Wouldn’t that be the very definition of a deist or an agnostic, instead of an atheist?
Val
Karma: 560
An interesting question, and not an easy one to answer in the way I could be sure you understood the same thing what I meant.
My original thought when composing the comment was that it never occurred to me that “he doesn’t have a PhD so his opinion is less worth”, and I would never use the fact that he doesn’t have a PhD, neither in an assumed debate with him nor for any self-assurance. This means that even if I answered with a “clear yes” to your question, it still wouldn’t mean that it was the cause of the rejection.
Loss of credit because he doesn’t have a PhD does not necessarily equal the gain of credit because he does have a PhD. Yes, I realize that this is the most attackable sentence in my answer.
The disagreements are more centered on personal opinion, morality, philosophical interpretation, opinion about culture and/or religion, and in part on interpreting history. So, mostly soft sciences. This means that there would be no relevant PhD in these cases (a PhD in a philosophical field wouldn’t matter to me as a deciding factor)
On the other hand, if it was a scientific field, then I might unconsciously have given him a little higher probability of being right if he did have a PhD in the field, but this would be dwarfed by the much larger probability gain caused by him actually working in the relevant field, PhD or not. As of yet I don’t have any really opposite views about any of his scientific views. Maybe I hold some possible future events a little more or less probable, or am unsure in things he is very sure about, but the conclusion is: I don’t have scientific disagreements with him as of yet.
About whether this type of rejection is common: if we take my explanation at the beginning of this answer, then I guess it is uncommon to reject him in that way (and his article might lean a tiny little bit in the direction of a strawman argument: “they only disagree because they think it’s important that I don’t have a PhD, so this means they just don’t have better excuses”). If we take your definition, then I agree that it might be higher.
The two comments you and Jiro wrote while composing mine actually made me think about a possibly unclear formulation: I should have written “are not based in any significant way on” instead of “don’t have anything to do with”.
You actually just described what I wrote as: “Loss of credit because he doesn’t have a PhD does not necessarily equal the gain of credit because he does have a PhD”
“with bounded computational power”—if that limited computational power means that even if every atom in the known Universe was a computer, it would still take more than the age of the Universe to brute-force it… then it is safe to assume that even the most superintelligent AI couldn’t break it.
There is an old joke about an art critic, who was accused of how he dares to criticize the art of others when he himself is unable to produce any art. The answer: “I cannot lay eggs, but I can still tell if an egg is rotten”.
The problem with the current system is that people with good haggling skills (for example, former used car salesmen) have an unfair advantage against people with less haggling and more technical skills.
You can neither prove nor disprove that we are in a simulation, just as you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. In both cases, you cannot come up with a measurable experiment, your claim is not falsifiable, so you cannot use the scientific method to prove or disprove it, and the discussion will inevitably lead to an argument about semantics: “how do you define simulation”, “how do you define god”, “how do you define define”, etc.
Almost all similar arguments I witnessed ended in an argument about semantics, where one came up with his own definition of a term and tried to prove or disprove it, instead of focusing on a commonly accepted definitions agreed by both parties.
Overcoming bias in itself will be useless if there would be people with the power to decide what is bias and what is not.
Just as the fight against extremism (or racism, intolerance, etc.) can be skewed if there are people with enough political power to decide the exact meanings of these terms.
The question is, how much tax choice.
Being able to allocate 1% of your taxes to the charity you choose, makes sense. It is actually in effect in some countries.
Being able to allocate 100% of your taxes as you like would be an unmanageable mess because people on average have no idea what is needed to keep a country or an economy running.
Somewhere in-between? Where? Without exact definitions what you mean by “tax choice” every discussion would be completely pointless.
I think you should spend a little more time among the average, common, non-academic people, and learn how they think. Then you will understand why your ideas wouldn’t work.
Do us all a favor and come up with a decent explanation for why we should trust your words (votes) rather than your actions (spending).
It’s simple. The representatives don’t micromanage our daily life, they only work on laws within the confines of a constitution. Have you heard about the separation of powers? They can also make only minor, gradual changes to the existing system without risking a revolution.
On the other hand, a completely free-choice taxation system would bring a lot of instability into the system. How could your economy follow drastic changes in the tax allocation, which will inevitably happen as people’s moods are changing. For example, the school system would get one year 150 billion $, the next year 17 billion $, the third year 200 billion $. How could you plan ahead in such a chaos?
Another question is, how would you introduce such a system, assuming it worked? Just come up one year with it, and when people get to fill their tax forms, they will be surprised by a long form where they will need to specify where they are allocating they taxes to? Do you really expect that it will be at least a little similar to how the allocation was last year? Because otherwise the system couldn’t handle the large differences. Do you expect that everyone would know by heart how much the upkeep of certain institutions costs? Do you expect every citizen to become a financial expert and know what to allocate where to stop some essential services form completely collapsing because they received only a tiny percentage compared to what they got last year?
You came up with a lot of theory without any proof how it would work in practice, so please, show us a plausible scenario with concrete examples how you thing your ideas would be implemented.
You also didn’t answer my original question: to what extent would the choice extend? Completely free? So if no one allocated to the police (because they hate receiving speeding tickets) then would the whole police just disband? The more I think about your proposal, the closer it looks to anarchy.
If not completely free, then what would be the limits?
People need time to learn a profession. At least a few years to learn it, and at least a decade to be good in it. You cannot expect tens of thousands of teachers to lose their jobs and retrain to become medics, just for them to have to retrain as policemen next year, because the allocation changed.
If the allocation in a certain sector dropped significantly, you argue that it just shows that demand dropped. But what to do with the thousands or maybe millions of people suddenly without a job?
If the allocation in a certain sector increased significantly, because demand suddenly soared, how would you get so many trained professionals for those jobs? You couldn’t train them overnight.
Demand will fluctuate significantly, because people are emotional beings. For example, I’ve seen in a European country, that a party’s votes dropped from over 50% to below 20% in a year because their leader was found out of doing something stupid. A completely new government was elected, but life went on with little changes, because they didn’t drastically changed the tax allocation, the new government made just small changes. Had they completely eliminated the funds of a sector, people would have gone on strike or maybe started a revolution.
Now imagine what would happen if an image of a dying child circulated through the media, with a message that there isn’t enough money for health-care. Next you know, that sector receives more then double the founding. How quickly you think you could train new staff for it? The same time a scandal breaks out because of a single teacher being found out that the abused a child. Tax allocation for education would drop significantly because of that single event, and now tens of thousands of teachers are without a job, and hundreds of thousands of pupils don’t have a classroom to study in. Even if next year the situation is stabilized, hundreds of thousands of students missed a school year, and there would be a job opening for tens thousands of teachers: how could you fill these instantly before the beginning of the school year?
You still didn’t answer how you could keep up retraining the workforce to constantly shifting demands.
Also you didn’t answer how you would introduce your system without causing great societal upheaval or even societal collapse as millions of people would lose their jobs and millions of other jobs won’t have a skilled workforce. If you don’t come up with a plan how to handle such drastic changes, then your “pragmatarianims” has absolutely no difference from complete anarchy.
It seems this discussion is leading nowhere. Instead of discussing it, you seem to play an artillery game, just like what politicians do in a public “debate”: you answer to the few of my claims you think you can refute, while completely ignoring those which you can’t.
First you have to spend at least a few sentences on how you define “consciousness”, otherwise you might risk this discussion to shift to the realm of semantics, like on the classic paradox of the sound of a fallen tree in a deserted forest.
I’m sorry if I was not clear enough. I was meaning to state how you yourself understand the term “consciousness”. For example, sound can be defined as a compression wave, or as a sensory experience.
If you define consciousness as in your example, then consciousness should always persist while you are considered to be different from a non-living object. However, it is possible to come up with a definition of consciousness where being asleep would make consciousness non-persistent.
The Galileo affair: who was on the side of rationality?
Please fill out this survey after having read the article:
Did it change any of your previously held beliefs? [pollid:820]
If you were a well-studied man in the early 17th century Italy, on which side of the heliocentrism debate would you have been, if you didn’t had the knowledge of later eras? [pollid:821]
Have you heard about Giovanni Battista Riccioli before reading this article? [pollid:822]
What I meant by him ridiculing the pope is that he created a character called Simplicio (meaning simple-minded, idiot) modeled from the pope. Maybe I didn’t formulate it well enough, but I wasn’t calling his book unscientific because of ridiculing the pope. I called it unscientific because of the lines of reasoning he used (look at the sloshing water example). Also, he failed to present both sides of the argument with their counter-arguments, he wrote a heavily biased book instead.
Of course, there are also some merits in the works of Galilei, he made observations and improved instruments which did add value to science. However, he is too much overrated compared to other scientists of his time.
In this case I agree with you.
However, I would like to add that when we judge people’s decisions we should judge based on the era in which they were made. In an era where pretty much anywhere in the world corporal and even capital punishment was the norm even for minor crimes (like theft), and if you insulted a nobleman you had a good chance of being challenged to a duel and killed, insulting the head of state only got him house arrest. A (comparatively) pretty mild punishment in my opinion. Of course, such a punishment would be unjustified in today’s world where we value the freedom of speech a lot. However, publicly calling a head of state an idiot would probably have some repercussions even today, even if just a fine, or a lawsuit to post a correction or apology in the next edition.
Sorry, I just love playing advocatus diaboli :)
There are some views of Yudkowsky I don’t necessarily agree with, and none of them have anything to do with him having or not having a PhD.
Are you sure this type of rejection (or excuse of a rejection) is common and significant?