Advice from a person who doesn’t care about you and makes money when you follow it is useless at best, and likely harmful. Advertising from a friend who wants what’s best for you might be beneficial, if such a thing existed.
clone of saturn
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It doesn’t seem generally true that communication requires delicate maintenance. Liars have existed for thousands of years, and languages have diverged and evolved, and yet we still are able to communicate straightforwardly the vast majority of the time! Like you said, lying loses its effectiveness the more it is used, and so there’s a counter-pressure which automatically prevents it from taking over.
It seems to me that there are numerous instances, from the Challenger o-rings to Iraqi WMDs to Lysenkoism, where telling lies has become normalized. Usually followed shortly by catastrophe. You could argue (and I would agree) that such catastrophes are simply part of the “automatic counter-pressure” that allows language to continue to exist. But there’s an understandable desire to find other mechanisms that don’t require as much suffering and death.
Yes, but only in the sense that by my best efforts, using the brain I actually have, I believe the thing to be the case.
This all seems to rest on an idea that an empty box labeled “truth” was dropped in my lap in the platonic land of a priori mental emptiness, and I’m obligated to fill it with something before I’m allowed to begin thinking. But obviously, that’s not what happened. Rather, as I grew up, the abstract label called “truth” was invented and refined by me to help me make sense of the world and communicate with (or win approval from) others. So I end up at the same answer, pragmatism, but I deny that there was ever any problematic circularity. The problem instead seems to come from a notion of transcendent epistemic justification which is unmotivated and flawed—what good does this idea of justification do? What’s the problem if I do something without justification?
This seems like it would be pretty easy to DIY with small drops of superglue.
GreaterWrong has the ability to automatically collapse comments from a given user. I could make it hide posts too if there’s a desire for that.
Do you feel that way about all the themes? Ideally I’d like it to have something for everyone.
I really dislike the central example used in this post, for reasons explained in this article. I hope it isn’t included in the next LW book series without changing to a better example.
Is it possible to insert a question using the markdown editor, or does it require using the new editor?
If the goal is to figure out how murderous the Mormons are, comparing their murder rate to the murder rate of non-Mormons, or some other reasonable base rate, is exactly what you would do. Surely this would be obvious in any other context.
I think this is fundamentally not possible, because the world does not come pre-labeled with rules and win/lose conditions the way a sport or game does. Any attempt to do this would require you to take certain concepts as presumptively valid and unquestionable, but the main point of being an intellectual is to question accepted concepts and develop new ones.
Should be fixed now. Evidently EA forum doesn’t (yet?) support comment threads on tags.
See also: The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
But a bird warning other birds that there is a snake in the grass does reveal a fact about the bird: that it is a good bird who will risk its life for the other birds, and therefore is helpful for the other birds to keep around, perhaps even with bribes.
What would be an example of energy not being conserved in a closed system?
If a spinning overbalanced wheel without additional energy input spun faster and faster instead of slowing down and stopping.
Does the law of thermodynamics even mean anything?
The laws of thermodynamics don’t seem to have the same problem of vagueness. It’s easy to tell whether a given situation would violate them or not.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, so it would probably be better to just state your point plainly.
I’m trying to figure out what you mean when you talk about EMH.
Like anything else, the EMH is useful insofar as it generates testable predictions about the world. One of the most useful predictions, as johnswentworth puts it: ‘you shouldn’t expect to make money trading stocks’.
Obviously some people have made money trading stocks. Does the EMH simply mean that less than 50% of people who trade stocks make money? That doesn’t seem to support the grandiose conclusions that are usually made on the basis of the EMH. The same would be true of a poker game, for instance, or simply a bet between 3 people where only one of them can be right.
What would be an example of asset prices not reflecting all available information?
If this kind of behavior is entirely consistent with EMH, does EMH even mean anything?
This seems like something that’s likely to be idiosyncratic and even if high quality studies exist, trying to mimic what works for the notional “average person” may not be a good idea.
It’s actually worse than that—the way the manipulation works is to induce you to compare the people in the ad with your own life, causing you to feel ugly, unlovable, like you’re missing out on life, etc. and then to propose the product as a relief from this deliberately induced misery.