A bit late to the game, but the link now appears to be broken. Has gessum been moved?
NoSignalNoNoise
As soon as this catches on, malicious people will learn to appear incompetent.
This suggests an improved absurdity heuristic: if somebody expresses a belief that seems absurd, first check whether they actually believe what you think they do. It might not be as absurd once you know what they actually believe.
They might really believe in a literal talking snake, but have you really lost much by giving the (temporary) benefit of the doubt?
There are important differences between moral principles and government policies. Even if you accept the premise that the morally optimal course of action is X, it does not logically follow that the government should mandate X. For one thing, it may or may not be feasible to enforce such a law, or the costs of implementing it may outweigh the benefits. Furthermore, some moral philosophies (though not utilitarianism) place firm boundaries on what is and is not the proper role of government.
I would be curious to know your true rejection of utilitarianism.
Who are the customers?
Support for legalizing marijuana is negatively correlated with age. I could not find statistics by age, but I would imagine that older Americans, being generally more conservative, are more likely to oppose abortion. Voter turnout increases with age, so although legalizing marijuana and banning abortion have similar overall levels of support, banning abortion has higher support among people whose opinions politicians care about (voters).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US8f1w1cYvs A bit late to the game, but the link is broken.
I am also a (usually) happy perfectionist. I achieved this through a similar approach—being dissatisfied with myself but satisfied with the rest of my situation. I do require OCD medication for this to work, though.
Perhaps adding an “anecdote” tag can address this issue. That way, those of us (myself included) who find this sort of post useful can read them, and those who do not can avoid them.
Psychiatric diagnoses are the map, not the territory. Many have overlapping symptoms, likely because the mechanisms are not all that well-understood. I would not go so far as to say that the statement “$person has ADHD” is semantically null, but it conveys far less useful information than “$person is likely to benefit from Ritalin”.
Does the belief that ADHD does or does not exist pay rent? Psychiatric diagnoses are the map; patterns of thought are territory. Society has certain rules that can make it expedient or inexpedient to call a particular similarity cluster a “disease” or “medical condition”, but what really matters is whether a given intervention (medication, psychotherapy, etc.) is or isn’t beneficial.
Getting upset at being corrected sounds like a rookie mistake to me.
Down-voted for being pedantic. The game of Go is not the point here.
My intuition says that improving the gender balance would help us become more mainstream; more diverse groups look less exclusive/threatening, so people feel more inclined to join them. Does anyone know of relevant research that would support/refute this hypothesis?
In matters of morality (as opposed to law, In matters of morality (as opposed to law), the important thing is to follow correct principles, not to find technicalities. As soon as someone writes on the bottom line “X is a moral act”, where X is what he/she happens to want to do at the moment, any further “moral reasoning” is just self-deception. Any reasonable person can tell that such an incredibly specific situation is useless for forming a categorical imperative. The fact that the idea of a categorical imperative breaks down when it is so vaguely specified is strong evidence against that particular implementation of it, but only weak evidence against the concept as a whole. It would require more work to define a standard of reasonableness for what situations can and can’t be generalized before one can say whether the categorical imperative does or doesn’t make sense.
That said, I suspect that if one starts with a naive categorical imperative like Matt expresses above and iteratively finds and patches flaws, one will eventually converge towards consequentialism. I could be proven wrong about this, though.
The story hack seems very hit-or-miss. For some students, the progression from the plum pudding model to the Bohr model to quantum mechanics is an engaging story that helps them understand the fundamentals of chemistry. Personally, these stories just made me tune out and wonder when they would get around to teaching me something useful.
That said, in scientific fields that are less well-developed, I think the historical experiments approach really adds to learning. It would be a lot harder to grok the psychology of authority without learning about the Milgram obedience study.
Checking a solution is often a lot easier than generating an original solution. If you are not going to be generating original solutions, I would guess that there are better uses of your time than learning how to. In my schooling in general (at middle school and higher level), I was generally annoyed that most subjects were taught with the assumption that you were going to become a practitioner of that subject, rather than simply a user. Naturally, every teacher thinks their subject is the most important in the world (why else would they have chosen it?), but most of their students do not see it that way. I would have been far better off learning how to communicate effectively rather than psychoanalyzing literature, just as those bound for non-quantitative careers would have been better off learning the math they need to keep their finances in order than constructing geometric proofs.
Pardon my sloppy phrasing. I did not intend to imply causality one way or another, merely the correlation. I edited the original comment to reflect my intent.
I think teaching “gateway skills” is an excellent idea. One potential impediment to making it work here (as far as I can tell, this is still the case 3 years later) is that the Core Sequences are essentially prerequisites to understanding most of the content here. In order to successfully bring in new people with differently inclined personalities (including, but not limited to more women), posts on “gateway skills” will need to be accessible to a more general audience. This is certainly doable; it would just require a break from routine.
Another potential benefit of this idea is that it may help current readers develop skills that they are less inclined to develop, and are consequently somewhat lacking in (I would consider myself part of this category).
I have found that LessWrong has the opposite effect on me. While I think that I am less rational and less intelligent than the average person here (or perhaps the availability-weighted average?), my main cognitive response has been an increase in self-esteem.
Strangely, in college, where there was also an abundance of people smarter than me, I and my response was a general feeling of inferiority.
I would hypothesize (~40% confidence) that the source of this difference is a sense of competing with my college classmates for jobs vs. aspiring to gain the abilities that others here have.