I took the survey.
NoSignalNoNoise
One thing I’m curious about—what did the process of the border closing off look like, and what was going on in the weeks leading up to it? While I have no near term plans to emigrate, I often wonder what the warning signs are that it’s time to start seriously looking, and what the warning signs are that it’s time to GTFO.
Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.
-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.
-- Paul Graham
- 1 Jan 2013 20:28 UTC; 12 points) 's comment on Rationality Quotes January 2013 by (
took it
Bad things don’t happen to you because you’re unlucky. Bad things happen to you because you’re a dumbass.
That 70s Show
While this is by no means an unconventional suggestion, I would consider putting it in an index fund. The fees are very low and barring societal collapse, your money will grow in the long-term without you having to do much of anything about it.
At a more meta level, the boring, conventional choice is generally the best one unless you have a compelling reason to believe otherwise.
This story makes sense for describing how people might believe conspiracy theories because they oppose lockdowns, but I don’t think a similar story would apply for opposition to vaccines. Following this line of thinking, I think the sequence of events is:
Disease breaks out.
Public health authorities respond to the disease with high-cost preventative measures.
People respond to those preventative measures by becoming hostile to public health measures.
People’s hostility to public health measures oppose vaccines even though they’re much lower cost and much more effective than the measures that led to them becoming hostile to public health measures in the first place.
The ideas of the Hasids are scientifically and morally wrong; the fashion, food and lifestyle are way stupid; but the community and family make me envious.
-- Penn Jilette
A related epistemology that is popular in the business world is PowerPointificationism, which holds that the truth of a proposition should be evaluated by how easily it can be expressed in PowerPoint. Due to the nature of PowerPoint as a means of expression, this epistemology often produces results similar to those of Occam’s sand-blaster, which holds that the simplest explanation is the correct one (note that unlike Occam’s razor, Occam’s sand-blaster does not require that the explanation be consistent with observation).
- 15 Sep 2012 4:31 UTC; 6 points) 's comment on The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem by (
How can I alter my Big 5 personality traits? (In particular, conscientiousness and extroversion)
From the 2014 Survey:
Polyamory:
51.8% prefer monogamous, 15.1% prefer polyamorous (a lot uncertain)
But only 5.3% have more than 1 partner
Children:
36.1% want more child(ren), 28.3% uncertain, 34.3% don’t want more
Politics:
38.9% Social Democratic, 27.7% Liberal, 25.2% Libertarian
Taxes: 3.14 +- 1.212 (1 = should be lower; 5 = should be higher)
Minimum Wage: 3.21 +- 1.359 (1 = should be lower; 5 = should be higher)
Social Justice: 3.15 +- 1.385 (1 = negative view; 5 = positive view)
Ethics:
60% accept or lean towards consequentialism
Out of constructivism, error theory, non-cognitivism, subjectivism and substantive realism, none had more than a third
Cryo:
24% don’t want to, 36.7% considering, 30.8% signed up or want to be
Probability that a person frozen today will be revived: 22.3 +- 27.3% (median 10%)
Misc:
p(many worlds) = 47.6% +- 30.1%
Can we please bring back downvoting?
An important aspect of this is that it involves a tradeoff between a sacred value (preventing death) and a secular value (avoiding restrictions). When it’s not socially acceptable to have a frank discussion of the real costs and benefits of various restrictions, it becomes easier for people who oppose the restrictions to pretend that the benefits of the restrictions don’t exist (aka the disease isn’t real or isn’t serious).
Although philosophers have explained variously the correlation between simplicity and truth, they generally agree that simplicity signals truth. Unless utilitarians can otherwise justify it, searching for a simple moral theory means searching for a true theory.
This is the fallacy of the undistributed middle. You say, essentially,
All searches for truth are searches for simplicity
Utilitarianism is a search for simplicity
Therefore utilitarianism is a search for truth
While I understand that utilitarianism being a search for simplicity is evidence that it’s a search for truth, that does not give you license to automatically assume the worst of a theory you dislike.
Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men.
Of course, the study reports how many sexual partners participants said they had had, not how many they wanted. Since it was filtered for an all-heterosexual population, the fact that men and women have about the same number of sexual partners (duh) doesn’t tell us anything about whether one sex wants more than the other.
What if we set a significantly higher karma threshold for voting? I think a threshold of 250 or so would make Eugene’s sockpuppetry and mass-downvoting shenanigans prohibitively difficult.
In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.
Ben Franklin
Some universally important skills that I wish I had been a lot better at in college:
Networking and selling yourself. None of the other (professional) skills you develop will matter if you can’t get a job where you use them.
How to collaborate effectively.
Setting priorities and time management.
Beyond that, it’s very important to know what your goals/values are. What do you want to get out of an ideal career? Why are you majoring in physics? It’s hard to optimize before you know what you’re optimizing for.
-- Paul Graham, The Acceleration of Addictiveness