I tend to dismiss Steven Landsburg’s critique of the standard interpretation of experiments along the lines of the Ultimatum Game, since nobody really thinks it through like him. But I actually did think about it when taking this survey (which is not the same as saying it affected my response).
teageegeepea
Karma: 532
What about Milton Friedman’s thermostat?
It seems to me that most of the “raise awareness” campaigns are for things people are plenty aware of already.
I’m surprised about the last one. I think it would be quite helpful if you could be prepared for that.
The other two are experiences you wouldn’t like to have. If you had the indexical knowledge of what the catchiest jingle was, you could better avoid hearing it.
Bryan Caplan argues against the “corrupted by power” idea with an alternative view: they were corrupt from the start, which is why they were willing to go to such extremes to attain power.
Around the time I stopped believing in God and objective morality I came around to Stirners’ view: such values are “geists” haunting the mind, often distracting us from factual truths. Just as I stopped reading fiction for reasons of epistemic hygiene, I decided that chucking morality would serve a similar purpose. I certainly wouldn’t trust myself to selectively filter any factual information. How can the uninformed know what to be uninformed about?
There was a time when Christians frequently did kill each other over seemingly minor religious differences. The wars of religion led to a backlash that eventually gave us the political theories of Hobbes, Locke etc. When people talk about the need for a reformation in Islam, they are really thinking of the period after those wars which we accept as normal.
I was going to link to Bryan Caplan on applying the Coase theorem to offense, but turned out I confused him with Alex Tabarrok on envy. He does extend his analysis to offense though.
I do recall Robin Hanson debating with Bryan Caplan and saying that it is a utilitarian best outcome for the majority of believers not to be subjected to atheist speech. I normally assume Caplan is wrong in any disagreement with Hanson, but there I lean more towards his free speech absolutism. That may be because my behaviorist leanings lead me to discount claims of psychic distress (or utility monsters) to zero. On the other hand, I don’t value the ability to make atheist polemics all that highly and would be open to “make a deal” along those lines, though I’d be upset if the deal was made without my consent.
The Volokh Conspiracy often discusses the heckler’s veto.
I’d get in Nozick’s machine for the wireheading. I figure it’s likely enough that I’m in a simulation anyway, and his simulation can be better than my current one. I figure I’m atypical though.
The blogger “Education Realist” disagrees with the argument that flat scores show that spending more on education hasn’t resulted in any improvements. He argues that if you divide students up demographically, we have seen improvements. It’s just that the shift in the composition of the student population masks that.
If higher IQ is almost always better, why the bell curve? Short people persist because height can have costs.
It’s not hard to find evidence that IQ can be fitness reducing.
I don’t like the idea of being labeled a “political blogger” (I don’t think I wrote anything about the election or its run-up), but it’s hard to deny that politics is discussed a lot at my blog and I don’t really have any other forte I could claim to displace it. I could defend myself by linking to Razib Khan on how many of the “science” blogs on his old blogroll spend most of their time discussing politics (generally, politically inflected atheism), but for one who accepts “politics is the mind-killer” that’s just a “but they do it too”. The post you link to could be construed as “sociological” rather than “political” and would be relevant in an alternate universe without politics.
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I actually did cease believing in morality when I ceased believing in God. I had grasped the nettle of the Euthyphro dilemma the same way as Vox Day: God can arbitrarily declare what is moral or immoral, just as a consequence of being God. Objective morality had no detectable independent existence otherwise. Since neither God nor morality exists and impinged on my world, ceasing to believe in them has not caused anything to happen to me analogous to disbelieving in a car racing towards you. The invisible pink unicorn comparison is apt.
The EMH applies to financial markets, which revolve around ownership of easily tradeable things. Often those things are bought just so they can be sold later on. A person convinced by your argument would have a difficult time “leveraging up” to arbitrage an inefficient labor market. Though I think the economic consensus might be that labor markets generally are not very efficient, hence the existence of persistent high unemployment (though that may not be an issue in Australia compared to the U.S these days).
I think in the absence of actual experience machines, we’re dealing with fictional evidence. Statements about what people would hypothetically do have no consequences other than signalling. Once we create them (as we have on a smaller scale with certain electronic diversions), we can observe the revealed preferences.
I came to the wrong conclusion in the Duke Lacrosse case, even though I didn’t think our society is all that racist. I messed up because I just assumed the authorities wouldn’t do what they did unless they had good reason. I have since changed my assumptions.
“Ancient prisons”? Incarceration is a relatively new development. Most punishment was corporal in the past. People were sent to jail to await trial or pay off debts. Robin Hanson can see beyond the status quo assumption that criminal punishment = prison.
Since a cynical view of most charitable organizations is held by many here (including me), this bit of pushback could be a surprise resulting in Bayesian updating.
That was a very nice trick you pulled. I was even grimacing at the phrase “rather intelligent Leon Kass acolyte”. Too bad it will be hard to do it again as we’ll be on alert!
I second Allan, you definitely changed the meaning from OUGHT_TO(x) to GIVEN(x).
I posted this before, but it seems appropriate again, so here is the Mind Hacks post on bias blind-spot.
I do have a favorite blogger that gets under my skin through that sort of outside-group analysis. Unfortunately, the benefits to my epistemic health are not captured in any way to provide incentives for production.
I like Eliezer’s writing, but I think he himself has described his work as “philosophy of AI”. He’s been a great popularizer (and kudos to folks like him and Dawkins), but that’s different from having “produced significant insights”. Or perhaps his insight is supposed to be “We are really screwed unless we resolve certain problems requiring significant insights!”.
It may not be your morality, but submission to God definitely was mine. Of course, at that time I would have insisted that other were confusing “morality” with something other than submission to God!
I’ve linked to a quote from Daniel Ellsberg at Overcoming Bias, but it seemed relevant enough here to excerpt the bits that caught my eye:
First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess
[...]
you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t....and that all those other people are fools
[...]
you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information [...] But that takes a while to learn. In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening.
[...]
You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.