Science has much to say about morality. It can say which morals different groups of people have, what are probable causes for morals, and which morals are useful on an gene|individual|group|society|planet level.
PetjaY
“But can you have YOUR child, while eugenics prevent you from breeding? Not in genetic sense, but it seems deeply flawed to base parent-child relation simply on genetic code. It’s upbringing that matters. Adopted child is in any meaningful way YOUR child.”
Treating people not genetically your children as if they were is a big minus in our evolutionary game these days. It also helps bad behaviour (making children and letting others raise them), so i´d say that it manages to be bad both for yourself and population, though the second part depends on why the child was given for adoption.
In general improving gene pool would be a good idea, but finding collective solutions for it that don´t cause more bad than good seems hard. Also if our evolution gets rid of the heuristic that sex=children=good which isn´t working anymore and replaces it with something like “acts that lead to you children=good” we then get people spending their money smarter, which increases reproductive success of richer people who tend to be >average intelligent.
Atleast Atlas Shrugged is written in a way that suggests cultishness. All good people are good at everything, good looking and always right. Enemies are stupid, wrong and ugly. There are no bad sides in good ideas or good sides in bad ideas.
Universe seems to be doing that, only problem is that instead of us getting results we are only part of them.
You only need to have better information than average voter for your vote to improve result of election. Though then again, effect of 1 vote is usually so small that the rational choice would be to vote for whatever gives you more social status.
First you need to decide what gives utility points to you, which is a moral problem. I consider most computer programs to be sentient, with their work memory being sentience, i also see pain as just a bit of programming that makes creatures avoid things causing it, not different from some regulators i have programmed. Therefore i don´t care if fetuses are sentient or feel pain, so for me that does not affect the utility calculation. But most people do not agree.
Many different things can cause similar movements, you could detect something pulling those atoms in 1 direction, and something else pushing them back at the edge of the pebble which is closest to earths center of gravity. But you would not know what is causing that pull, only from where it is coming and how strong it is.
The important question is not whether sweatshops are good, but what changes can be made, and will those changes make the world better or worse. So when considering if sweatshops should be banned, it is a very important argument that those working there have decided that the sweatshop is better than any alternative they have, and if you ban the sweatshop they will be worse off.
That is correct, and even more importantly “When answering a question with a large enough number of possible answers, any single possible answer will have a bigger chance of being a false positive than true positive if tested”
I would rather say that for normal people certainty is ~90% propability, you can notice this noticing that people who say something is certain aren´t willing to act in ways that would cause serious harm if they were wrong.
“For example, our emotions don’t seem to work in a time-consistent manner, and we often later regret actions that we take based on strong emotions, when those emotions eventually fade away.”
There is a rational explanation for this, i will use anger as example: People try to not anger people who easily get angry and violent, so anger has benefits. However this can also cause other people to want to punish angry person for his violence, and here regret comes in and lowers the punishment that angry person gets. Imagine a trial where a man found his wife sexing another man, and hit them both until they were almost dead. Which explanation will lead to a lower punishment? “I do not know what went in to me, and have regretted doing it ever since, i hope they will some day forgive me for losing my mind for a moment” or “By beating them i try to make sure that both my wife and people that know us will not attempt this or any other thing that might upset me badly again”
When you count percentages, you always count percentages of something. In this case you count percentages of 100 in one case, and percentages of 98 in the other, which explains why you get different numbers
Reading Eliezers quantum physics sequence should help with configuration spaces and thingspaces, probably some other physics references aswell.
“It will no longer be correct to say that something is (a color or similar property). One must say it “seems” a color, as well as to whom. Not “Snow is white”, rather, “Snow seems white to me”.”
I´d say this is not needed, when people say “Snow is white” we know that it really means “Snow seems white to me”, so saying it as “Snow seems white to me” adds length without adding information.
My first fixes to english would be to unite spoken and written english with same letters always meaning same sounds, and getting rid of adding “the” to places where it does not add information (where sentence would mean same even without “the”).
Until poetry everything you wrote could´ve come from me, but then i´ve never seen any beauty in poetry. So using same brain structures for hearing and reading, and enjoying poetry don´t always correlate
While people often often end debates without admitting defeat, if you discuss with them after a couple of days (or weeks) you can often see their opinions changed. This is because people need time to think before changing their mind, which they cannot do that well while debating. Especially people do not like admitting they´re wrong before they´re sure they are.
I have a similar way, which i find simpler:
9N=10N-N
That is, 9 8=10 8-8
Schools would have a lot to learn from videogames. Companies aswell (in motivating their employees) but especially schools.
I hope you mean taxing additional income that much, otherwise earning 40k$ instead of 1$ less would make you pay 40k$(25%-20%)=2000$ more in taxes, which means people would have to start checking how much they´ve earned when closing to yearend, and sometimes working less (or asking for less pay) to not go to the next bracket. Why not just use a function? Like, tax rate=lesser of: 0.25earnings,40% or something like that. My personal favourite is basic income+flat tax rate though.
To better understand why it is used imagine a map, going right is +, going left is -, going up is i, going down is -i. Turning left is multiplying by i, turning right is multiplying by -i. So i is used to calculate things where you need 2 dimensions.