I’m new to Less Wrong and still figuring out the proper etiquette, so I was hoping somebody could help me on this. Are you supposed to contact someone, or RSVP, to attend one of the regular meetings, or do you just show up? Thanks.
Jay_Schweikert
Karma: 719
Great, thanks for the information.
Even though it might seem a little silly, I’ve always thought that Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is a Place on Earth has a surprisingly rationalist, humanist bent. Aside from the basic message conveyed in the title and chorus, I’d note in particular the end of the second verse:
“In this world we’re just beginning/ To understand the miracle of living/ Baby I was afraid before/ But I’m not afraid anymore”
Nothing too fancy, but I’ve always thought the song did a good job of capturing the simple joy that life on earth can hold.
Blogging? My problem is that I always end up posting late in the evening, when all the reasonable people are asleep. But I still want instant feedback, so I stay up even later waiting for people to comment. Maybe I’d do better to blog earlier, when people might actually read it that day?
David, if you haven’t already seen it, you might want to check out Randomizing Law, a bold article written by several prominent law professors, recently published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
More generally, the value of trial-and-error seems like one of the major benefits of a federal system, rather than a wholly national system—the classic “laboratories of democracy” argument. Of course, composite states themselves probably wouldn’t be any more open to direct “testing” than nation states themselves, so you wouldn’t exactly be able to run experiments. But just being able to compare natural results across states could likely achieve at least some of the benefits of true trial and error.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting this article (or maybe the NY Times isn’t exactly presenting everything correctly), but doesn’t Hugo Mercier seem to be coming pretty close to saying something like “this whole attempt at identifying and correcting biases is misguided—flaws in reasoning are ‘natural,’ so we should be okay with them.” I mean, consider the following excerpt:
Mr. Mercier, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, contends that attempts to rid people of biases have failed because reasoning does exactly what it is supposed to do: help win an argument.
“People have been trying to reform something that works perfectly well,” he said, “as if they had decided that hands were made for walking and that everybody should be taught that.”
Am I missing something, or is this one of the most absurd statements about human rationality ever made? We shouldn’t try to get rid of biases, not because the effort is futile, but because flawed reasoning works? I guess that’s why most people are so successful at handling personal finances, calculating risk, evaluating political proposals, and questioning ingrained religious beliefs.
The scope of “free will” within biology?
I’ve actually always found C.S. Lewis to be one of the single most fascinating and compelling Christian writers. Obviously I think he makes some very fundamental mistakes, but his approach to Christianity is about as rationalist as you can get. He really emphasizes that if you’re going to believe in something, it better really be true not just “worth believing in” or “virtuous” or “helpful”—he himself could have written Belief in Belief. Furthermore, he seems committed to a conception of “faith” that doesn’t involve any conflict with rationality—he thinks that the logical arguments for the existence of God do a lot of work, and he’s fairly sophisticated scientifically (seems reasonably knowledgeable about evolution, quantum mechanics, etc.). I would actually highly recommend The Screwtape Letters to any rationalists who find religious arguments interesting (if not compelling).
Holmes is revered as a quasi-deity among most legal academics, and while I think he’s entitled to far less respect than he generally receives, I’ve always appreciated this sentiment. Basically, “the simplicity on the other side of complexity” is the lawyer’s way of stating “it all adds up to normality.”
So, the simplicity on this side of complexity would be something like naive free will theory—basically, “it feels like I have free will, so something magic must happen that gives me true power to choose.” If you reject this simplicity, but don’t make it to the other side of complexity, you might end up saying silly things like “free will doesn’t exist, so all of our choices are meaningless—everything is determined for us.” You need to work your way through the complexity to reach the simplicity that says “yeah, the experience of making decisions is real, and that’s what matters—this is just a normal part of physics, not something magic.” Sometimes, simple truths really are correct—but you need to work through a bit of complexity to understand why that’s the case.
Another good example with regard to reductionism:
Simplicity on this side of complexity: rainbows are real and awesome!
Stuck in complexity: everything is just quarks, your model of “rainbows” is a mere product of your own mind, beauty doesn’t really exist in nature, get over yourself.
Simplicity on the other side of complexity: rainbows are explained in reductionism, but not explained away; yes, my model of a rainbow is “just” a model, but that doesn’t mean rainbows aren’t “real”; you can think a rainbow really, truly is beautiful, and still believe in reductionism.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but doesn’t diminishing marginal utility play a big role here? After all, almost all of us would prefer $1,000,000 with certainty to $2,000,100 with 50% probability, and it would be perfectly rational to do so—not because of the “utility of certainty,” but because $2 million isn’t quite twice as good as $1 million (for most people). But if you offered us this same choice a thousand times, we would probably then take the $20,000,100, because the many coin flips would reduce the variance enough to create a higher expected utility, even with diminishing marginal returns. (If the math doesn’t quite seem to work out, you could probably work out numbers that would.)
So it seems at least plausible that you could construct versions of the money pump problem where you could rationally prefer bid A to bid B in a one-off shot, but where you would then change your preference to bid B if offered multiple times. Obviously I’m not saying that’s what’s really going on—Allais paradox surely does demonstrate a real and problematic inconsistency. But we shouldn’t conclude from that it’s always rational to just “shut up and multiply,” at least when we’re talking about anything other than “raw” utility.
Non-theist cinema?
Well, I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of Glee (although the parodies of it on Community are enough to make me glad the show exists), but that sounds interesting enough that I might check it out, if I could find the episode on Hulu or something. Honestly, I would never have thought that “Glee on atheism” would be particularly well done, but I’ll take your word for it!
I’m not familiar with all of these, so I’ll definitely try to look into some of them. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that the movies I mentioned were the only explicitly atheist movies out there—just that it was quite rare in major motion pictures. The Golden Compass is a good example that simply slipped my mind, and perhaps There Will Be Blood and Watchmen—the latter two at least have prominent characters who are atheists, even if atheism isn’t really part of the story itself. But the point is well-taken—there’s more out there than I mentioned.
However, I would question why some of these are on the list. Saved pretty clearly comes away with the message that God is real, but that he wants us to tolerate and appreciate our differences. Contact (at least the movie) suggests that Occam’s Razor isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and seems to liken belief in God to belief in Ellie’s trip (which is sympathetic). And while I confess that I haven’t seen all of the original The Wicker Man, isn’t the protagonist a sympathetic Christian?
Anyway, maybe I’m just missing something, but these ones confused me. Otherwise, I appreciate the examples!
Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because, of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be… fooled.
--John Cutter, The Prestige
The context in the movie is a bit different, but it’s a nice illustration of how people can let themselves be seduced by mysterious answers to mysterious questions, even when they purport to be “looking for the answer.”
I had considered posting it there, but I’m still somewhat new to writing articles and didn’t want to jump the gun. Given the response, however, I’ll go ahead and move it. Thanks for the encouragement!
When None Dare Urge Restraint, pt. 2
One more link on the subject. Jason Brennan has a post on Bleeding Heart Libertarians cataloging different norms for valorizing soldiers (this post is largely a follow-up to a prior post arguing that it might be appropriate to hold even individual soldiers accountable for volunteering to serve in wars they know or should know to be unjust). While it’s nothing particularly innovative, I think this framework is useful for understanding both the Hayes controversy and the issue more generally.
The reaction to Chris Hayes suggests that most Americans are pretty close to norm 1, or otherwise a norm 2 where it would take something shocking and extreme—like overt torture or rape—to rebut the presumption of heroic status. But the reasonable debate is where we should fall between norms 2 and 3 -- that is, to what extent soldiers should be presumed heroic vs. judged neutrally according to their actual motivations and decisions, like we would judge everyone else.
For me, the hardest issue is distinguishing what makes a war unjustified enough to blame the civilian leadership and unjustified enough to blame soldiers who volunteer to fight in it. There will of course be a gulf between these positions, and the size of that gulf is probably the biggest difference I have with Brennan (I think it’s bigger). As many here have pointed out, there’s value in having a strong presumption of heroic status, not only as an honest recognition of what subjectively motivates most soldiers, but also to provide a social incentive to keep the military consistently strong over time. But it’s still important to acknowledge the existence of this line and to question where it is, both to provide a check on unjust war itself, and to discourage soldiers from risking their lives unless it’s really necessary.
Well, yes, I think that’s right. But even under norm 3 (neutral judgment), somebody who risks their life for a worthy cause clearly deserves praise. And if you think that most of what the military does counts as a worthy cause (or at least, is worthy enough that someone could volunteer in good faith), then norms 2 and 3 are probably going to blend together. In that case, the neutral judgment will be to presume heroism. But the more unjustified you think military actions are, the more the distinction becomes relevant, because you have to start asking what to think of soldiers who voluntarily join up with an unworthy cause.
Also, norm 3 might entail more of a distinction between risky and non-risky military roles. My general impression is that “military/non-military” matters more in how people make judgments than “combat role/non-combat role,” even though the point about “risking one’s life” only really comes in with the latter. (Yes, I’m aware that even supposedly “non-combat roles” can operate in war zones and involve substantial risk—I’m speaking in generalities.)
Of course, there may be good reasons for this approach, even just in terms of signaling cost. It’s relatively easy to see whether someone has served in the military, but harder and more awkward to ask “okay, but how much danger were you really in?” I’m just trying to explain why there might be a distinction between norms 2 and 3, even acknowledging that military service generally involves heightened risk to one’s life.
I agree that the “it’s not my fault, it’s everyone else keeping me down” sentiment is entirely antithetical to Objectivism. Indeed, one of the clearest distinctions between the good guys and bad guys in Atlas Shrugged is that the good guys are focused on getting things done, no matter what, regardless of whatever obstacles are thrown in their path by the villains, while the bad guys are always making excuses and looking to blame others.
However, I think it probably is correct to say that many individual members of the Objectivist movement did exhibit this kind of behavior, at least some of the time. Sadly, Rand in her later life and many of her closest followers were often decidedly poor exemplars of their purported ideas, and it’s valid to criticize Rand as such. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the philosophy itself is naturally prone to this vice.