It’s an important note for the soccer game that Barbados needed to win by two points in order to advance to the finals. Otherwise, Grenada would go to the finals. Now people have a chance of imagining what happened.
Hook
My litmus test for whether someone even has the basic knowledge that might entitle them to the opinion that anthropogenic climate change isn’t happening is: “All other things being equal, does adding CO2 to the atmosphere make the world warmer?”
The answer is of course “yes.” Now, if a climate change non-skeptic answers “yes” the follow up question to see if they are entitled to their opinion that anthropogenic climate change is happening: “How could a climate change skeptic answer ‘yes’ to that question?” The correct answer to that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Hello.
My name is Dan, and I’m a 30 year old software engineer living in Maryland. I was a mostly lurking member of the Extropian mailing list back in the day and I’ve been following the progress of the SIAI sporadically since it’s founding. I’ve made a few donations, but nothing terribly significant.I’ve been an atheist for half my life now, and as I’ve grown older I’ve tended more and more to rational thinking. My wife recently made a comment that she specifically uses rational argument with me much more so than anyone else she has to deal with, even at work, because she knows that is what will work. (Obviously, she wins frequently enough to make it worth her while.)
I hope to have something minor to contribute to the akrasia discussion, although I haven’t fully formulated it yet. I used to be an avid video game player and I don’t play anymore. The last few times I played any games I didn’t even enjoy it. I plan to describe the experiences that led to this state. Unfortunately for general applicability, one of those experiences is “grow older and have a child.”
It’s not the most altruistic of motives, but what most draws me to this community is that I enjoy being right, and there seem to be lots of things I can learn here to help me to be right more often. What I would dream about getting out of this community is a way to find or prepare for meaningful work that helped reduce existential risk. I have a one year old daughter and I was recently asking myself “What is most likely to kill my children and grandchildren?” The answer I came up with was “The same thing that kills everyone else.”
As a suggestion, maybe typos that have no substantial impact on readability should be communicated to the author through a direct message rather than a public comment.
- 4 Mar 2010 18:12 UTC; 8 points) 's comment on For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books by (
Leaving aside the physical complications of moving cows, I think most vegetarians would find the decision to push a cow onto the train tracks to save the lives of four people much easier to make than pushing a large man onto the tracks, implying that humans are more special than cows.
EDIT: The above scenario may not work out so well for Hindus and certain extreme animal rights activists. It may be better to think about pushing one cow to save four cows vs. one human to save four humans. It seems like the cow scenario should be much less of a moral quandary for everyone.
Looking at that amazon link, has anyone considered automatically inserting a SIAI affiliate into amazon links? It appeared to work quite well for StackOverflow.
Jaynes even uses the example of meteorites (aka thunderstones) to show that this line of reasoning, while valid by the laws of probability, can lead educated people to believe things that are not true.
The natural philosophers who knew something about gravity had a much higher prior probability for the unreliability of farmers’ reports of natural phenomena than they did for rocks falling from the sky, so every report served to reinforce the hypothesis that farmers don’t know what they are talking about. It took reports from people who were considered reliable in order for the meteorite hypothesis to be accepted.
How reliable a reporter would you need to call science in general into question?
I first learned how to touch type on Dvorak, but switched to qwerty when I went to college so I wouldn’t have issues using other computers. I found that I could not maintain proficiency with both layouts. One skill just clobbered the other.
The worst cooking I have ever had came from a person who seems to lack any sort of ability to criticize food. It’s not that she didn’t have the skill to be a good cook. She simply could not tell when her cooking was bad. Being a good critic is certainly not sufficient, but it is necessary.
Someone posted a while back that only a third of adults are capable of abstract reasoning. I’ve had some trouble figuring out exactly it means to go through life without abstract reasoning. The “heavy boots” response is a good example.
Without abstract reasoning, it’s not possible to form the kind of theories that would let you connect the behavior of a pen and an astronaut in a gravitational field. I agree that this is an example of lack of ability, not compartmentalization. Of course, scientists are capable of abstract reasoning, so its still possible to accuse them of compartmentalizing even after considering the survey results.
Another test:
Could smoking during pregnancy have a benefit? Could drinking during pregnancy have a benefit? It’s not necessary that someone know what the benefit could be, just acknowledge the nicotine and alcohol are drugs that have complex effects on the body.
As for smoking, it’s definitely a bad idea, but it reduces the chances of pre-eclampsia. I don’t know of any benefit for alcohol.
I think “making the argument that humans have some special moral place in the world” in the absence of an eternal soul is very easy for someone intelligent enough to think about how close humans and goldfish are “in the space of ‘things that one can construct out of atoms.’”
Whether something can be used for evil or not is the wrong question. It’s better to ask “How much does computer vision decrease the cost of evil?” Many of the bad things that could be done with CV can be done with a camera, a fast network connection, and an airman in Nevada, just as many of the good medical applications can be done by a patient postdoc or technician.
You should consider other solutions, since the first one you think of is unlikely to be the best/cheapest to implement. The “Edit” functionality already exists. Users above a certain karma level could be allowed to edit posts, as in the case of StackOverflow. The major cost is that there would need to be a way to revert changes to prevent vandalism. Morendil pointed out that DM are a bit harder to send than comments. If desired, that could be fixed cheaply. There are surely other solutions.
Psychosurgery or pharmaceutical intervention to encourage some of the more positive autistic spectrum cognitive traits seems more likely to work than this. We are far from identifying the genetic basis of intelligence or exceptional intelligence, never mind an aspect as specific as rationality.
It’s also not clear that it is in someone’s self interest to do this. I know you said retroviral genetic engineering, but for now I’ll assume that it would only be possible on embryos. In that case, if someone really wanted grand children, it is not clear that making these alterations in her children would be the best way to achieve that goal.
For the time being, I’ll just consider literacy as a binary quality, leaving aside differences in ability. In developed countries, with literacy rates around 99%, literacy is probably some what heritable because that <1% cannot read because of some sort of learning defect with a heritable component.
In Mail, with a 26.2% literacy rate, literacy is not very heritable. The illiterate there are a consequence of lack of educational opportunities. I think that the situation we are in regarding the phenotype of “rational” is closer to the Mali scenario rather than the developed world scenario.
I would place 0 value on creating identical non-interacting copies of myself. However, I would place a negative value on creating copies of my loved ones who were suffering because I got blown up by a grenade. If Sly is using the same reasoning, I think he should charge me with attempted murder.
I think discussion of talent is generally lacking from rationality. Some clearly very irrational people are extremely successful. Sometimes it is due to luck, but even then it is usually the case that a large amount of talent was necessary to enter the lottery. With my particular combination of talents, no amount of learning the arts of rationality is going to turn me into a golfer like Tiger Woods or a media mogul like Rupert Murdoch.
The closest Roko’s list comes to this sort of thing is microeconomics, which includes comparative advantage. Taking proper advantage of that comes down to having something valuable to trade, asking others for help and negotiation skills, the last two of which Morendil and Johnicholas have already pointed out are not commonly discussed here.
Adversarial legal systems were not necessarily designed to be role models of rational groups. They are more like a way to give opposing biased adversaries an incrementally fairer way of fighting it out than existed previously.
I’m guessing scientific institutions don’t do this because the people involved feel they are less biased (and probably actually are) than participants in a legal system.
Athletic ability at birth isn’t really all that variable. Besides, “at birth” doesn’t eliminate in utero environmental effects.
Correlation with race does not mean genetic causation. Having 100% recent African ancestry correlates highly with living in Africa.