Also, [i]italics[/i] would be nice.
Z_M_Davis
Karma: 1,143
Z_M’s
(winces)
This is to nominate “The Bottom Line” / “A Rational Argument.”
The most frequently useful thing I’ve gotten out of Overcoming Bias is not a technique or lesson so much as it is an attitude. It’s the most ridiculously simple thing of all: to be in the habit of actually, seriously asking: is (this idea) really actually true? You can ask anyone if they think their beliefs are true, and they’ll say yes, but it’s another thing to know on a gut level that you could just be wrong, and for this to scare you, not in the sense of “O terror!--if my cherished belief were false, then I could not live!” but rather the sense of “O terror!--my cherished belief could be false, and if I’m not absurdly careful, I could live my whole life and not even know!”
Clearly the earlier material is more important than the later. Include stuff like “The Bottom Line,” “Update Yourself Incrementally,” “Think Like Reality,” “Conservation of Expected Evidence,” “Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points,” the Fake Utility Functions sequence, &c. Also consider including the material between “But There’s Still a Chance, Right?” through “0 and 1 are Not Probabilities,” and “Mind Projection Fallacy” through “If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help.” Ooh, and reprint the “Twelve Virtues”!
Don’t mention quantum mechanics or the Singularity. Don’t mention morality except for something along the lines of “Feeling Rational.”
I think it means the comment has been edited.
EDIT: This is a test of said hypothesis. SECOND EDIT: The experiment supports the hypothesis.
It’s the Same Five Dollars!
Potentially related: my italics are showing up fine in the editor, but not in the actual post. Markdown-style asterisks aren’t working either. I see italics in other people’s posts—how are they doing it?
[...] and Dennett [talks] about free will.
Dennett’s free will is very much unlike naïve free will.
Anecdotal: I don’t remember having the slightest concept of sexual interest in anything before puberty.
This is also my experience.
But this is really a serious concern. Brushing it away with a comment along the lines of “Well, they also say that about obviously non-cultish figure X; how silly!” is like—like—well, um...
--failing to pump against entropy, as it is written that “Every Cause Wants to Be a Cult.”
Downvoted.
I believe that many if not most people value some things more than happiness.
I sometimes suspect that mass institutionalized schooling is net harmful because it kills off personal curiosity and fosters the mindset that education necessarily consists of being enrolled in a school and obeying commands issued by an authority (as opposed to learners directly seeking out knowledge and insight from self-chosen books and activities). I say sometimes suspect rather than believe because my intense emotional involvement with this issue causes me to doubt my rationality: therefore I heavily discount my personal impressions on majoritarian grounds.
I don’t actually believe it as such, but I think J. Michael Bailey et al. are onto something.
One problem with trusting the experts rather than trying to think things through for yourself is that you need a certain amount of expertise just to understand what the experts are saying. The experts might be able to tell you that “all symmetric matrices are orthonormally diagonalizable,” and you might have perfect trust in them, but without a lot of personal study and inquiry, the mere words don’t help you very much.
“Cinderella, dressed in yella / Had a theory she would tellya / How much evidence could she ignore / Before her listeners start to bore? / One, two, three—”
Okay, now I can get the italics to work—by manually editing the HTML source, changing the editor’s tags to such or such. But the editor should really be fixed—or is it just my browser? I’m running Safari 3.2.1.
Thus John Keats, in the same year he wrote Lamia, also penned perhaps the greatest statement of the Joy in the Merely Real ideal ever, writing: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.”
Maybe I’m interpreting it wrong, but I’ve never liked that couplet (likewise Dickinson’s expression of the same sentiment). Truth is not beauty! We’re the products of billions of years of bloody blind natural selection, clinging desperately to what scraps of value we’ve managed to achieve in this cold, uncaring universe! Everything you care about, everything you believe in (in the comforting, nonrationalist sense) means shit to the Price equation! It’s this sentiment that makes me like the poem preceding Greg Egan’s Distress, which ends:
And there must be room for all at the celebration of understanding
for there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold
imposed by force, resisted
or escaped.
That’s more like it. By all means, appreciate the beauty of the natural world—but not so much that it doesn’t scare you. Rationality is beautiful, but the truth is just the truth.
Other nominations … maybe Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Lie”? (Note that “give them the lie” here is an idiom for “Tell them that they’re lying.”) My favorite poem is Stephen Spender’s “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great,” but it might be stretching the evidence to call it rationality-related—and of course stretching the evidence is something we must not do.
No spaces or periods in usernames? Was that really necessary? Did Silas put you up to this?