But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco, “Foucault’s Pendulum”
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco, “Foucault’s Pendulum”
Our value judgements. -- All actions proceed from value judgements, all value judgements are either our own or accepted—the latter are by far the majority. Why do we accept them? Out of fear—that is: we consider it wiser to pretend that they have been our own as well—and we get used to this pretence, so that it eventually becomes our nature. Our own value judgement: that means measuring a thing on the basis of how much it pleases or displeases just us and nobody else—something exceedingly rare! But our judgement of another, that in which lies the reason why we so often rely on his judgement, should that at least come from us, be our own judgement? Yes, but we do this as children and rarely learn again in a different way; for our whole life, moreover, we are the fools of judgments to which we got used as children, if one considers the way we judge our neighbour (his spirit, his rank, his morality, his exemplarity, his loathsomeness) and hold it necessary to bow before his value judgements.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Daybreak”
The important question is: are freethinkers brought up in our society more likely to go in the ‘right’ direction against the status quo? The example in the OP is only weak evidence for this, because its a lot easier to find moral actions ‘less evil than Nazis’ than ‘more evil than Nazis’.
This criticism would be valid if the study considered someone who neither opposed nor actively supported Nazi crimes as a ‘rescuer’. But since the Uncommitted are filed as ‘non-rescuers’, the study does indeed single out the free-thinkers’ tendency to go against the status quo.
Furthermore, the fact that the crimes of Nazism are considered among the most repugnant in history is only weakly relevant. As long as the society-encouraged activities are sufficiently offensive that in the lack of supporting propaganda they would be suffer universal condemnation, the more important trait is that the consequences for pursuing an unconventional morality were far harsher under the Nazi regime than in most other situations—and one had little personal gain to find there as well. This danger strongly ties anti-Nazi activity to a sense of personal moral duty.
Provides some nice counter weight to all those lamenting the lack of obedience in today’s kids (still I’d say they have a point as well)
I think such lamentations rarely take the form of “my children always want to know why they should do as I say! I wish they’d just blindly obey”. More like “my children blindly dismiss everything I say! I wish they’d just blindly obey” :P.
On the other side, I’d be extremely surprised if one could find evidence of a generation in which parents didn’t complain about their children’s misbehaviour.
Also, wanting to take a multiple choice test that outputs a numeric score is going to have a higher correlation with autism/Asperger’s than with homosexuality :)
This seems like the sort of activity Google Wave is (was?) meant for.
I think it can, e.g. if it takes an unusual open-mindedness for a local to marry into a despised and/or feared subgroup.
More importantly, the question is terribly phrased—or just terrible. The philosopher could have started with “If you met the ‘twins’ afterwards, could someone tell them apart without asking anyone?”, which has an obvious response of “no”, and then gets followed by a actually interesting questions about, for example, what “memory” exactly is.
That version is a lot funnier, though!
However, if 999 clones have their ‘anthropic reasoning’ capacity removed then both probabilities are 1/1001, and you should conclude that heads and tails are equally likely.
Are you sure? In the earlier model where memory erasure is random, remembering AR will be an independent event from the room placements and won’t tell you anything extra about that.
One can make a case that genius is precisely the degree to which one does not think like a human mind (at least in a more useful and/or beautiful way).
Ah, I misunderstood you: I thought you were suggesting the possibility that free-thinkers wouldn’t be motivated to rebel at all without a sufficiently offensive status quo, not that they might do it in an unexpected direction.
Regarding Kaczynski, while he’s certainly an example of society-unfriendly morality, I suspect we would still be a lot better off if everyone had the willpower to go that far, if necessary, in pursue of their concept of greater good. In other words, the damage Kaczynski did arose from the combination of zealous nonconformism and a deeply flawed analysis of his environment. But if you gifted everyone, at least in the First World, with the same zealous nonconformism, they would on average pair it with an analysis not nearly as twisted as that presented in the Manifesto. The result, I think, would be a world with a lot more conflict but also with a dramatically improved rate of progress.
If the coin was heads then the probability of event “clone #707 is in a green room” is 1/1000. And since, in this case, the clone in the green room is sure to be an anthropic reasoner, the probability of “clone #707 is an anthropic reasoner in a green room” is still 1/1000.
But you know that you are AR in the exact same way that you know that you are in a green room. If you’re taking P(BeingInGreenRoom|CoinIsHead)=1/1000, then you must equally take P(AR)=P(AR|CoinIsHead)=P(AR|BeingInGreenRoom)=1/1000.
and P(#707 is AR | coin was tails and #707 is in a green room) is only 1⁄999.
Why shouldn’t it be 1/1000? The lucky clone who gets to retain AR is picked at random among the entire thousand, not just the ones in the more common type of room.
I have in the past used precisely the latter to describe myself to others. Last Saturday I was at a student party: I spent the late afternoon and early evening chatting with both friends and new acquaintances pretty much non-stop, drank up to the point where my behaviour became just a bit more impulsive than usual, danced into the wee hours of the morning and exchanged some crude sexual rites with a stranger.
I unquestionably had fun. It will also take me at least a couple of weeks before I can talk to more than one people at a time without feeling exhausted. Until then, my free time will be spent with a pair of headphones, my reading queue, a 4X videogame, and no human interaction closer than Skype.
I believe Eliezer is… nine geniuses working together in a basement.
By the nether gods… IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW
Using lawyers as the most expensive kind of diary ever is… actually not as bad as how they’re ordinarily used, in fact.
The phrase between parentheses is a critical issue, since it is extremely easy—and, in fact, the default—to cheat without producing illegitimate offspring, thus making the prenup fairly worthless.
It’s actually likely to make things worse, since swearing that “I will not cheat and get pregnant” is going to bring one’s attention to the backdoor—i.e. that you never promised not to cheat outright. It looks like a classical and extremely clumsy deception.
Unless, that is, you’d be happy with your husband being suspicious of you at the same time he is confident that his child is really his.
People don’t feel “I love him/her, therefore I must absolutely trust him/her”. They feel “I absolutely trust him/her, that means I love him/her”.
The car example has the two actors signing contracts with opposing goals.
I can’t see why someone would set up beforehand a contract that prevented them from signing a prenup. The reluctance to prenuptial arrangements only appears after you’ve met “the one”, and all that the anti-prenup actor is concerned with is the motivation of the pro-prenup actor, and signing a counter-contract won’t allay that.
Could they sign up a contract for with one or more of the companies supplying the individual iPad components for 100K pieces a year until 2020, with a hefty penalty for breach of contract, and loudly publicise the deal? They’d lose the option of switching suppliers in case a better one came along, but it may be worth it given the strategic payoff.
(That is assuming the company in question doesn’t have a vertical monopoly, controlling all production steps from the ore mines to quality testing, which is a very reasonable assumption for nearly every physical product)
And when he cannot answer and stares at you dumbfounded while drooling a little,then you tell him he’s crazy :)