And this sums up why I feel that respect for the silly beliefs of others is important: it sets the stage for the acceptable treatment of things that are confusing or silly.
It’s not that you take the belief seriously, but rather that you take seriously the epistemic position that makes that belief seem sensible.
Since so many poker opponents often decide at whim, we need to do more than just strategically analyze their actions relative to what they should be doing. We need to watch and listen and determine what they are doing.
--Mike Caro, Caro’s Book of Tells
Has anybody considered starting a folding@home team for lesswrong? Seems like it would be a fairly cheap way of increasing our visibility.
After a brief 10 word discussion on #lesswrong, I’ve made a lesswrong team :p
Our team number is 186453; enter this into the folding@home client, and your completed work units will be credited.
How… what…
People on the internet aren’t from Saskatoon, that’s my city!
Make sure you’re logged out first, otherwise your search results are tuned according to your search history.
That’s my bet: Harry doesn’t believe in souls, but he swallows the explanation without a second thought.
I think the “it’s bigger on the inside” phenomenon is a better foundation to build such a spell on.
Can you say anything more substantive than that? It’s plausible given the studies mentioned in Cialdini, an example of which follows:
Freedman and Fraser didn’t stop there. They tried a slightly different procedure on another sample of homeowners. These people first received a request to sign a petition that favored “keeping California beautiful.” Of course, nearly everyone signed since state beauty, like efficiency in government or sound prenatal care, is one of those issues no one opposes. After waiting about two weeks, Freedman and Eraser sent a new “volunteer worker” to these same homes to ask the residents to allow the big DRIVE CAREFULLY sign to be erected on their lawns. In some ways, the response of these homeowners was the most astounding of any in the study.
Approximately half of these people consented to the installation of the DRIVE CAREFULLY billboard, even though the small commitment they had made weeks earlier was not to driver safety but to an entirely different public-service topic, state beautification.
-- Robert Caildini, Influence: Science and Practice
Harry has already been forbidden from leaving the Hogwarts wards without sufficient cause and escort by this time; lunch with Quirrell was explicitly included in this ban. That’s not far from what he’d say as an innocent.
I think you’re leaving out another possibility: that they actually think they’re right. This obviously doesn’t apply to all cases, but I do think it’s more common than you would think.
There’s also a (related?) strong desire for consistency, which is explored in “Influence—Science and Practice” (Cialdini), which I found sheds some new light on the material in “How to win friends and influence people”.
[Also, welcome to lesswrong]
And note the hat’s commentary on the matter.
I took the liberty of mucking up the spreadsheet a little bit:
Calculate preferred time in UTC
Sort names alphabetically
Total number of people who would prefer to have the meeting at a given UTC time.
Once more people have filled in their preferred times, it might make sense to re-sort by that.
http://demented.no-ip.org/~feep/rss_proxy.cgi?5782108
You can also get email alerts of new chapters, directly from fanfiction.net
On further consideration, my complaint wasn’t my real/best argument, consider this a redirect to rwallace’s response above :p
That said, I personally don’t take ‘many’ as meaning ‘most’, but more in the sense of “a significant fraction”, which may be as little as 1⁄5 and as much as 4⁄5. I’d be somewhat surprised if the number of old machines (5+ years old) in use wasn’t in that range.
re: scaling, the Ubuntu folding team’s wiki describes the approach.
Beetle-sized (of the beautifully blue sort), at least.
Note also that the body the mind wears apparently (according to quirrel) does have an impact on the mind.
I think this might have been intended more in the purple dragon sense than anything: focus on how they know exactly what experimental results they’ll need to explain, and what that implies about their gut-level beliefs.
That seems to be conceding the point that it has moral weight.
I teleport a hostage about to be executed to a capsule in lunar orbit. I then offer you three options: you pay me 1,000,000,000$, and I give him whatever pleasures are possible given the surroundings for a day, and then painlessly kill him; I simply kill him painlessly; I torture him for a day, and then painlessly kill him, and then pay you 1,000,000,000$.
Do you still take the money?
This strikes me as a pretty stark decision, such that I’d have a really hard time treating those who would take the money any different than I’d treat the babyeaters. It’s almost exactly the same moral equation.
-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)