decision theorist accepts. So just to get this clear, this is the matrix that he draws for this problem. So P and not P are distant past statements, statements about the distant past. So we take them to be the dependency hypotheses. Bet one, if P is true, you win $10 if you take bet one and you win $1 if you take bet two. So bet one is better if P is true. If P is false, then you lose a dollar if you take bet one and you lose $10 if you take bet two. So it's still better to take bet one. But bet two is obviously what you should take. And I agree about the normative premise, but the mistake in Ahmed's argument is that is that one should take bet one or the other one should take bet two. The mistake in Ahmed's argument is the assumption because the truth or falsity of P was settled by facts about the distant past as all facts are, it is therefore entailed by the true dependency hypothesis. But the point of the causal decision theorist framework was to distinguish features of the world that are counterfactually independent of the action from those that are not. The compatibilist acknowledges, Ahmed is a compatibilist. He just accepts the premises of the argument against compatibilism. The compatibilist acknowledges that the agent's choice has a causal history and that if determinism is true, then events in the distant past determine both the agent's choices and the events that would have happened, whatever choice had been made. So I think the person facing the choice, let's call her Alice, should reason like this. Assuming the thesis of determinism, which both Bob and I presuppose, to say that the past is such as to determine that I choose bet two, is just a roundabout way of saying that I choose bet two or similarly for bet one. So there is really just one dependency hypothesis that says the following. If I choose bet one, I lose a dollar. And if I choose bet two, I gain a dollar. It's a no-brainer. I go for bet two. In fact, unlike Newcombe's problem, you can easily play this game at home. Assuming that it's, for Newcombe's problem, you need a super predictor. But here you don't need any special powers. All you have to do is to believe determinism or to be prepared to presuppose it. So I might offer you a dollar to play the role of Bob. And you can ask yourself, would you accept if I did? If you accept, you probably won't make any money, but you can't lose any. In deciding whether to take my offer, Alice's choice is your dependency hypothesis. As you don't have any control over that, that's something that she'll do whatever whether whoever it is for the bet. If she takes bet one, you gain an extra dollar. And if she takes bet two, as she surely will, you break even. So, if you wanna test out your views about free will, we'll go home and play this game. Now, the reason you can play this game at home without having any special insight into the distant past or into Alice's state of mind is that Alice's choice is causally relevant to whether Bob pays or collects, even if it's not causally relevant to whether P is true or false. Now, this is a loophole which Ahmed recognizes in his story and he suggests that we might block this feature of the story by supposing that the payoffs in the matrix above represent not money that Bob would give her or collect from her, but rather just utility values that she attaches directly, that's quoting him, values that she attaches directly through the possible outcomes. Suppose for some reason, it doesn't matter what it is, she ranks her preferences over possible states of affairs this way. Best outcome, take bet one while P is true. Second best outcome, take bet two while P is true. Third best, take bet one while P is false. Worst outcome, take bet two while P is false. And then you can read that off the matrix by saying what the four alternative possible outcomes are as represented in that matrix. But notice that the best and the worst of these four descriptions of possible situations are essentially counterfactual specifications like the situation you wish for when you wish that a yacht were longer than it is. A situation in which bet one is taken while the past is such as to determine that bet one is not taken, I'm sorry, a situation in which bet one is taken while the past is such as to determine that bet one is not taken must be a situation in which a miracle happens and things that were determined to happen don't happen where some actual law of nature is false. But no miracle occurs in this counterfactual situation. The laws that hold in that situation are not vital. Situations defined by an essentially counterfactual specification are not options available in deliberation. Although in a retrospective assessment of a decision, some options one did have may be specified in that way. Let's define, for example, a road not taken as an action when considers in deliberation but in the end rejects. O'Leary is always second guessing his decisions, often regretting the choices he has made. Noting this trend, he resolves in the future to avoid regrettable choices by sometimes taking roads not taken. And he's frustrated by the fact that he never succeeds. He concludes that he is not as free as he had thought. The fatalism argument, not the consequence argument, but the fatalism argument turns on the conflation of the sense in which one cannot choose what one does not choose and the sense in which sometimes one can or at least could have. The consequence argument, I think, turns on a more subtle version of his fallacy, although there's obviously a lot more else going on. Now, in my homie version of Ahmet's story, the one you can play at home, Bob's knowledge of whether P is true or false is causally downstream from Alice's action. But as Ahmet observes, it might be that Bob knew this prior to and independently of his choice. This is certainly possible. And in fact, it's not at all unrealistic. Many free decisions are predictable and in many cases one could say that someone before the fact knew what I was gonna do and that wouldn't prevent me from freely doing it. Many free decisions are predictable, particularly when there are no brainers like Alice's choice. She knew what she was gonna do before the time came to commit herself and Bob, knowing that she was clearheaded, might have known that she was the kind of person who would make the rational choice. That does not imply that Bob's knowledge and so Alice's choice is a consequence of the true dependency hypothesis. The counterfactual, if Alice had chosen differently, Bob's belief would not have been knowledge is a true counterfactual. The contexts of deliberation and retrospective assessment of decisions taken involve a complex interaction of temporal, causal, normative and epistemic considerations to give rise to a range of puzzles about choice and about an agent's capacity for choice. I think the causal decision theorist model helps to sharpen and clarify some of those puzzles, but we need to disarm the tacit assumption that determinism obliterates all causal distinctions in order to make room for a project of this kind. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Well, thank you for that beautiful talk. Thank you. Professor Zellmacher. Okay. We'd usually, at this point, stop for buns and cookies and wine, but not being able to do that. Maybe while we were waiting for people to type in their questions, I could just ask you a little bit about what you just said. Yes, go ahead. In particular, how you're handling backtracking conditionals, the idea is that to determine which possible worlds are relevant to the interpretation of a counterfactual, we should be looking at the common ground and what is happening to the common ground and the conversation, and in doing that, we can help ourselves to the notion of causation. Is it causation? Yes. Yeah. So we don't need the Lewis, the very austere thing where we drop causation here and try and define similarity without causation. Right, yeah. That's an important move. But that's not really essential to the story because Lewis would not disagree that causation is going to play a role in practical assess evaluation, but causation itself should be analyzed in other terms. But still, I do think that this whole notion of a hierarchy of definitions plays a role in a number of places in these arguments. And I think the idea that we're looking here for conceptual interconnections and we can have them, constitutive connections, say between causal notions and temporal notions and so on, even if we don't have any analysis that's sort of reducing things step by step in some way. I don't want to say about backtracking conditional. I mean, one of the things that, the way normal way of thinking about backtracking additional is that there's just different criteria of similarity. But I think the main thing is different questions that issue. So the question, if the question is, how did it get that way? How did a certain fact get that way? One looks back to the causes of it. And when considers what would have had to been different for the thing to be different. So they're different questions at issue. And in some cases, that's gonna force you to have different priorities with respect to what's more possibilities and more similar to than others. But it's different possibilities that you're considering is the main thing. And as for the most part, a backtracking conditional doesn't assume different criteria of similarity. It just asks a different question. But in sort of memorable cases as different, like Frank Jackson has this example of, you know, if he jumped off the bridge, he would have died, you know, no, he wouldn't have because he wouldn't have jumped off the bridge unless there were a safety net below. Yeah. And so that's going to a totally different counterfactual situation. But you can also ask a backtracking conditional, which really orders things in the same ways. And in my slide, Pete exam, he might ask, how come he didn't take a card? He should have. It would have been much better strategy given what he knew to take another card, but he didn't. Why didn't he? Well, that's a different question, but it's a question about the same situation. Okay. Just one last thing in this, while we're waiting for questions to come in, which I hope people will type in. When you were talking about practical deliberation, when you moved to talking about practical deliberation, I may have been naively hearing this, but I was thinking that sometimes backtracking conditionals are very relevant to deliberation as to what to do. I mean, if, for example, you and I are burgling a house together, you know, something we've done many times and your task is to get inside the house and loosen a window for me to get in. When I get to the house, if I find the window loose, I think, ah, if it's loose, then my colleague must be inside the house. That can only be because my colleague is inside the house. So now I know how to proceed. So in practical deliberation, then we're often going to have to consider backtracking conditionals. Yeah. So it's certainly not that we want some way of thinking about the interpretation of the conditionals in practical reasoning that will simply let us sideline the backtracking and say, I only wanna look at the future. In fact, the context of deliberation, these are epistemic conditionals too.  The main question that issue involves, if I do this, then so and so. But in trying to figure out what the dependency hypotheses are, that is what the causally independent facts are, you may use backtracking reasoning. That's an epistemic form of reasoning. As you say, you wanna, you don't know whether your partner is in the house yet. And so that's an open question. And the backtracking is a way to get at what the answer to that question is. So quick counterfactuals of any kind may enter into, but the specific kind of causal context and the notion of causal independence is playing a role in all of these, in all of these things. So in fact, you say, well, whether he's in the house or not, it's not causally independent of whether the window is loose, but if it's, the cause goes the other way, in that case, from him being in there to the window. Okay, we only have a couple of minutes, but we have a question from Roger and Berkeley, who says, you refer to the laws of nature as if they are deterministic. Since we discovered that the world appears to operate under the laws of quantum mechanics where all events proceed only probabilistic, i measurements are always approximate. There are many possible outcomes and sequences of events, et cetera. Does this modern physics affect your view of counterfactuals and determinism? Okay, so first, I wanna separate the question what a law of nature is or how it's modeled and defining a dynamic theory from the question whether the laws are deterministic. So you can have laws of, I mean, what's essential to the laws of nature is that they constrain in some way, or they have made claims about the relationship between the state of the world at one time and the state of the world at other times, but there are non-deterministic laws of nature which do constrain, but they constrain it in a non-deterministic way by saying that the outcome have to be one of these and it may assign, the laws may assign a probability value to those things. So even if chance is a feature of the most basic laws of nature, as Louis thought and other people think, those questions about exactly how quantum mechanics should be spelled out, I'm sure, I know, I don't know much about it, but the idea of a deterministic law is just a special kind of law, but not part of the definition of it. I hope that gets at what he's asking. I think so, but I'll watch out for anything else coming in on this. Just, we'll have to stop, I think, in just a second. On your, you said you had some reservations about the thesis of metaphysical determinism, very strong thesis. I guess I wondered about pluralism. I mean, if you think about Nancy Cartwright's picture, for example, of there being no one physical theory that governs all the world, but just many overlapping theories, would you be sympathetic to those kinds of doubts about? Oh yeah, no, and more than that, I mean, I think one can separate the question, what's fundamental science like from the question? I mean, there is a question, does that determine all the other? I mean, the questions that mix normative and factual in a way that's hard to sort out, there's fagness and so on. And so the very claim that all the facts are supervenient on the fact stated in one fundamental scientific theory is it can be called into question both on the grounds that maybe there isn't just one, maybe the left side scientific theories that overlap or that govern different domains and so on and there's no way of unifying them all together, but to add to that, the rest of our discourse, the rest of the things we talk about and we talk about the world and how much of that is not reducible in a piece by piece way, but it is in some way wholly determined by that and that's what I'm skeptical about. Okay, that's wonderful. Well, thank you very much. It's frustrating, but I think we do have to stop here and we'll look forward to carrying on discussion with you tomorrow in the department colloquium. Very good, thank you. So meantime, on behalf of what I'm sure is a vast scattered audience, let me thank you very much for that. Thanks, thank you. Thank you all. I stand in for everyone. Okay, thanks very much. Thank you.


This is one of the most incredible parts of Saksa Waman and the one least explainable by the local guides. This stone here is at least 15 feet long, 5 to 6 feet wide and 4 to 5 feet tall. The groove in it along the whole length is almost perfect like the old statement of you can't fit a human hair in there. The rock this is made from is pink granite. This, which I didn't notice before, is older and this is probably dire right. You can see that it also has been shaped. It seems similar to some of the stone that we've seen at other places. One's in Cusco, like at Kinko, where my guide who's native born and bred in Cusco dates that site at 5,000 years, 3,000 BC. Could the ancients of Cusco have built a massive complex to protect him from the synchrotron radiation and x-ray during the squatter man manifestation? If the theory that all of Cusco was laid out to form a puma shape when seen from above is correct, then Saksa Waman was its head. The fortress has three distinct terraces which receive backwards on each other. The walls each reaching a height of 18 meters are laid out in a zigzag fashion stretching over 540 meters so that each wall has up to 40 segments. Eyewitness Spanish accounts describe a large circular four or five-story tower centrally placed within the fortress and its foundations along with those for two others can be seen today. The fortress was said to have had a capacity for at least a thousand warriors, but it was rarely needed as the Inca did not suffer invasions from enemy states. Saksa Waman was designed as much more than a fortress. The complex included temples, notably one of the sun god Enti. Enti was the Incan god of the sun, the one whom shone brightest and considered all powerful but he was also a benevolent god and capable of great generosity. However, Enti could be angered and he would demonstrate his displeasure through solar eclipses which necessitated sacrifice to win back the gods good favor. Incan rulers considered themselves direct descendants of Enti just as the Pharaohs of Egypt considered themselves gods incarnation. The fear of the god manifest from the squatter man, the one whom once shone brightest. The giver of life, the grower of crops and manifested intro the discrete phases in the squatter field. A confusion occurs and an assimilation of thought reaches us today for us to decipher. Enti was the sun but probably not the sun of today. This was the light of the golden age and widely regarded to have possibly been the planet Saturn before a supernova event radiated in the solar system. Within the mountains earth people seek shelter and in Cusco they built Saksa Waman to protect him from these intense atmospheric disturbances. Enti was the sun which in Incan mythology was created by the supreme Incan deity Viracocha from an island on Lake Tiricaca. Although Viracocha was higher in status he usually remained in the background of worldly affairs and allowed intermediaries such as Enti to actually govern the world. Enti was married to the goddess of the moon Cuela. Nately linking the gods to mankind the first Incan leader and founder of the civilization Manacapa was believed either to have been instructed by Enti or actually been his son. Along with the other original Incan ancestors such as Mamakoya who was also described as Enti's wife in some versions of the myth. Completely reminiscent of the so called Osiris myth of Egypt and this means that these people saw something in the sky matching up these gods stories provides eerie echoes of what was witnessed. In this way the successive Incan rulers could claim divine lineage and emphasize their role as intermediaries between the gods and ordinary people. Manacapa even wore a sheet gold costume to impress the populace with his divine parentage. However it was not until the 9th Incan ruler Pachakuti Incan Yupangwe that the cult of Enti really became established in the cultural practices of the Inca. With the expansion of the Incan Empire sun worship was incorporated into the religions of the conquered peoples and used as an imperial propaganda that the Incan were the people with a divine right to rule. The mask of Enti were typically made of thinly beaten gold and also had the suns rays bursting from the gods head in a design common in pre-Incan deity mask. These rays were typically cut in a dramatic zigzag fashion and sometimes ended in a small human face or figure. The most famous such mask was on display within the Corricancia Temple at Cusco. But what do you guys think about this anyway? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching. Okay, we're now approaching the largest stones of the zigzag wall in Saksa-Uma.  That one is negative. And this one is cross. But the positive across, the negative at the minus side. And the middle is a quartz, no? The truth. The truth. So after us, the people did the same thing. They did the same thing. They did the same thing. They did the same thing. They did the same thing. He said in the past what he used to do is touch the positive energy with a quartz. The belly button here. Right now we can do that because we're in circles. But if we came early in the morning, we might be able to do that.


OK, everybody, if we could grab your seats. We're live, Chris. OK, thank you, everyone. We're now going to do a quick wrap-up of day one of the NF Core Hackathon, October 2023 in Barcelona. Thank you, everyone, here today in person. It's been an amazing day seeing everyone talking, kind of socializing, and getting a lot of stuff done. By the number of people who have come and asked me, can we do this new thing? I feel like it's been a productive day, so it's good signs. Hopefully, everyone's had a really good time. We are going to quickly have a few wrap-up slides for me, group leaders, just to summarize some of the work we've done. Now, I know there's a lot of you here today in person and online, and it's kind of impossible to represent everything that everyone's done. So apologies in advance to those of you who may feel underrepresented on the slides. We're going to try and strike the balance of it not being boring and too thorough, but give it a flavor of the kind of things that people have been working on today. So without further ado, who wants to go first? Yeah? Sure, like this. OK, hey, everyone. First of all, thank you to everyone and the modules and sub-workflows group for adding a bunch of new modules. I have the feeling the numbers are a bit low if I look at the GitHub repository. But in any case, we had about, I think, 13 new modules or more today for a bunch of different things. Then several people worked on adding NF tests for some modules. And we had multiple bugs fixed, bugs fixed, and Adam added this new, oh, sorry, better. OK, we had 13 new modules for anyone who didn't hear me. NF tests added for several modules, several bugs fixed, and sub-workflows. As I mentioned, I think the numbers are a bit low, so I kind of just checked a bit on the projects board. But we had 13 new modules, 13 PR open and 11 of closed, and 11 PRs reviewed. So don't forget to add your PRs for today still or also for tomorrow then. Yes, it has not been updated. Can I? Oops. How do I do full screen? How do I do full screen with that? Sorry. A slideshow. Hello, everyone. Yes, sorry, I'm so bad with the Mac. You should never let me get close to a Mac. So yes, pipeline team, we've been like, not we. Everyone else but me has been working amazingly well, so that's good. Like, congratulations to all of you. I'm proud to be part of this team. So I think one of the biggest stuff was the consensus that we started this world discussion about refactoring the pipeline to accommodate NF tests, so that was good. We added first NF tests for some everyday SICK module. There was adding some NF test module in some NF tests in the NFCore fund scan, adding some new crack and sub workflow to the demultiplex pipeline as well, updating some of the pipeline as well as we said, so Metal SICK, adding some new profiler in the tax profiler pipeline, adding some new stuff in the differential abundance pipeline, adding new module to Sarek, better docs in differential abundance as well, a metromap as well in... Oh, good job. No, no, that's nice. And now, like, fetch SDS metadata that can use FFQ. So, oh, that's amazing. Congrats Rob on that. And yes, next slide, sorry. That's already... So, good job everyone. And I will do better tomorrow. Yes, hello everybody from the infrastructure group. We were this smallish group here, but also one online, Marius. And we worked on, as usual with infrastructure on everything. So first in the morning, we got the AWS CLR runners running for the modules. So we... You got these starting models through because we had free runners. So, and similar with the pipelines, this will also then in the future, hopefully run on AWS. So we don't run into the issues with the GitHub runner limits. We still run into issues with the GitHub API limits, but that's a different story. Then, Niklas was working on general bug fixes in the NF validation. And also, I think, especially for Sarek, added support for sample sheets with no headers. Alfred picked up three stale PRs, which were all dealing with type checking in NFCore tools. So we will now get types in tools, which is very exciting. And Sofia worked on the website to add an accordion effect on the parameter pages so you don't need to see the whole group, but you can close them down and scroll faster to certain sections. And Marius, who's online, did many things. Specifically, he added some more documentation about using profile debug, which I actually didn't know about. So you never stop learning when reviewing PRs. In total, we reviewed around nine PRs. We opened one issue in closed five, so win. We opened three PRs, merged 11, again, win. And I closed one because Jose was faster than me with a PR, so yeah, that's what we have one person. Thank you very much. Howdy, folks. My name is Ben Sherman, and I'm in charge of this new Nextflow Plugins Group. If you're wondering who I am, I wasn't here this morning because I was stuck in passport control. Not because I'm a sketchy individual, but because there was just a really long line. I got through just fine once I made it to the front of the line. So now we're here, and we got all kinds of stuff going on now in the Nextflow Codebase and a growing ecosystem of plugins. First of all, in the Nextflow Codebase, we got Jordy, my colleague. He's working on this issue that has been around for a little while. Some people have requested basically being able to specify a checksum whenever you download a remote file, say like from an HTTP URL, being able to provide that checksum so that it'll verify it for you. He told me that he just finished it before he left, and he's gonna test it tomorrow. We got Mahesh working on the join operator and some other operators to make them work better with the typical structure that you guys like to use where you have like a metamap and you wanna be able to say like join items based on certain keys within the metamap. By the way, if you wanna join on just the whole metamap, you can just do that, but if you wanna do certain kinds of keys, that's gonna require some extra plumbing. So he's working on that. We got Francesco, who wants to expand the Nextflow training to include some sections about, I believe by application-specific, he means some trainings that where you work through specific enough core pipelines just to show you how to use them for whatever analysis they're designed for. And then we've got this new plugin called the NFCO Tube Footprint that'll basically show you how fast you're burning the world with every analysis you run. And so it looks like Sabrina is leading that and she's adding some stuff from Green Algorithms. I don't actually know what that is, but I assume it's achieving her goals. So go Sabrina. We got enough proof. So this was actually started last year by Bruno Grande. He's since moved on to better places and he handed the plugin over to me. And so now I'm working on it. You may have seen some releases on Slack recently. We added support for bio-computed objects. I'm now working on AutoCrate. Specifically, this is called the Work for a Run AutoCrate, which is, I would say, a more detailed provenance report for your pipeline runs that'll include stuff like input files, output files, even like the specific tools and scripts you ran, which apparently you guys like this format out here in Europe, so we're gonna make that for you. And then Rob Newman is just working on a tiny little improvement where whenever you have input files that came from, say, like a GitHub repo or GitLab repo, that the provenance report actually shows that URL, so you can just click on it instead of whatever local path it gets staged to. So that'll be nice. And then we also got our friends from Quilt Data, Ernie and Kevin. So they've been spinning today trying to set up a, I believe, an S3 bucket that they'd like you guys to use that you'll be able to upload on Quilt packages too. If you're not familiar with this Quilt plugin, basically it's the plugin itself, if you do a pipeline run with it, at the end of the run, it will create a Quilt package, which you could think of it as sort of like a provenance report, but it contains a lot. You can really put whatever you want in it and uploads it to a bucket, like a S3 bucket, and then Quilt has a browser where you can go and view all that stuff kind of like GitHub, but for data results. And so what they'd like to do for this hackathon is collect, maybe make a few example packages for all the different NF Core pipelines. So if you guys are interested in that at all, please go talk to them or message them on Slack because they probably need your help to figure out how to create those packages and they can help you get started with that too. I forgot to add a funny GIF. I'm sorry. I'll try to do better next time. That's all I got. Thank you folks. Brilliant. So just to wrap up, thank you very much everyone. Thank you to our project leaders there for giving us an overview of everything. And thank you to all of you, both here in person and also online for hacking with us. Some really exciting start to a day. Hopefully everyone feels like they're really kind of got sunk into it now. Know what they're doing and we'll kick off again 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. Can be back here and sort of just crack straight back on again basically. Quick reminder, tomorrow we have the hackathon social in the evening. Remember there's not very long to get there. So we're gonna be doing the same wrap up, six to six thirty tomorrow evening. And then we've got to get to the venue to be there ready to start at seven. So basically you're probably gonna have to come straight from here. So just bear that in mind, bring anything you need with you. And we'll all sort of probably track over in a big group. Otherwise, thanks very much. And we'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning. Have a good evening.


Create a team vision that your team understands and relates to and you give them better direction and motivation. Explain the purpose of your team and how their work creates value for the company as a whole is very motivational for most people. When you link your team vision into the functional goals and the company's strategy, you are helping your team understand the context of their work, how they fit into the bigger picture and what they can do to be individually successful and contribute to the companies and team's success. We all feel happier and more fulfilled when we can directly see how our work creates value for the wider team and knowing how our work fits into the company's strategy provides safety and knowledge that our bosses will be happy. Create a team vision to link what each person does day to day to the bigger picture and your team will be happier, more motivated and ultimately more successful. We are going through these seven ways to create a team vision and link company strategy to your team. The last few steps are sharing tips of how to implement your vision or turn it from a good idea into reality for you and your team, which is usually the hardest part. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here in Hans Dot Training Shares, people manager and expertise, resources and courses to speed up your journey to becoming a great manager. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as the video timestamps, so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. The first way to create a team vision is to understand the company strategy. Linking company strategy to team objectives is a great way to keep your bosses happy and your team efforts coordinated with everyone else's efforts. Companies estimate that more than 70% of companies fail to implement their strategies and achieve the success they should. How to create your team vision is easier when you start with looking at the function you work in. You know, what underlying purpose does your function undertake within the business and what are the functional goals? Understand this before you think about explaining the purpose of your team. Firstly, for instance, your finances purpose might be to create performance visibility and increasing profitability and the cash generation of the company. Secondly, a marketing might be to build a recognised and trusted brand and increase the number of leads fed into the sales team. And sales might be to increase the conversion rate of the leads generated and grow sales by recruiting and training a strong, knowledgeable sales team. Understand what your function's role and purpose is in relation to the company's strategy before you think about how to create a team vision. Depending on the size of your team, your team might be the function or it might be part of the function. The smaller your team in relation to the business, the smaller the part of the company strategy your team's work will feed into as a general role. Communicating strategy to your team should be focused on what role they specifically play in implementing the company strategy. Second, when linking company strategy to your team, work out what problems you are really solving. Many managers make the mistake of regurgitating the parts of the company strategy they think are relevant to their team. This doesn't make the strategy relatable to the individual team members. To motivate your team members, your team vision needs to be phrased in language and problems that your team can directly relate to. So work out what problems your team are solving that feed into the functional goals and company strategy. Sticking with the finance example touched on earlier, part of the company strategy might be expanding Germany to be more than 25% of the group's revenue. The finance function might be tasked with ensuring profitability in Germany is more than 10%. The problem your management accounts team might face is creating visibility to support both of these goals. A solution might be creating P&L and working capital reporting by German customer contract, so the business as a whole has objective information about how each company is supporting the company's strategic goal in Germany. Work out exactly what the key set of problems your team is trying to solve to support the functional goals and the company strategy. The third step to linking company strategy to your team is creating a relatable vision in what is going to be the main purpose or goal of your team over the next few years. How would you use everyday language to describe the high level solution to the big problems facing the team? Answer these two questions and you will have a good relatable vision to share with your team. Keep your team vision simple and straightforward. A team vision doesn't have to be and probably shouldn't be a masterpiece of wordsmithing. Back to the finance example used earlier, your team vision could be to create and share detailed financial reporting at customer contract level across the business to improve decision making, accountability and profitability. A really useful step is to put a draft team vision statement to your team and ask them to finalise it with you. This actually gets the team members owning this part of the step and introducing language that they understand and use into the team vision statement. Then communicate the team vision with all team members and keep reminding them of it. The fourth step to create a team vision is to set clear and measurable goals. Most of us like structure and direction at work. Setting out clear and measurable team goals is a great way to provide this to your team. I like using the smart framework for this step and asking the team to be involved in creating each goal. This group exercise gets everyone involved and owning the goals we create together. Do spend enough time to get smart goals. This is not usually a quick process. If you take an hour to get each goal really clear, that might be perfectly OK. Do think about how you're going to measure progress. Make the measurement of progress as simple as possible and ensure the data needed is easy and quick together. Keep your final team goals visible and keep reminding the team of progress against these goals. The fifth step to create a team vision is to break down the goals into team inputs. This fifth step is helping the team to move from the what to the how to achieve the goals. Helping the team to mentally overcome the how step massively improves the chances of reaching your goals. When we have goals, but don't really understand how we're going to reach the goal, we remain stuck and inactive. When we understand the tasks, activities and projects we need to do to help us achieve team goals, we are much more confident of taking the right action. Back to our finance example. Some of the inputs or tasks to achieving our financial reporting vision might be if firstly to set up project codes within the financial system. Second to implement a simple timesheet system to capture each employee hour spent on each customer contract. Third to add a project code to all invoices inputted into the finance system. And fourth create PNL reporting for each project code or customer contract. When you've worked out the main team's inputs or activities to achieve the goals, then work out which individual will do what. The sixth step to implementing a team vision is to assign ownership of individual goals. Once you've shared a clear team vision with the team and the goals and activities at team level, the next step is to create goals and activities at individual level. Focus on how to achieve the goals as much as the goals themselves. Work out who is best place to work to achieve each team goal. This may be one person or several people. In each case, give overall responsibility to achieve the goal to one person to make ownership clear, even if several people will work on the goal. Give each team member as much of the roadmap as you can to help them successfully achieve each of their goals. It is in everyone's interest for each team member to be successful. Running a set of team planning workshops focus on how to achieve each goal and who should be responsible can be more productive than deciding and telling each person yourself. If the team has a strong say, they will be more motivated and successful because it is their plan too. Teams often produce better solutions than one individual working on their own. The seventh step to implementing a team vision is to outline milestones and progress measurement. Create visibility of progress so that everyone knows and understands exactly how far the team has progressed in reaching each goal. Visibility is a key step in driving ownership and accountability. I would suggest you add in sensible milestones for each of your goals. The longer the time period in question, the more milestones you should add in. This is good project management, plus it gives everyone a more immediate sense of purpose and achievement. Your goals to be achieved in 12 months don't really seem as real as the ones that need to be achieved in this month. Creating lots of little goals on a journey will make achieving the final end goal a lot easier. So in summary, create a vision of how your team will support the wider business goals. Make sure your team understands and believes in the team vision and they will be more motivated and more focused on maintaining team direction. Higher motivation levels and more focus generally means better results. Getting the team interested and behind where you want to take the team also helps team happiness and provides the lead at a loss of satisfaction. To recap, the seven ways to create a team vision while linking company strategy to your team are Firstly, company strategy, understand your team's contribution. Secondly, what problems are you really solving? Third, creating a relatable vision. Fourth, set clear and measurable goals. Fifth, break down the goals into team inputs. Sixth, assigning ownership of individual goals. And then seventh, outline milestones and progress measurements. And if you have any questions on creating a team vision, please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.


Welcome to the Week in Review, from the Government Information Service, I'm Richmond Felix. The first sit-ins since the opening session of the 11th Parliament on July 12th were held this week. The inter-governmental agreement between St. Lucia and the United States of America was discussed at Tuesday's House of Assembly meeting. In presenting the bill, the Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Economic Growth, Job Creation, External Affairs and the Public Service said it was about facilitating an easier means of communication whilst preventing money laundering. The agreement between the Government of St. Lucia and the Government of the United States of America to improve international tax compliance and implement factor. Whereas the Government of St. Lucia and the Government of the United States of America each a party and together the parties desire to conclude an agreement to improve international tax compliance through mutual assistance and tax matters based on the effective infrastructure for the automatic exchange of information. The Education Minister has been touring school facilities ahead of the implementation of a program of preventative maintenance which is seen as the best way forward in dealing with the extremely high cost of repairs needed annually. More in this report from the Ministry of Education. Minister for Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development, the Honourable Dr. Gil Rigabet, met recently with stakeholders involved in the temporary relocation of the George Charles Secondary School. Students and staff of the George Charles Secondary School will be reassigned to the John O'Donnell Secondary School effective September 5, 2016 in order to house divisions of the South Lewis Community College which has to undergo extensive repairs. The Honourable Dr. Gil Rigabet says she is extremely pleased with the outcome of the meeting. Most importantly, issues of curriculum, instruction, student management, staff and student well-being, all of these among other issues were raised as we want to ensure minimum disruption to staff, students and of course to the parents as well. I trust therefore that having had this discussion and given that a committee has been established to oversee the transitioning process that all affected persons will appreciate the need for the temporary arrangement. President of the St. Lucia Teacher's Union, Julian Monrose, who was present at the stakeholder meeting says this kind of dialogue enhances the relationship between the Ministry and the Union, especially in circumstances like the one which is currently being confronted. We have always indicated that we want to have open and free dialogue with the Ministry of Education. We're involved in the business of education. We represent the professionals in the system and that nothing can happen if you don't have the professionals on board. So we're very happy that the Ministry understands that needs to engage the Teacher's Union. The whole idea is to find solutions because there will be problems in any system. The Ministry of Education has commenced demolition of Curtin-Termite infested structures of the South Lewis Community College and expects to commence rehabilitation works shortly. From the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development, I am Fennel Neptune reporting. The Sandals Foundation Cricket Academy has bowled off its 14th year in St. Lucia where some 33 of the island's best under 15 players will converge for one week at the Darren-Same Cricket Grounds for intense on and off the field training. The 14th edition of the Sandals Cricket Academy is currently underway following an official launch this week at the Darren-Same Cricket Ground. 33 of the island's top under 15 cricketers are being coached not only in a game of cricket but other life skills as well. Acting Permanent Secretary in the Department of Youth Development and Sports, Dr. Anthony George urged the young cricketers to develop an attitude of cricket excellence. What does it require for you to pursue excellence at that next level? What does it require for you as national champions as Windward Islands Cricket and the 15 champions to pursue that level of excellence, setting excellence as the goal at the next level? Dr. George advised the CS Group of Camp attendees that they should grasp the opportunity to hone their skills during the academy. Set the imagination, align it with what you believe and pursue it vigorously by nurturing the skills, the capabilities and the endless potential that you do have. The Sandals Cricket Academy is a nursery for the development of the island's national under 15 cricket team and the Department of Youth Development and Sports has been an integral partner during this process. From the Ministry of Equity, Social Justice, Empowerment, Youth Development, Sports, Culture and Local Government, I'm Ryan O'Brien reporting. The Government of St. Lucia received $2.26 million from the Republic of China, Taiwan to upgrade sporting facilities. The funds were donated for lighting installation at the Barbano Canaries, Dennery Self and Shouzele Plain Fields. Any money spent in sports is not a cost but an investment. And that this contribution and specifically the lighting of four additional pain fields in St. Lucia will go long ways in helping support the long-term goals that we have for sports in our country. For many community residents everywhere, Taiwan and St. Lucia, I believe after dinner we still have time to do some interactions in the community. So this is a thing that is very important to increase the capacity of the community playing field. For multiple uses at different times and create more activities that can keep the youth in St. Lucia engaged through sports. Ten St. Lucia elite athletes are engaging their younger counterparts to develop and empower them through the 758th Olympian Program. This comes against the backdrop of five representatives participating at the Rio Games this year. Especially LeVoon Spencer, who on Thursday qualified for the high jump final, much the delight of fellow St. Lucia's. The Ministry of Equity, Social Justice, Youth Development, Sports, Culture and Local Government engaged athletes to foster youth development. Acting Permanent Secretary in the Department of Youth Development and Sports, Dr. Anthony George says one aspect of the program is to support St. Lucia Olympians in Rio. It is a show of support for five Olympians who are now in Rio representing St. Lucia at the highest level of their own sport. And so with Marshall, the 758th champions, the St. Lucia team from every sporting discipline. Dr. George says this program will teach and inspire over 100 emerging athletes between 13 and 19 years old. We need all of our emerging athletes, our young athletes, to move from their personal best to really establish national records. And then beyond the national records, we want our athletes competing with the world. And so in order to do this throughout this academic year coming up, we've put together a national coaching program, an emerging athlete development program, an elite athlete development program, with the support, of course, of our ministers and the government of St. Lucia. The program covers four development aspects, training, personal development, community services, and social interaction among the emerging athletes. In this next report, we get an update on the Owen King EU Hospital. Over the past two months, the Owen King EU Hospital has been buzzing with activity with the arrival and installation of numerous pieces of equipment and furniture. Claudio Merovic has been involved in all tendering and supervision of contracts at the hospital since 2012. He reports that all is on target thus far. Right now we're working on the last five contracts that we have, five contractors that are providing all the general furniture, all the clinical furniture, including all the beds for delivery beds as well, all the surgical tables, also ENT and ophthalmology microscopes, and all the tools and all the equipment that is coming for the maintenance area is also coming in this part of the project. And the last two contractors that are going to be starting right now are for physiotherapy equipment and for the lab and the morgue equipment. Merovic added that all equipment has now been shipped to St. Lucia, with over 30 containers already destuffed at the facility. Several teams of persons are currently engaged in the installation of equipment and furniture within all areas of the facility. Merovic targets the end of September to be completed with most, if not all, the installation. We expect that some of the contractor also finish their work by the end of August. So we would have only a couple of contractors working in September. And that means that all the furniture and all the equipment will be ready to start doing training for doctors and nurses to start working and feeling the hospital as their new house. From inception, the Office of the National Authorizing Officer has played a critical role in overseeing procurement, contract management and payments for all contractors. Without the NAO's involvement, the communication would not begin. And so all of the communication happens with and through the NAO. Yes, you may have other authority figures, you know, the Prime Minister being a key person in that negotiation process. But given that the Cotton Agreement mentions or identifies the NAO in that role, it must happen in his or her presence, whoever sits in the chair at that time. The NAO was born out of the Cotton Agreement, which binds the EU with the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, and functions as a liaison between the various ACP governments and the EU Commission. Its pivotal role is in managing the developmental assistance provided by the EU. It is anticipated that St Lucians will be very pleased with the State of the App Facility, which will soon be delivered to them. I tell this to everybody, not only to St Lucians, I think you're going to have a first-class hospital in the island. Nothing is going to be missing, and you're going to have one of the best technologies to take care of the health of all the population, which is one of our objectives, and I think the people of St. Lucian can be proud of. Trading on the newly installed operating tables commenced this August, with continued trading on ENT, ophthalmology and sterilization equipment scheduled for September. Reporting for the Ministry of Health and Wellness, I'm Glenn Simon. Breastfeeding is not only the cornerstone of a child's healthy development, it is also the foundation of a country's development, according to the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action. The emphasis of Breastfeeding Week this year was on raising awareness on the links between breastfeeding and the sustainable development goals. Here is another report from the Ministry of Health and Wellness. Breast is best is the message the nursing and nutrition departments of the Ministry of Health and Wellness continue to drive home to pregnant women and nursing mothers. Exclusive breastfeeding of a baby for at least the first six months of their life is being promoted as a method which is in the best interest of both the baby and mother. Nutritional officer Mariana Gasper-Philip stated, when other foods are introduced too early to the babies, it can adversely affect their growth and development. The breast milk has all the properties, all the nutrients in the right amounts and so it goes without saying that breast is best for the infant because it was meant for the baby. And by extension it has benefits to the mother which helps the mother to feel better, helps her womb to reap to the uterus to contract and for her to regain her normal size. It has benefits to the mother as well in terms of bonding. Philip indicated that 15-20% of the average household income can be spent in purchasing baby formula during the first six months of a baby's life which is a huge cost when compared to exclusive breastfeeding. The breast milk is always ready, it is at the right temperature, it is cheap, it has all the antibodies that will protect the baby from a lot of childhood infections. The exclusive breastfeeding sensitization workshop was conducted at the NEE Wellness Center as part of activities in recognition of World Breastfeeding Week. Breastfeeding is a very good thing, it's very healthy for the children because even though your body changes, you'll pick up back because I've been breastfeeding seven children and look at me, sometimes I get small, sometimes I get fat but I still breastfeed. You have no milk to buy, you save from that also. Family Nurse Practitioner Mary Joseph Sidney notes, though there is a heightened awareness among the general population about exclusive breastfeeding, there is still not enough adherence by mothers. We really want them to understand exclusive breastfeeding not only help the physical aspect of the child to grow adequately, however the child's brain, we call the cognitive function of the child, is much improved on children who are breastfed because every property in the breast milk gets to the child. Breastfeeding workshops were conducted throughout the island by the nursing and nutrition departments of the Ministry of Health with the aim of convincing more mothers to stay true to exclusive breastfeeding for at least the first six months of the child's life. From the Ministry of Health and Wellness, I'm Glenn Simon reporting. Organizers hail the successful production of Mukheri Beach 2016. Organizers hail the successful production of the three-day-four event that was Mukheri Beach 2016. Maritime consultant Cuthbert DJ says marrying the nautical event with other aspects of St. Lucian culture and Caribbean culture as well infused a unique element into Mukheri Beach. This year was to pitch a Mukheri experience because this weekend is special because Monday is a holiday in Martinique. So we came up with the idea that if we can get them here from Thursday meaning people from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica and Miami, they'll stay till the Monday. And to make sure that they infuse themselves in the local culture. So Grosely Friday night was our fringe event that opened up. And it all came together. Tough lineup, great location. We battled with some bad weather but as you can see today came up and it's a good climate. Head of security for the event Titus Leo says the boots on the ground approach coupled with the installation of CCTV cameras curbed any disturbances before it escalated. He says patrons to the event were as secure as could be. Minister for Tourism, Information and Broadcast in the Honourable Dominic Fede says Mukheri has a significant economic footprint for St. Lucia.  So this event has tremendous value for tourism sector, for the small hotel sector certainly. And it justifies the investment of the St. Lucia Tourism Board. Mukheri Beach began in Martinique as a thank you event to mariners who purchased Mukheri engines. The event has grown into a premier French experience. Meanwhile, the Government Information Service spoke to patrons at Mukheri Beach to get their impressions of the event. A lot of people coming from Martinique, coming from Guadeloupe, Trinidad, all the Caribbean islands come here to enjoy themselves, to spend money here. And I think it's important to have an event like this. And that's the Week in Review from the Government Information Service. I'm Richmond Felix.