Upvoted. I really like this comment because it shows some of my own concerns about consequentialism. For example I have decided that for most cases the deontic answers fit the consequentialist ones so well that we should start out following them and only if they appear to be nonsatisfactory we should dive into consequentialist reasoning. This quite leads to some peace of mind, but it obviously is the easy answer, not the correct one… Is there a post on lesswrong for deontology as a subset of consequentialism? (According to wikipedia there seem to be some scientists that state a similar opinion.)
WingedViper
Of course, that’s why I would call myself a consequentialist even though I mainly/very often argue by using deontic principles. I wasn’t talking about theory (or foundation), but about the practicality/practical use of deontic reasoning versus consequentialism.
Drug use is IMO not a good example because drug prohibition does our (modern, informed and scientifically advanced) society no favor. Quite the opposite, as more and more people seem to realise.
Banning superstimuli is not the best way to go (it might not even be a good way), early education is much more effective. Our information society opens up new possibilities to make well informed decisions and to come closer to the free market ideal.
Hi Leute, werde vielleicht da sein, komme aus dem Südwesten nach Berlin.
It does not state which (!) former self, so I would expect some sort of median or mean or summary of your former self and not just the last day. So I’m sorry but there is no shortcut ;-)
Hi, I looked through the games and (as far as I remember) we could play at least 2 (nearly) without preparation and 1 with very little, so that’s the ones I want to try. We will definitely have 2 to 4 games/activities to chose from. So we can decide what we want to do. It is of course just an offer, no pressure there.
I think I missed the poll for the date, so is it going to be Thursday the 28th?
Let’s talk about politics
I never said that we are immune, I said that there was potential for good political discussions not that there would be no bad ones. And I wanted to ask a question, not state that you are all wrong and stupid.
But that doesn’t explain (entirely) why there are no political threads. A better explanation is (I guess) that you downvote everything that has the word politics in it.
I may have been overly optimistic. I was just stating my confusion about the fact that this chance (people with different political opinions and small identities that are interested in finding the truth and like to discuss on a fair basis) has not been used (much) to discuss politics.
I guess with “perfect” I meant that it is one of the best places you can find, not that it is really perfect.
That is the sort of answer I was aiming for when I was writing the post. I genuinely wanted to know why you don’t have those discussions and this is an interesting reason.
I realise more and more that I did not phrase my question/query very well. What I meant with a political discussion was that you have a general issue and you try to find either the truth or a consens if possible. So I don’t want to discuss Democrats vs Republicans (I am German anyway) but talk about certain issues that you would not want to discuss, because they are “political”. (e.g. same sex marriage, how to minimise poverty etc.)
Well the intention was indeed twofold. Firstly advocate the possibility for good political discussions (because then, and to a lesser extent now, I thought that it would be good to have them) and genuinely ask why you don’t have them.
I don’t know if you know, but just in case you (or someone else) don’t: There is no inequality symbol on the computer keyboard, so he used a typical programmer’s inequality symbol which is ”!=”. So yes, it is not easily readable (i! is a bad combination...) but totally correct.
I would be interested in the conclusions you (all) draw from the two-party swindle. Do you think it gets better with multiple party politics? And what would be the best political system? Direct democracy? A council based republic? I agree that the two-party system is greatly flawed, but what is best (multiple parties is better, but clearly not best, right?)
Longtime lurker that finally signed up in July. All questions except for the last ones with the tests. (did the IQ test though)
Same for me here. Most of them were surprisingly easy and some (about 3 or 4) were just plain bizarre.
Yep, imperial system was quite a frustration and is not really appropriate for such a scientifically minded group.
Hi,
I’m a German student-to-be (I am going to start studying IT in October) and I am interested in almost anything connected with rationality, especially the self improvement, biases and “how to save the world” parts. I hope that lesswrong will be (and it already has been to a certain amount) one of the resources for (re-)shaping my thinking and acting towards a better me and a better world.
I came here, like so many others ;-), because I wanted to check out the foundations/concepts behind HPMOR and I could not just leave again. So over the last few months I visited again and again to read some of the sequences and posts.
As I am interested in science, especially physics, maths, technology and astronomy, I have a question that I would like to ask the lesswrong community: What is a fast and secure way of determining the trustworthiness of scientists and scientific papers? I ask this because there is a lot of pseudoscience and poorly done science out there which often isn’t easy to distinguish from unconventional/disrupting science (at least not for me).
all the best Viper