Even better: you can’t get the exact text of a policy until you buy it. Some homeowners or renters policies will actually insure you against libel claims. But I couldn’t find a single insurance company willing to give me the exact text of the policy until I actually bought one.
novalis
Karma: 1,677
Learn to cook. If you can cook for yourself, you’ll eat healthier and better and save money. Also you can impress your dates.
I actually think a lot of people who advance the selfishness hypothesis are instead confused about selfishness.
On one hand, the word “selfishness” has a bunch of negative connotations and associations. But on the other hand, the revealed preferences theory holds that, in the end, we do what we do because we in some sense want to. Excepting reflexes and autonomic behavior, this is both trivially true and utterly useless. Saying that we do something “because we want to” has no explanatory power. But people who are confused about this take “we do what we want to”, together with “to do something merely because you want to is selfish” together to say that “all behavior is selfish.” This smuggles in all the connotations of selfishness, without explaining anything.
This post does a good job of explaining why our behavior doesn’t match some of the connotative meanings of selfishness, but doesn’t address the common confusion. That’s probably because you wrote it for the Less Wrong audience, who should already have the tools to avoid the common trap.
Until this moment, I had always assumed that Eliezer had read 100% of all fiction.
Other: “Justification” is just another complicated pre-Bayes way of trying to understand what belief is.
One of my mom’s friends was into Landmark. He was not what I would describe as a successful person, to put it bluntly.
On the subject of dark arts, the longer course involves several greater than twelve hour days of lectures with limited bathroom and meal breaks. These are clearly not designed to promote clear thinking about the content of the courses.
In the US, the law recognizes that people would sometimes benefit from plausible deniability, and thus sometimes has a standard of “knew or should have known.”
Yeah, if you’re an airline, the number might be 105.
“It’s actually hard to see when you’ve fucked up, because you chose all your actions in a good-faith effort and if you were to run through it again you’ll just get the same results. I mean, errors-of-fact you can see when you learn more facts, but errors-of-judgement are judged using the same brain that made the judgement in the first place.”—Collin Street
There is one exception to this, which is political charities (ACLU, for instance). Giving to political charities, has a signalling effect: a political charity can say “we have twelve million donors,” and this tells politicians that they had better listen to that charity or those twelve million people might be voting for someone else.
That said, a $10 donation is enough to get this effect.
why should I care?
Isn’t this an objection to any theory of ethics?
The MIT Mystery Hunt and the Illusion of Transparency
Maybe just asking for explanations is the best bet?
“I don’t understand the mechanism by which God could make something right or wrong.”
“Even if I accept that God must exist, I don’t understand where Jesus enters into things”
“If the Catholics have it right, why don’t they do any better than the rest of us ethically?”
“The only evidence you have for God is a feeling that morality must have certain properties. What would constitute evidence for or against your views on morality? And if there is no evidence, why believe one way or the other?”
I just donated.
Another classic example of the brain’s hackishness, which does not seem to have been mentioned here before, is the sentence, “More people have been to Russia than I have.” If you say this sentence to someone (try it!), they’ll at first claim that it was a perfectly reasonable, grammatical sentence. But then you ask them what it means, they’ll start to say something, then stop, look confused, and laugh.
(Yes, there is a parsing of “have” as “possess”, but this is (a) precluded by inflection, and (b) not ever what someone initially comes up with).
… presumably there’s a conservation of visceral feeling law that should apply here …
That’s why I sometimes randomly feel happy: because somewhere else in the universe, two people are fighting.
This is also the thesis of the classic “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics”
Unless you were both influenced by Perelandra, in which case the odds are much higher.
This essay’s thesis is that we should eat less meat, but its evidence is only that factory-farmed meat is a problem.
Most (but not all) of the meat I eat is not factory-farmed. The coop where I buy my meat says (pdf) that it buys only “humanely and sustainably raised” meat and poultry … from animals that are free to range on chemical-free pastures, raised on a grass-based diet with quality grain used only as necessary, never given hormones and produced and processed by small-scale farmers.” (For eggs, the coop does offer less-humane options, but I only buy the most-humane ones).
I might stop eating most of the factory-farmed meat that I eat. It would simply mean never eating out at non-frou-frou places. The exception would be dealing with non-local family (for local family, I could simply bring meat from the coop to share).
That said, it’s hard to know when a restaurant is serving humanely raised meat. It seems like it would be nice to have a site where I could type in a restaurant’s name, and find out who their suppliers are and what standards they adhere to. For the vast majority of restaurants, the answer would be that they just don’t care. But, at least in NYC, it’s common for foodie sorts of restaurants to list their suppliers. My favorite restaurant, Momofuku, for instance, sometimes specifically lists that some dish’s meat is from e.g. Niman Ranch. Niman Ranch claims to raise their animals humanely. Do they really? And such a site would increase the pressure on restaurants to choose humane suppliers.
Maybe you should reconsider picking on an entire field you know nothing about?
I’m not saying this to defend postmodernism, which I know almost nothing about, but to point out that the Sokal hoax is not really enough reason to reject an entire field (any more than the Bogdanov affair is for physics).
I’m pointing out that you’re neglecting the virtues of curiosity and humility, at least.
And this is leaving aside that there is no particular reason for “post-utopian” to be a postmodern as opposed to modern term; categorizing writers into movements has been a standard tool of literary analysis for ages (unsurprisingly, since people love putting things into categories).