the simple answer is that when you reinvest you have to reinvest in something. Lots of people investing in lots of companies = more competition = better world.
nazgulnarsil
if you have a choice between marketing something that educates people and something that allows them to be more lazy which would you choose? millions of others have made the obvious choice and the result is what you see.
I posit that a private rationalist school would produce people that outperform others on average by a ridiculous margin. But it would take you 20 years to prove it.
This is a perfect example of the web that builds itself around even one confusion of a value statement and a factual statement. I fear we all have these lurking.
in the same vein: how about a post on rationalist games (such as the calibration quizzes mentioned recently). More specifically: most games reward the player for a rational appraisal of the actions available to him, but which games give feedback other than win/lose on how rational you were?
maybe have the promoted page move at a slower pace for the higher quality articles and let the other pages (such as controversial) soak up the chaff.
aren’t you ignoring the fact that the rumors of ghosts could very well be a misidentification of other causes? if everyone believes there to be a ghost because 3 people disappeared but what actually happened is that a crazed maniac dragged them off into the woods then our fear is justified. Imagine our ancestors telling an anecdote not to go near the watering hole at a certain time because if you go at that time you’ll disappear and all that will be found of you is bloody scraps (big cats were in the area at the time). They might come up with a story about demons in order to scare children into not going to the water hole at that time (say the middle of the night). Even though the identified cause is wrong it still pays to believe it, since we lack any other causes to believe in. We might not know of all the potential causes of death, so we ascribe all unidentified ones to “the midnight witch who eats naughty children”. Avoiding this witch based on the stories of others from the area is natural.
I think the latter experience is telling. my experience of trolls tells me that they get labeled as trolls because they say things that make people uncomfortable because they suspect they might be true. If the so called troll was just saying completely wacky things it would be simple to dismiss them. Someone coming into a forum and shouting white power or some such nonsense is not the same as a troll.
being afraid to enter a graveyard is rational from the ancestral perspective. dead bodies attract disease. before our ancestors understood what disease was they probably attributed it to the ghosts of the dead haunting the living.
with regards to the third question: what if I believe that any resources given simply allow the population to expand and hence cause more suffering than letting people die?
I would say the biggest change is in using status seeking explanations to yield better predictions about the people around me. This has also let me form a more accurate picture of how others interpret my behavior.
point your kids at science fiction and let nature take its course. situations like ender’s game are resolved simply by being exposed to actual quality sci-fi. Just like the Harry potter situation can be solved by exposing people to quality fantasy (a bit harder admittedly)
90% of actual self defense confrontations involve extremely simple techniques. hard core martial arts training is about beating other martial artists. if you just want practical survival skills you learn the control techniques cops use and just practice.
I don’t see how individualism can beat out collectivism as long as groups = more power. for individualism to work each person would have to wield equal power to any group.
art died when relativism came along. yes, some works are better than others. and it’s not even hard to distinguish between them.
I feel like this should be one of the prime goals of this site. creating some sort of rationalist corpus that can take you from “you are a hominid living on planet three” to interacting with modern society.
if ideologies can have these why can’t the simple truth? where is the rationalist manifesto?
“Enlightenment” and “nirvana” are probably ways of hacking the brain to enter certain states at will rather than because of external stimuli. I suspect as our understanding of the brain increases we will eventually have “meditation machines” that simulate this effect.
Most drugs are extremely crude. Pleasure drugs usually work simply by inducing your body to dump all its supply of endorphins into your system at once.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/meditation/
I think at some point we’ll be able to induce brain states without such crude methods (think of the inducer in The Lathe of Heaven if you’ve read it)
I think it’s perfectly possible to maximize your outcome given current conditions while still being resentful that it is only a local maxima and there are much higher hills that you are being prevented from climbing.
you’re speaking a little more concretely. I was more thinking “we don’t have flying cars because NASA and the FAA suck”.
it seems that the the relevance of the calibration tests are that the better calibrated you are the better you will perform on predicting how happy various outcomes will make you. being good at this puts you at a huge advantage relative to the average person.