Yes please!
lukeprog(Luke Muehlhauser)
Karma: 36,477
I interviewed the lead author of this paper for my podcast, in which Dr. Young provides some context for the study and discusses greater implications, for example the possibility that the normative theory you find most plausible is influenced by your brain configuration, for example how active your RTPJ is.
I appreciate your commitment to quality!
Two key words on the evolution of the moral conscience are:
Joyce, The Evolution of Morality
de Waal et. al., Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved
I third the suggestion.
Just to clarify...
I didn’t intend to link to LW as an authority on certain topics, but merely as a storehouse of well-written explanations for those topics.
I second the recommendation for Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment.
We don’t need to re-invent the wheels of research on procrastination by practicing one-sample phenomenology. Much is known about procrastination via peer-reviewed scientific research, and those interested in beating procrastination might want to employ the rationality virtue of scholarship and begin there.
A recent overview of the relevant research papers begins here.
That said, Eliezer may be on to something that should be researched by professional psychologists.
I suppose I should introduce myself.
I’ve been reading Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong intermittently for more than a year. I only recently became active, posting a few comments and attending a meetup in Irvine, CA.
I’m a 25-year-old computer systems administrator for businesses in L.A. county, but my real passion is philosophy, and I hope to return to school and become a philosophy professor one day.
Though I was raised an evangelical Christian and pastor’s kid, I now write the popular atheism blog Common Sense Atheism and also host three podcasts: one on philosophy, one on meta-ethics, and one on Christianity. On that site I’ve also posted many Less Wrong-related posts.
P.S. Thanks to orthonormal for this post and for a fun list of ‘instant gratification’ posts on Less Wrong.
Thanks.
But, note that I’m not blogging the sequences at CSA. I’m blogging through all of Eliezer’s writing, chronologically. One day I may return and attempt one-post summaries of some of the shorter sequences, but I’m hoping somebody on Less Wrong will beat me to it.
The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship
Why did my post appear correctly in the editor, but when posted to the site, lose the spaces just before an apparently random selection of my hyperlinks?
For now, I simply added two spaces where Less Wrong wanted to collapse my single space into nothing. Hopefully someone will be able to figure out a more elegant solution.
I’m on Snow Leopard, Google Chrome.
I can’t remember the source of the quote I’m thinking of, but it goes something like this:
“People always remark that I know so much about science and so little about celebrities, but they fail to see that the two are related.”
Does anyone know the original quote?
I very much agree with your final sentence.
Do you think Eliezer’s post is more precise and useful than the controlled experiments published in peer-reviewed journals described in the book I linked to? I find that most writing on psychology is necessarily pretty soft, because the the phenomena it is trying to describe are vastly more complicated than those of the hard sciences.
Sweet! Thanks.
I certainly didn’t add div tags on purpose, so I’ll be sure to watch out for them in the future.
Completely agreed. I wrote very much the same thing in How to Do Philosophy Better.
Oops, you’re right that my link does not mention controlled experiments. A few controlled experiments are instead mentioned in other sections of the book on techniques applicable to a greater variety of behavior change goals.
Unfortunately, the author of Psychological Self-Help died last year, and his book has not been updated much in the past decade. Of course, more work on procrastination has been done in recent years, though I’m not sure if it is collected nicely anywhere.
If you haven’t already, you should try reading postmodern philosophy. An uninterrupted wall of alarm bells. :)
I’m coming from North Hollywood and can take passengers to the Ihop and back. Contact me at lukeprog [at] gmail if you need a lift.