Indeed, one of the more relevant similarities between pain and offense is that both are warning signs. Pain is a warning that something may damage you, but if you are experiencing pain from nondamaging events, you are better off reinterpreting the stimulus. For instance, walking barefoot on rocky terrain is often interpreted as painful by those who typically walk shod, but after multiple exposures the sensation is processed differently.
Similarly, offense has a component of “things may turn bad” in addition to the signalling described elsewhere in this discussion. The fact that people take offense primarily tells us/them that something is going on; whether that thing is significant, good, or bad requires us to look farther than the fact that offense was taken.
Marius
A neighbor of mine enters every sweepstakes she can find, sending in dozens of applications per day. She wins at least one prize a month, ranging from kitchen gadgets to trips. The listed likelihood of winning is often an underestimate, she says, since some sweepstakes do not receive the number of expected applications. This is a life-defining hobby for her: it takes a significant amount of her time each day to find and enter these contests; most of her stories center around the prizes she’s won. Here is an article about a woman in a similar situation: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08335/931083-54.stm
I don’t believe this is quite correct. I think a large number of Americans support (to an extent) the status quo in all areas, and this prevents them from taking prison rape as seriously as other rape. But I’ve met nobody who’d be willing to pay ten cents to increase the amount of prison rape.
Nor have I seen many people who disfavor execution as being “too easy”. I won’t say zero on this one, however.
How so? When scientists perform studies, they can sometimes benefit (money, job, or simply reputation) by inventing data or otherwise skipping steps in their research. At other times, they can benefit by failing to publish a result when they can benefit by refraining to publish. A scientist who is willing to violate certain ethical principles (lying, cheating, etc) is surely more willing to act unethically in publishing (or declining to publish) their studies.
One question that might help you clarify: Fundamentally, is the divide in your head “more interested in taking steps to promote the side effect or in taking steps to avoid it” or “seems to consider the side effect acceptable”?
I think the example of a drunk driver might be an accessible one. Your goal is to get yourself and your car home; your intention is not to hit anyone. In fact, you’d be extremely sad if you hit someone, and would be willing to take some steps to avoid doing so. You drive anyway.
Do you put the risky driving in your intentional category? If you think intentionality means “treats it as a thing to seek rather than to avoid where convenient”, the risk is unintentional. If you think intentionality means “seems to consider the side effect acceptable”, then the risk is intentional because you weren’t willing to sober up, skip drinking, or take a cab.
Just so long as it doesn’t involve much real world experimentation. :)
But this is the fundamental problem: you don’t want to let the theory in any field get too far ahead of the real world experimentation. If it does, it makes it harder for the people who eventually do good (and ethical) research to have their work integrated properly into the knowledge. And knowledge that is not based on research is likely to be false. So an important question in any field should be “is there some portion of this that can be studied ethically?” If we “develop its instrumental rationality for a while without moralists sticking their noses in”, we run the risk of letting theories run wild without sufficient evidence [evo-psych, I’m looking at you] or of relying on unethically-obtained (and therefore less-trustworthy) evidence.
But one might work, infernally, by torturing puppies
FTFY
How do you judge: [X|Authority believes X]
Track record of statements/predictions, taking into account the prior likelihood of previous predictions and prior likelihood of current prediction.
Can you provide a link to Yudkowsky or any well known Bayesian advocating appeals to authority?
Are you asking us to justify appeals to authority by using an appeal to authority?
edit per wedrifid
An appeal to authority is not logically airtight, and if logic is about mathematical proofs, then it’s going to be a fallacy. But an appeal to an appropriate authority gives Bayesians strong evidence, provided that [X|Authority believes X] is sufficiently high. In many fields, authorities have sufficient track records that appeals to authority are good arguments. In other fields, not so much.
Of course, the Appeal to Insufficient Force fallacy is a different story from the Appeal to Inappropriate Authority
It is normally difficult enough to avoid selection bias, but there’s the additional difficulty here that a disproportionate number of the unsuccessful ones are located in prison.
So this brings up one of the questions I wonder if PUAs can answer: do you have any kind of metric capable of telling whether something is attractive for “females” or for “the kind of females PUAs find easy targets”? It was obvious when I did my psychiatry rotation that the Cluster B personality disorder patients found themselves drawn to one another. Is the Dark Triad good for picking up women who aren’t Cluster B, or primarily for picking up women who are? Or at least, are there tools available to actually answer that question?
Yes, I very much agree with this. Changing the status of males vs females is unlikely to change my life much at all. Few (if any) people are likely to change sexual orientation due to that kind of status; the effects on promotion/pay are greatly overemphasized. In contrast, changing the status of various professions, or taking certain people out of the dating pool is extremely relevant.
In third-world countries there is more at stake, of course.
There is already a common deontological rule that one should adopt appropriate caution. “Appropriate caution” allows one to break up with people under most circumstances, but my limited understanding of pickup sounds closer to “recklessness”.
The background status is not uniform. When females made progress in terms of ability to be seen as good employees/employers, it reduced the relative status of certain male employers/employees, but also increased the relative status of male stay-at-home husbands.
Even in the status game, it doesn’t break down on strict gender lines.
When other factors are looked at, the divisions are even less gender-based. If we have a more formal vs less formal consent process, the winners and losers are probably nearly-evenly divided male/female.
The way in which the AP scores are reported change each year; be certain you know the rules prior to taking an exam. For instance, it has sometimes been the case that scores can be withheld entirely (with no record of having taken the exam); other years, the exam is listed to universities as “score withheld”. Still other years, it’s been possible to completely cancel the record of having taken the test only prior to receiving your score.
If you wish to attend a university whose admission requirements you easily meet but wish to graduate early, this is of no import: take all the tests you might plausibly pass. If, however, a prestigious university would be highly beneficial to your expected goals in life, you would be well advised to calculate your chances of doing well on an exam prior to taking it along with your ability to hide the results if a poor score is obtained. Naturally, if you are taking a high school AP course, failure to take/do well on the exam will look particularly bad. If you simply decided (as I did) that watching Forrest Gump provides adequate preparation for the US History AP, then this does not apply to quite the same extent.
So if there’s both males and females on sides A and B, what makes it a war between the sexes?
To a large extent, most do.
There’s a reason why we don’t have such a word: too much incentive to cheat. If you bother to reply to an argument, you generally want to communicate one of two things: a. I paid significant attention and should be taken seriously in my comments. b. I didn’t pay much attention, so I do not want to be taken very seriously and do not want to be thought dumb if I make a mistake. A is much more common than B, because strategy C (keep your mouth shut) is usually better than B. There is little advantage to gradation. If you want to be taken seriously, you’d like to communicate that you’ve paid at least as much attention as everyone else. So there is strong incentive to cheat at characterizing the attention you’ve paid.
Thus, communication of that sort needs to be expensive (i.e. inefficient). Typically, it takes the form of detailed analysis.
I believe it’s to make atonement, which is more closely related to punishment than to helping others. There is a component of both present in atonement, however. Note that you will not see many people punishming themselves in ways unrelated to their crime (hair shirts, self-flagellation, etc) outside of religious communities that believe the true problem of wrongdoing is distancing oneself from a deity rather than harming others. But you will also not see many people atoning for wrongdoing by finding the cheapest possible way to create sufficient good to counterbalance the harm they’ve committed. Rather, most people try to find hard/painful ways to do good. Often this involves nonfinancial contributions.
car keys draw no untoward attention, but can ruin someone’s day.