I’ll admit that I haven’t seen the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but how does it compare to Romeo and Juliet in terms of comedy? Shakespeare’s real talents lie not in mawkish sentimentality, but in clever wordplay and character-driven humor; this is true even of his plays which are supposedly “tragedies”.
Nominull2
I make it a habit to learn as little as possible by rote, and just derive what I need when I need it. This means my knowledge is already heavily compressed, so if you start plucking out pieces of it at random, it becomes unrecoverable fairly quickly. As near as I can tell, my knowledge rarely vanishes for no good reason, though, so I have not really found this to be a handicap.
If they have no interest in knowing the information for its own sake, that sounds like a problem with them, not with the university.
So it turns out that all you have to do is overcome bias? I confess I was hoping for something a little more specific than that.
Not murdering people for criticizing your beliefs is, at the very least, a useful heuristic.
You don’t believe in the artistic value of a beautifully extended metaphor?
Well, I wouldn’t have the balls to hijack an airplane and crash it into a building. If they’re cowards, what does that make me?
“Resist against being human” is an interesting choice of words. Surely, most people would not see that as a goal worth pursuing.
But everything is evidence about everything else. I don’t see the problem at all.
Evidence is like gravity. Everything is pulling on everything else, but in most cases the pull is weak enough that we can pretty much ignore it. What you have done, Caledonian, is akin to telling me the position of three one-gram weights, and then asking me to calculate the motion of Charon based on that.
Isn’t it reasonable to find it more likely that people are lying than that something has gone that flagrantly wrong with my ability to judge sizes of lines?
Hey everybody, let’s post our self-perceptions regarding our leadership abilities so that Eliezer can get some feedback as to his expectations!
As for me, I couldn’t lead a starving man to a buffet.
Nobody followed my lead. I guess that means my belief about my leadership abilities is well-founded!
James Bach, if science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, science isn’t a good in itself. If the experts aren’t ignorant, then we don’t need science anymore. If we know all the answers then why in hell do we need to learn?
Learning is good because it destroys doubt, doubt isn’t good because it enables learning. That perspective is incredibly wrongheaded.
Way to get trolled, Eliezer. The fact that OC’s comment had nothing to do with the post it was attached to should really have tipped you off that he’s really only interested in pushing your buttons.
This is pretty much your and Robin’s blog, write whatever you want. You don’t have to make excuses.
Argument #2 strikes me as eminently reasonable. I won’t be voting.
It seems like it should be impossible to calculate a fudge factor into your calculations to account for the possibility that your calculations are totally wrong, because once you calculate it in it becomes part of your calculations, which could be totally wrong. Maybe I’m missing something here that would become apparent if I actually sat down and thought about the math, so if anybody has already thought about the math and can save me the time, I would appreciate it.
I find the use of pick-up techniques super creepy, actually. Basically it amounts to attempts at mind control, and mind-controlling someone in order to have sex with them is, well, rape.
To say that Eliezer is a moral relativist because he realizes that a primality sorter might care about primality rather than morality, is equivalent to calling him a primality relativist because he realizes that a human might care about morality rather than primality.
So, it seems that Eliezer’s working definition of an intelligent person is “someone who agrees with me”.