Closet survey #1
What do you believe that most people on this site don't?
I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if you don't want to tarnish your image.
I think a big problem with a "community" dedicated to being less wrong is that it will make people more concerned about APPEARING less wrong. The biggest part of my intellectual journey so far has been the acquisition of new and startling knowledge, and that knowledge doesn't seem likely to turn up here in the conditions that currently exist.
So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.
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Comments (407)
I do not believe in utilitarianism of any sort, as an account of how people should behave, how they do behave, or how artificial people might be designed to behave. People do not have utility functions and cannot use utility functions, and they will never prove useful in AGI.
Bayesian reasoning is no more a method for discovering truth than predicate calculus is. In particular, it will never be the basis for constructing an AGI.
Almost all writings on how to build an AGI are nothing more than word salad.
In common with most people here, I expect AGI to be possible. However, I may be unlike most people here in that I have no idea how to build one.
The bar to take seriously any proposed way of building an AGI is at least this high: a real demo that scares Eliezer with what could be done with it right now, never mind if and when it might foom.
All discussion of gender relations on LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or any similar forum, will converge on GenderFail. (Google "RaceFail" to see what I'm comparing this to. The current GenderFail isn't as bad as LiveJournal's great RaceFail 2009, but it's the same process in miniature.)
Some things are right, some things are wrong, and it is possible to tell the difference.
Corporations literally get away with murder. The corporation is a recent innovation, not something that has always been with us. This recent social contract that governs corporations is deeply flawed, in that it holds no one accountable for consequences that would be regarded as criminal if resulting from the actions of a person. A recent case in point is the wave of suicides in the French national telecom giant.
(Ideas below are still works in progress, listed in descending order of potential disagreement:)
Bearing children is immoral. Eliezer has stated that he is not adult enough to have children, but I wonder if we will ever be adult enough, including in a post-singularity environment.
The second idea probably isn't as controversial: early suicide (outside of any moral dilemma, battlefield, euthanasia situation, etc.) is in some cases rational and moral. Combined with cryonics, it is the only sensible option for, e.g., senile dementia patients. But this group can be expanded, even without cryonics.
Some have mentioned modern school systems to be broken, but I'll go even further and say that mandatory education is a huge waste of time and money, for all involved. Many, perhaps most, need to know only basic literacy and arithmetic. The rest should be taught on a want-to-know basis or similar. As a corollary, I don't think many or even most people can be brought into the fold of science or rationality.
(Curiously, the original poster wondered if our crazy beliefs might be true, but many responses, including my own, are value, not fact, judgments.)
I love saying crazy things that I can support, and I thrive on the attention given to the iconoclast, so I find it impossible to answer this.
The only beliefs that I wouldn't feel comfortable saying here are beliefs that I want to be true, want to argue for, but I know would get shredded. This is one reason I try to hang out with smart, argumentative people - so that my concern about being shredded in an argument forces me to more carefully evaluate my beliefs. (With less intelligent people, I could say false things and still win arguments).
I've had a bone to pick with Yudkowski* ever since reading Three Worlds Collide. I haven't gathered all of my thoughts yet, or put them in a proper essay, but since you asked, here's a quick synopsis (paraphrasing Clausewitz).
I think people nowadays overestimate the value of human life. Generally speaking, we ain't worth that much - and up until about four-hundred years ago, killing each other was our primary source of entertainment.
As long as we have individuals, conflict is inevitable; and a society where the conflict's extremes have been narrowed down to nothing but sassy comments and politicking, well... that seems like a pretty boring place to live.
Speaking from experience, yelling at people solves a lot of problems. And I know a few individuals whom would be much less of a trainwreck if they'd been given the punch in the face they deserved. I think we've got no call to be judging the Baby Eaters for their biology - anymore than the Orgasmiums have for judging us. Misery can be just as much fun, if you approach it with the proper mindset, and I think HBO Rome does a brilliant job of describing a society with more reasonable standards. At the end of the day, it beats playing checkers, doesn't it?
:-) Just look at our entertainment - we love a protagonist who suffers.
*It's a very small bone. A chicken bone, really.
You may want to read some of the Romantics, if you haven't already. Especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nietzsche, who don't necessarily normally fall into that category.
Whenever I hear an unsupported vote against conventional wisdom on a web forum, e.g. "adult-preteen intercourse isn't very harmful", I don't update my view much. Absent a well-argued case for the unconventional position, I assume that such beliefs reflect some strong self-interested bias (sufficient to overcome strong societal pressure) and not fearless rational investigation - to say nothing of trolls.
I also strongly discount unreasoned votes in favor of the consensus, especially on issues subject to strong conformity pressure.
It seems that this survey is not intended to solicit arguments for particular controversial anthropological or political beliefs. Does the site accept them at all? I'd expect not, except as case studies for some general claim, due to the risk of attracting cranks.
I agree. See my comment for this post. My position is controversial, but pretty coherent. At least, no one came up with a counter argument, I was just downvoted alot. So, my opinion is a pretty good example of what the poster is looking for, yet such opinions inherently will not do well. Really, this forum is antithetical to this post.
I don't have much of a vested interest in being or remaining human. I've often shocked friends and acquaintances by saying that if there were a large number of intelligent life forms in the universe and I had my choice, I doubt I'd choose to be human.
I think school, as conventionally operated, is a scandalous waste of brain plasticity and really amounts mostly to a combination of "signaling" and a corral.
I'm not sure what should replace it. There are things kids need to know - math, general knowledge, epistemology, reasoning, literacy as communication, and the skills of unsupervised study and research. (School doesn't overtly teach most of the above - it puts you under impossible pressure and assumes that like a tomato pip you will be squeezed into moving in the right direction.)
There are also a ton of things they might like to learn, out of interest.
I am not sure those two categories of learning ought to be bundled up. Especially, while I can understand forcing a study of the first category, it seems obviously counterproductive to force the second.
I've read some responses touching on the same issue, but my point is different enough that I thought I'd do my own.
I believe that posession of child, or any other kind of pornography should be legal. I don't have enough information to decide whether the actual making of child pornography is harmful in the long term to the children, but I believe that having easy access to it would allow would-be child molesters to limit themselves to viewing things that have already happened and can't be undone.
I would say that the prominence of hentai and lolicon in Japan is a smaller step in the same direction, and seems to have worked well there.
In context it's interesting that Japanese children's manga routinely has bawdy jokes, sexualized slapstick and "fan service". This may be an outsider's mistaken view but there doesn't seem to be any serious attempt to fence children into a contrived asexual sandpit.
I agree that's interesting, but remember these manga are not actually written by children, nor bought or read exclusively by children.
There is no such thing as a consumer-driven economy.
I don't know how many people here would agree with the following, but my position on it is extreme relative to the mainstream, so I think it deserves a mention:
As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.
Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished. The same applies to laws on libel, slander and exchange of child pornography.
Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.
People and companies exposing buggy software to untrusted parties deserve to have it exploited to their disadvantage. Maliciously attacking software systems by submitting data crafted to trigger security-critical bugs should not be illegal in any way.
Limits: The last paragraph assumes that there are no langford basilisks; if such things do in fact exist, preventing basilisk deaths may justify censorship - based on the purely practical observation that fixing the human mind would likely not be possible shortly after discovery.
All of the stated policy opinions apply to societies composed of roughly human-intelligent people only; they break down in the presence of sufficiently intelligent entities.
In addition, if it was possible to significantly ameliorate existential risks by censorsing certain information, that would justify doing so - but I can't come up with a likely case for that happening in practice.
Isn't yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater a kind of langford basilisk?
Agreed.
Normally, when people say they believe "all information should be free", I suspect they don't really mean this, but since you claim your position is very "extreme", perhaps you really do mean it?
I think information, such as what is the PIN to my bank account, or the password to my LessWrong.com account, should not be freely accessible.
You don't believe there is value in anonymity? E.g. being able to criticize an oppressive government, without fear of retribution from said government?
You make a good point; I didn't phrase my original statement as well as I should have. What I meant was that there shouldn't be any laws (within the limits mentioned in my original post) preventing people or companies from using, storing and passing on information. I didn't mean to imply keeping secrets should be illegal. If a person or company wants to keep something secret, and can manage to do so in practice, that should be perfectly legal as well.
As a special case, using encryption and keeping the keys to yourself should be a fundamental right, and doing so shouldn't lead to e.g. a presumption of guilt in a legal case.
I believe there can be value in anonymity, but the way to achieve it is by effectively keeping a secret either through technological means or by communicating through trusted associates. If doing so is infeasible without laws on use of information, I don't think laws would help, either.
I think governments that would like to be oppressive have significantly more to fear from free information use than their citizens do.
I very strongly agree, except for the matter of trademarks. Trademarks make brand recognition easier and reduce transaction costs. Also enforcing trademarks is more along the lines of preventing fraud, since trademarks are limited only in identifying items in specific classes of items (rather clumsily worded, but I'm trying to be concise and legalities don't exactly lend themselves to concision.)
Agreed.
Also, if you pile on technological improvements but still try to keep patents etc, you end up in the crazy situation where government intrusiveness has to grow without bounds and make hegemonic war on the universe to stop anyone, anywhere from popping a Rolex out of their Drexlerian assembler.
Something that I don't so much believe as assign a higher probability than other people.
There is a limit to how much technology humans can have, how much of the universe we can understand and how complicated of devices we can make. This isn't necessarily a universal IQ limit but more of an asymptotic limit that our evolved brains can't surpass. And this limit is lower, perhaps substantially so, than what we would need to do a lot of the cool stuff like achieve the singularity and start colonizing the universe.
I think it's even possible that some sort of asymptotic limit is common to all evolved life, this may well be a solution to the fermi paradox, not that they aren't out there, but no one is smart enough to actually leave their rock.
I have wondered about the assumption that technological / scientific / economic progress can continue forever, and I am also suspicious of the idea that arbitrary degrees of hyper-intelligence are possible. I suspect that all things have limits, and that mother nature long ago found most of those limits.
With probability 50% or greater, the long-term benefits of the invasion of Iraq will outweigh the costs suffered in the short term.
I can see the reasoning though I don't quite agree for two reasons.
1) If the Lancet report is at all accurate that's a lot of deaths for the long-term benefits to make up for.
2) How much more extreme has that made the rest of the middle east? How has it hurt the possibility of peace in Israel.
I was, and still am against the start of the war, though I've been fairly consistent in thinking they should stay since then. (Oddly enough I thought the surge was a good idea when virtually no-one else did, though have since started to think it didn't really do anything now that everyone is moving on board!).
Costs and benefits to whom? America and allies, Iraq, or the world in general?
I believe that some improvements in rationality have negative consequences which outweigh their positive ones.
That said, it might be easy to make too much of this. I agree that, on average, marginal improvements in rationality lead to far superior outcomes for individuals and society.
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.
OK, you're the second person in this thread I've seen advocating this view, so maybe my pro-school view is the minority one here.
The idea of curiosity is very compelling, but how often does productive curiosity actually occur in people who don't go to school? Modern society has lots of things to be curious about: television, video games, fan fiction, skateboarding, model rockets, etc. The level of interesting-ness doesn't correlate with the level of importance (examples of fields with potential large improvements for humanity: theoretical physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, etc.) If you believe model rockets are a sure lead-in to theoretical physics or chemistry, I think you're being overly optimistic.
The most important effect of school is providing an external force that gets people to study these (relatively) boring but important fields. Also, you get benefits like learning to speak in public, being able to use expensive school facilities, having lots of other people to converse with on the topics you're learning, etc. To do boring things on your own, you need self-discipline, which is hard to come buy. School does a great job of augmenting self-discipline.
By the way, I thought about school much the same way you did until I left high school (two years early) and went to community college. I can't explain why, but for some reason it's a million times better.
Well, in community college, you're now the "customer", and determine what you want to study, and how to study. It still provides a framework, but you're much freer in that framework. The question is to what extent can we get similar benefits in earlier schooling. AFAICT, the best way to do so would be to make more of it optional. (Another pet project of mine would be to separate grading/certification and teaching. They're very different things, and having the same entity do both of them seems like a recipe for altering one to make the other look good.)
I really think this is the domino that could trigger reform throughout the entire system. The problem is that there are only a few professions that require a specific, critical skill-set which can be easily tested and which completion of a degree does not guarantee.
I agree in principle. The problem is kids in the workplace. When you're gardening and making necklaces, the children can float around among the adults, learn by observation, and from one another. When both parents are sitting in front of a computer all day...
So you found OB and his other writings 40 years ago?
Also, kudos for spending a lot of time studying theoretical physics.
I think people should be allowed to sell their organs if they want to. We don’t consider it immoral to pay a surgeon to transplant a kidney, or to pay the nurse who helps him, so I don’t see why it’s immoral to pay the person who provides that kidney. I also think we should pay people in medical experiments. Pharmaceutical companies could hire private rating agencies to judge proposed Human experiments much as Standard and Poor rates bonds; that way people would know what they’re getting into. The pain \ danger index would range from slightly uncomfortable \ probably harmless to agony \ probably fatal and payment would be tied to that index. A market would develop open to anybody who was interested. It would be in the financial interest of the drug companies to make the tests as safe and comfortable as possible. All parties would benefit, medical research would get a huge boost and everybody would have a new way to make money if they chose to do it.
I also think that if you believe in capital punishment it is foolish to kill the condemned before performing some medical experiments on him first.
I think we do pay people in medical experiments.
Cryonics membership is a rational choice.
My chances of surviving death through resuscitation are good (as such things as chances to beat death go), but would be better if I convinced more people that cryonics is a rational choice.
In my day to day I am more concerned with my job than convincing others on the subject of cryonics, even though the latter is probably more valuable to my long term happiness. Am I not aware of what I value? Why do I not structure my behavior to match what I believe I value? If I believed that cryonics would buy me an additional 1000 years of life wouldn't 10 years of total dedication to its cause be worthwhile? Does this mean that I do not actually believe in cryonics, but only profess to believe in cryonics?
Americans no longer significantly value liberty and this will be to the detriment of our society.
A large number of Americans accept the torture of religious enemies as necessary and just.
Male circumcision is more harmful than we realize and one cause (among many) of sexual dysfunction among couples.
Most humans would be happier if polyamory was socially acceptable and encouraged.
Responding to the question "What do you believe that most people on this site don't?":
I believe that people who try and sound all "edgy" and "serious" by intoning what they believe to be "blunt truths" about race/gender differences are incredibly annoying for the most part. I just want to roll my eyes when I see that kind of thing, and not because I'm a "slave to political correctness", but because I see so many poorly defined terms being bandied about and a lot of really bad science besides.
(And I am not going to get into a big explanation right here, right now, of why I think what I think in this regard -- I'm confident enough in this area here to take whatever status hit my largely-unqualified statement above brings. If I write an explanation at some point it will be on my own terms and I frankly don't care who does or doesn't think I'm smart in the meantime.)
Racial differences and gender differences are very different topics. Especially if we are interested in discussing whether, or the extent to which, they are rooted in biology.
I agree (and I see sex/gender as far more valid of a biological concept than "race", for the record), but I've noticed a correlation between people who would describe themselves in terms like "race realist" and people who think there's good evidence for women being "less suited" to math and science than men, cognitively speaking. (And again, getting deeply into this right now is not something I'm going to do, it would be wandering off-topic for one thing.)
I don't think this qualifies as a belief; it's just something I have noticed.
My dreams are always a collection of images (assembled into a narrative, naturally) of things I thought about precisely once the prior day. Anything I did not think about, or thought about more than a single time, is not included. I like to use this to my advantage to avoid nightmares, but I have also never had a sex dream. The fact that other people seem to have sex dreams is good evidence that my experience is rare or unique, but I have no explanation for it.
My nightmares are some of my most interesting dreams, so I don't try to avoid them.
I used to have really interesting nightmares too. Unfortunately, nightmares need a charge of fear to sustain them, and I haven't really been afraid of anything in the last few years, so no more nightmares. My dreams have been a lot more disorganized and less memorable since.
When I really get depressed I speculate that drug abuse could be the explanation of the Fermi Paradox, the reason we can't find any ET's. If it were possible to change your emotions to anything you wanted, alter modes of thought, radically change your personality, swap your goals as well as your philosophy of life at the drop of a hat it would be very dangerous.
Ever want to accomplish something but been unable to because it's difficult, well just change your goal in life to something simple and do that; better yet, flood your mind with a feeling of pride for a job well done and don't bother accomplishing anything at all. Think all this is a terrible idea and stupid as well, no problem, just change your mind (and I do mean CHANGE YOUR MIND) now you think it's a wonderful idea.
Complex mechanisms just don't do well in positive feedback loops, not electronics, not animals, not people, not ET's and not even Jupiter brains. I mean who wouldn't want to be a little bit happier than they are; if all you had to do is move a knob a little what could it hurt, oh that's much better maybe a little bit more, just a bit more, a little more.
The world could end not in a bang or a whimper but in an eternal mindless orgasm. I'm not saying this is definitely going to happen but I do think about it a little when I get down in the dumps.
Doubtful. The first person to invent an 'expansionist' drug, that turned users into hyper-competitive, rapidly-reproducing, high-achieving types -- basically, a pill for being a Mormon -- would have lots of offspring, lots of success, etc. Many people choose to abuse heroin, but many people also choose to abuse Adderall, or to use Piracetam or other similar substances. The success-druggies will outbreed and outcompete the orgasm-druggies, leading to more intense success-drugs and perpetuating the cycle.
What you've just said is a perfect example of the way in which the "far" brain's intuitive modeling of minds, inaccurately predicts REAL human behavior, especially with respect to emotions.
Positive motivation actually consists of associating a positive emotion with goal completion... and this requires you to have a taste of the feeling you'll get when you complete the goal. (i.e., "Oh boy, I can almost taste that food now!").
So what actually happens when you give yourself the feeling of pride in a job well done, before the job is done, you get more motivated, not less, as long as you link that emotion to the desired future state, as compared to the current state of reality.
It's worth us worrying about as far as our future is concerned, but to be the sole explanation of the Fermi Paradox (rather than just a contributing factor) it would have to have happened to at least an overwhelming majority of extraterrestrial civilizations, many of whom would presumably have considered the problem beforehand.
Here's something else I can't normally say in public:
Infants are not people because they do not have significant mental capacities. They should be given the same moral status as, say, dogs. It's acceptable to euthanize one's pet dog for many reasons, so it should be okay to kill a newborn for similar reasons.
In other words, the right to an abortion shouldn't end after the baby is born. Infants probably become more like people than like dogs some time around two years of age, so it should be acceptable to euthanize any infant less than two years old under any circumstances in which it would be acceptable to euthanize a dog.
I would put the cutoff at ~1 week after birth rather than 2 years, simply for a comfortable margin of safety, but yes.
However, as I've written about before elsewhere, this kind of thinking does lead to the amusing conclusion that cutting off a baby's limb is more wrong than killing it (because in the former case there's a full-human who's directly harmed, which is not true in the latter case).
This suggests the following argument: if it's wrong to cut off a baby's limb, surely (the possibility of negative quality of life aside) it's wrong to give the baby a permanent affliction that prevents it from ever thinking, having fun, etc? That's exactly the kind of affliction that death is.
I think many philosophical questions would be clearer, or at least more interesting, if we reconceptualized death as "Persistent Mineral Syndrome".
No, because the baby (by assumption) has no moral weight. The entity with moral weight is the adult which that baby will become. Preventing that adult from existing at all is not immoral (if it were, we'd essentially have to accept the repugnant conclusion), whereas causing harm to that adult, by harming the baby nonfatally, is.
Well, on this view the baby does grow into an adult, it's just that the adult is a death patient (and, apparently, discriminated against for this reason).
Too pseudo-clever?
You say that like it's an unexpected conclusion. Which is more wrong: cutting off one of a dog's legs, or euthanizing it? Most people, I suspect, would say the former.
What happens is that we apply different standards to thinking, feeling life forms of limited intelligence based on whether or not the organism happens to be human.
Personally, I would say that neither of those is wrong (per se, anyway), and I don't think the situations are very analogous. But I certainly agree with your last sentence (both that we apply different standards, and that we shouldn't).
Do you really deny that there are probably benefits, given limits to average human condition, to at least some hard legal lines corresponding to continuous realities?
/me shrugs... I suppose it is useful to have a line, and once you decide to have a line, you do have to draw it somewhere, but I don't see why viability is a particularly meaningful place to draw it.
Similar arguments are often used to argue in favor of animal rights; some humans don't have brains that work better than animals' brains, so if humans with defective or otherwise underdeveloped brains (the profoundly mentally retarded, infants, etc.) have moral status, then so do animals such as chimpanzees and dogs.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_marginal_cases
Here's why this is distasteful:
That infant has either experienced enough to affect their development, or has shown individuality of some kind that will be developed further as they mature. An infant is always in the stage of 'becoming,' and as such their future selves are to some degree already in evidence. Lose the infant, lose the future -- and that is the loss that most people find tragic.
In America, infants have a special privileged moral status, as evidenced by the "Baby On Board" signs people put on their autos. "Oh, there's a baby in that car! I'll plow into this car full of old people instead."
I think there is a huge amount of wisdom in the core ideas of Buddhism. self is a convenient fiction and a source of much confusion and suffering; subtle forms of attachment are frequent sources of suffering; meditation can improve attention/concentration and meta-cognitive awareness, and some Buddhist techniques are effective in this regard; our experience in life is much more determined by our mind than we believe; compassion can and should be cultivated.
Is this really controversial among rationalists?
The question wasn't whether it's controversial, but whether most people on the site believe it.
If we just mean that most rationalists would agree that there is (considerable?) wisdom in Buddhism, I'm sure we'd find at least half. If we mean the much stronger assertion that Buddhism is worthy of serious attention, much more than reading a book or two and browsing Wikipedia, then I don't think most people believe it.
I think that most people, including rationalists, have significant psychological problems that interfere with their happiness in life and impair their rationality and their pursuit of rationality. What we think of as normal is very dysfunctional, and it is dysfunctional in many more ways than just being irrational and subject to cognitive biases.
I think furthermore that before devoting yourself to rationality at the near exclusion of other types of self-improvement, you should devote some serious effort to overcoming the more mundane psychological problems such as being overly attached to material trinkets and measuring your self-worth in material terms, being unaware of your emotions and unable to express your emotions clearly and honestly, having persistent family and relationship problems, having chronic psychosomatic ailments, etc. Without attending to these sorts of issues first (or at the same time), trying to become a rationalist jedi is like trying to get a bodybuilder physique before you've fixed your diet and lost the 200 extra pounds you have.
I think the notion the 'most people suffer from significant problem X' is very often plain misunderstood. If everybody 'suffers' X, X is the norm, not an affliction (with exceptions such as, say, lower back pain). You're projecting your normative values onto factual matters.
Also, the notion that we have deficient moral/mental capacities seems to me unsupported and basically quasi-religious. "What we think of as normal is very dysfunctional..." Red pill or blue pill. Please.
Our attachment to material trinkets, material self-worth, emotion expression abilities, family problems etc. all stem from our evolutionary background and the conflicting selection pressures our species was subjected to. Why would one even think that an conflict-free perfect Bayesian could, would or should result from evolution?
Yes, it sucks loving your spouse and wanting to cheat at the same time. I just don't see how this translates into "significant psychological problems." Especially not some that need be overcome before moving on towards rationality Nirvana. I suggest bullet-biting as the cure for this ailment.
EDIT: Re-reading, this seems unnecessarily hostile. Don't have time to reword properly, please accept my apologies...
I'm inclined to believe that rationality is more an instrument rather than a goal, as you try to describe it. Being attached to material trinkets, (or not) will be a rational choice for the one who developed his rationality and was able to think his choice through, while irrationally dismissing the utility of mundane gadgetry as well as wholeheartedly embracing it, most likely as a result of an induced bias, exposes the undertaker to unconsidered, not-yet-evaluated risks - hence the label "irrationally".
There is some seed of truth in what you're saying - the balance between the effort of developing a rational art and the likely impact of that development on one's goal has to receive the necessary attention.
To go with the example provided (the body-builder [the rationalist jedi]) - going straight towards his final goal (obtaining an Adonis physique [being a rational jedi]) will help him develop more muscle mass [more powerful rational skills] which would mean more fat-burning cells in his body [more chances to make the right decisions when various day-to-day challenges arise] to deal with the extra 200 pounds [whatever skewed perception or behavioural pattern one has], which, in my opinion is more close to optimal than a simple diet [blunt choice of "what is right" based on commonly-accepted opinion].
I fear this may be wishful thinking; you can get much further than I would have thought a priori in a sub-art of rationality without developing a strong kick as well as a strong punch.
It would be interesting to try to diagram the "forced skill development" - for example, how far can you get in cognitive science before your ability to believe in a supernatural collapses - and of course the diagram would be very different for skills you studied from others versus skills you were able to invent yourself.
I'm not sure how much you mean by the doing without a kick analogy. If you mean, for example, that a rationalist should overcome something like social anxiety that impedes his research career by developing techniques from scratch rather than engaging in something like cognitive behavioral therapy, then I disagree. Ditto for the other sorts of psychological problems I mentioned.
The reason is not that I think you couldn't address anything from first principles, building up techniques as you go, but that this would be hugely inefficient, like developing calculus from first principles rather than studying a textbook.
Would you consider a top-level post about this?
(FWIW, I, at least, see emotional self-awareness as a core rationality skill.)
If you're interested in this, we should be talking about CBT and related techniques, which are essentially a form of rationalism training directed at those biases which feed eg depression and anxiety disorders. If rationalism training were brought into schools, some CBT techniques should be part of that.
Yes, CBT and related techniques are exactly the sort of thing I had in mind.
I don't think most rationalists are aware of them though, and it's not because rationalists suffer from none of the problems for which they are especially effective or because they have already addressed the problems via other means.
There is no such thing as a free market.
Yeah there is, they are just really small. Just the other day I asked if someone would come in on their day off from work in order to cover for me. I paid them, and they performed the service. All this went down without any government intervention, coercion, or use of force.
If you mean that there is not a single country on Earth that contains ONLY free markets then you are absolutely right.
Thought of a few more:
Circumcision may be harmful, and may cause more harm than benefit.
It's generally not worth your time to ask a doctor questions about treatments; the responses you'll get will be soothing but non-informative.
Doctors probably cause more harm than good, considered over all interventions.
Annoyance, do you intend the last sentence to broadly mean "treatment is less effective than prevention," or "Western medicine is a crock," or "Doctors specifically are not as effective as other aspects of modern medicine," or something else?
Western medicine isn't a crock because it has a lot of valuable content; in contrast, (for the most part) 'alternative' medicine does not. A lot of that value comes from coping with sudden crises that would normally result in quick death.
But if you added up all of the benefits that come directly from all medical interventions, and compared them to the harms that come directly from all medical interventions, I very strongly believe the ratio would be far smaller than most people would expect, and I weakly believe the ratio would be less than 1:1.
Aren't all of these kind of obvious?
Gotta ditto BrandonReinhart's point.
(Many/Most) doctors won't give me useful information even if I complain about their unhelpfulness.
Most people not only believe that doctors do far more good than harm, but act offended if any other position is suggested even hypothetically.
And that goes double for circumcision. Most people won't even consider the possibility that it's not well-justified, much less that it's harmful.
(edit) Since I don't think I expressed myself well:
There is at least one person who posts on these boards that I once tried to discuss these issues with. Not only did he insist that they weren't (non-negligibly) possible, but without hearing any of my reasons why I was unsure about them or offering any points of his own, he insisted that I was stupid for even considering them.
I would say that generally, he's far more rational than most people, but on certain issues, he became totally irrational. (Not necessarily wrong, just irrational.)
And my experience suggests that happens very, very commonly.
If they are, then why do they persist as sources of harm?
People's attitudes can be changed by changing their behavior. Get someone to do something, and they'll rationalize why they did so if they can't think of a good reason. Get someone to do something that distresses them, and they'll rationalize very strongly, especially if their self-image isn't compatible with a negative assessment of the action.
Think of really harmful hazing. If no such tradition existed, people wouldn't react well to someone trying to start it. Once people go along with minor hazing, there's less of a psychological barrier against it and more of a barrier against viewing it as bad. It then becomes easier to progress to more serious hazing. Finally people try to force others to do really stupid, risky, or even certainly-harmful things, while never really considering the costs or consequences.
People are consequentialists. If a consequence of believing X "that an action is harmful" is to conclude that they've done harm, people will tend to deny the possibility of X.
There are a lot of persistent sources of harm in the world. Some of it is down to game-theoretic limitations (Arrow's paradox, prisoner's dilemma, etc.). Most of it is down to stupidity.
I don't like libertarianism. It makes some really good points, and clearly there are lots of things government should stay out of, but the whole narrative of government as the evil villain that can never do anything right strikes me as more of a heroic myth than a useful way to shape policy. This only applies to libertarians who go overboard, though. I like Will Wilkinson, but I hate Lew Rockwell.
I think the better class of mystics probably know some things about the mind the rest of us don't. I tend to trust yogis who say they've achieved perfect bliss after years of meditation, although I think there's a neurological explanation (and would like to know what it is). I think Crowley's project to systematize and scientifically explain mysticism had some good results even though he did go utterly off the deep end.
I am not sure I will sign up for cryonics, although I am still seriously considering it. The probability of ending up immortal and stuck in a dystopia where I couldn't commit suicide scares me too much.
I have a very hard time going under 2-3% belief in anything that lots of other people believe. This includes religion, UFOs, and ESP. Not astrology though, oddly enough; I'll happily go so low on that one it'd take exponential notation to describe properly.
I like religion. I don't believe it, I just like it. Greek mythology is my favorite, but I think the Abrahamic religions are pretty neat too.
I am a very hard-core utilitarian, and happily accept John Maxwell's altruist argument. I sorta accept Torture vs. Dust Specks on a rational but not an emotional level.
I am still not entirely convinced that irrationality can't be fun. I sympathize with some of those Wiccans who worship their gods not because they believe in them but just because they like them. Of course, I separate this from belief in belief, which really is an evil.
Personally I'd prefer an eternity of being tortured by an unFriendly AI to simple death. Is that controversial?
That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false.
I'm curious - is your personal evidence anecdotal, qualitative, quantitative...?
Michael Vassar also makes a good point - the values and implications of "traditional roles" vary a great deal across time, and especially across socioeconomic status. There are certainly career women in the West who perceive taking time off to care for children as a relief from the rat race and a chance to contribute to society in another positive way. They might feel differently had they been, say, a 12-year old Zimbabwean girl who never attended school, was married to an older man to help her family's finances, developed an obstetric fistula in childbirth, and never left her husband's compound again. That isn't just traditional, it's an active reality for millions of poor women around the world. There are also many happy, healthy, educated African career women and stay-at-home-moms, of course. The context of "tradition" is very important.
I agree. But even though feminists (and other women exposed to the rhetoric) may say they want gender "equality" to increase their happiness, it is not necessarily the real reason. Once it becomes possible for women to enter the workplace (for any reason), competition will force other women to follow suit. Elizabeth Warren's research shows, for instance, that positional goods (housing, education) have experienced tremendous inflation since the '70s. The quality of these goods hasn't improved commensurately.
How traditional? 1600s Japan? Hopi? Dravidian? Surely it would be quite a coincidence if precisely the norms prevalent in the youth and culture of the poster or his or her parents were optimal for human flourishing.
If anything, I have the convert's bias in this regard, Michael, not the true-born believer's. I'm fairly young and was raised in quite a progressive household. I'd suspect myself more of overstating my case because it has come to me as such a revelatory shock. But that's neither here nor there, as I'm not advocating for any specific "tradition."
I'll posit that gender roles and dynamics since the feminist movement began in earnest in the 60s and 70s have proven to be a sizable and essentially unprecedented break from the previous continuum in Western societies going back at least a couple thousand years. I don't know enough about 1600s Japan or Hopi or Dravidian societies to speculate as to whether they fit into that pattern too. I understand there are arguments that feminist regimes are actually more original to the human species and that patriarchy only appears with the advent of agriculture and monarchy/despotism. My understanding is that this is an open question, and again beyond my expertise. So I should readily concede that "traditional" is a highly suspect term.
So I'll be even more blunt, since this is our comment thread to not worry about whether or not these views are currently acceptable, right?
My rather vague comment is based in a more specific belief that women like to be dominated by men, that these feelings are natural and not pathological (whether or not that makes them "right" is of course another question) that they are unhappy when their man is incapable of domination and are left feeling deeply sexually unfulfilled by the careerism which empowers them elsewhere in their lives, that the current social education of both women and men (at least in the circles of the US in which I move) teach everyone that it's abhorrent and wrong for a man to assert power over a woman, that men who enjoy it are twisted assholes and that women who enjoy it are suffering from deep psychological damage, and that it is practically inexcusable for a woman to admit that her limbic system gives her pleasure signals when a man arouses her this way.
Naturally, I am basing the perception of this relatively new regime, at least in its current extreme form, on my interpretation of what came immediately before in the society in which I was raised (I don't know firsthand as I was born well into the current regime), so your point stands, I suppose. But I don't really think using this as a starting off point merits any twinkling snark.
The second sentence of my original post, however, contains the more important point. Regardless of whatever "norm" anyone has in mind, be it Basque, Dravidian, or Branch Davidian, the real problem is that the current norm actively teaches unhappiness-increasing lies. If the last regime was imperfect too, I'd counter that two wrongs don't make a right.
Though as Z M Davis notes, not all beings value happiness highest. I readily concede that too.
What I personally have observed is that there are plenty of men and women who have a need or desire to be dominated. And that a minority of these people can't deal with the idea that it's "just" a sexual fetish or personal quirk, but must convince themselves instead that the entire world would be happier or much better off if only our entire society were male supremacist or female supremacist, accordingly.
I've also observed that there are plenty of people who have a leadership or followership preference in a relationship... but the desire to be the follower is both more widespread and more gender-balanced than the desire to be the leader.
So I guess what I'm saying is, the fact that there's a large unsatisfied market of females wishing to be dominated (sexually or otherwise) should NOT be mistaken for an indicator that this is somehow "the way the world should be".
That market is unsatisfied for the same reason its male counterpart is: there simply aren't enough people of either gender with the inclination, experience, self-awareness, etc. to meet the demand.
It's my impersonal understanding that the ratio of male submissives to female dominants is way worse than the ratio of female submissives to male dominants - both kinds of submissives will have trouble finding a dominant counterpart, but the heterosexual males have it way worse.
This is very much my impression also - as a switch, I'm topping a lot more than would be my natural inclination because that's where the demand is.
That's why I said the desire to be a follower is more gender-balanced than the desire to be a leader. I also used "leader" and "follower" because "dominant" and "submissive" carry more sexual overtone than is actually relevant to my point... but also because it's way easier for men to find socially "leading" partners than sexually leading ones.
Also, to make things more complex... there are plenty of people who like to go both ways... and there are people who want to be sexually dominant but socially submissive or vice versa... if you've actually met and spoken with enough real people (without the self-selection bias that occurs when people with identical kinks get together), it quickly cures you of any idea that you can just say, "This Is The One True Way Relationships Should Be."
(My wife owns a lingerie and adult toy/video store, and we've socialized with a lot of kinky and swinger folk, including gay, transgendered, etc. -- for a fairly broad definition of "etc.")
I believe that many if not most people value some things more than happiness.
I think most people would agree with that statement, if you ask them to think about it a little more. Happiness, or "expected happiness" is just one term in the utility function. There is also "expected unhappiness" which might encompass things like suffering, pain, negative emotions. The concept of utility tries generalize enough to add these things together, but at an everyday conceptual level these seem to be different things (nevermind about how emotions manifest physically.) For instance, we can be happy about one thing and yet about another e.g. "my infant daughter is beautiful, but I'm sad that my parents did not live long to share this joy with us." People seem to understand this: in English we have the word "bittersweet", and the juxtaposition of joy and melancholy seems to be present in many other languages and cultures.
Back to the question of value: are people more eager to avoid loss than to pursue potential gains (of the same order of magnitude?) Experience points to most people putting more effort into keeping what they have, even if they are relatively unhappy with their situation. Part of this is probably evolved defaults of the brain influencing even what you might call conscious decision making.
And don't forget about morality. Although we might try to reconcile the two, there is often some tension between doing what is "right" and doing what we expect may make us happier.
I know for a fact that I value truth over happiness . I tend to do things that other people often point out to me would have "gone better" if I did it some other way or if I did something else entirely .
Civilians should be considered legitimate targets in warfare, with the decision whether or not to attack them based entirely on expediency. If a cause isn't worth killing civilians over, it's not worth killing soldiers over, either.
I might agree with that if human civilization as a whole was much more rational than it is now.,(especially the institutions that deal with political and military power - this includes organized religion to a certain degree in most places).
If I believed that warfare would only be used to attain noble goals that nothing else can reach (a "cause worth killing for", as you say), then yeah, if it's worth killing soldiers, it might be worth killing civilians too.
But right now, it seems that war is mostly about small politics, personal status (both for dictators and democratically elected leaders), xenophobia, and money.
I feel that if civilians had been a legitimate target in most recent wars, the outcomes would only have been worse, not better, and so I can't support it.
I am an atheist who does not believe in the super natural. Great. Tons of evidence and well thought out reasoning on my side.
But... well... a few things have happened in my life that I find rather difficult to explain. I feel like a statistician looking at a data set with a nice normal distribution... and a few very low probability outliers. Did I just get a weird sample, or is something going on here? I figure that they are most likely to be just weird data points, but they are weird enough to bother me.
Let me give you one example. A few years ago I had a dream that I was eating and out of the blue I discovered a shard of glass in my mouth. The dream bothered me so much that I had a flash back to the dream the next day as I was walking down the road. For me that's extremely unusual. It's rare that I can even remember a dream, and when I do they certainly don't bother me the next day. So, the day after that I was eating a salad and crunch. I spat out what was in my mouth and there was a seriously nasty looking slither of glass. I didn't cut my mouth or anything, no harm done. I just hit it with my tooth.
To the best of my knowledge that was the only time I've ever found glass in something I was eating, and it was the only time I've had a vivid dream about it that bothered me the next day (or any dream about it all). I didn't have any particular glass eating phobia before all this took place (except for a normal aversion to the idea), and I haven't been worried about it since (ok, except for looking rather carefully at salads from that particular cafeteria for a few weeks afterwards). Was this all just a really weird coincidence? As far as I can make out the probabilities are just too low to be ignored. To make matters worse, I have a few other stories that I find just as difficult to explain away as coincidence.
Now, I wouldn't say that I "believe" that something seriously weird is going on here. That would be much too strong. However, because I don't feel that I can adequately account for some of my observations of the world, I think I must assign a small probability that there is something very seriously strange going on in the universe and that these events were not weird flukes.
I have other things to say but that would get into topics currently banned from this blog :-/
I'll answer with a koan.
Of all the people who live in the world, should the lucky thousand who witness the events that are a million times too unlikely to witness for any single individual, start believing in supernatural, while the rest shouldn't?
No, but if those thousand people don't know if they are part of the thousand or not, after all in any normal situation I wouldn't tell these stories to anybody, shouldn't they assume that they probably aren't part of the 1 in 1000 and thus adjust their posterior distribution accordingly?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_Law_of_Miracles
Also the Birthday effect, as the coincidence was a match between two different events.
I know about the birthday effect and similar. (I do math and stats for a living.) The problem is that when I try to estimate the probability of having these events happen I get probabilities that are too small.
Well, I'm getting my karma eaten so I'll return to being quiet about these events. :-)
http://www.unicornjelly.com/oldforums/viewtopic.php?p=135082
Killing people, and locking them in prison for 20 years, are both worse than torturing them.
Killing enemy soldiers is not much better than killing enemy civilians.
It is immoral not to put a dollar value on life.
The rate of technological change has been slowing since 1970.
It can't be true that both universal higher education and immigration are social goods, since it is cheaper to just not educate some percentage your own people.
Increasing the population density makes the cost of land rise; and this is a major factor in the cost and quality of life.
Men and women think differently.
Ditto that modern Western women hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy.
War is not good for your economy (unless you aren't fighting in it).
"War is not good for your economy (unless you aren't fighting in it)."
That's pretty well accepted in some economics circles. See the broken window fallacy by Frédéric Bastiat.
Fortunately, my training as a philosopher left little room for embarrassment about my beliefs (my mentor was a Popperian - of the 'say it loud' sort). So there really isn't anything I could say here that hasn't come out elsewhere. But a lot of it is somewhat unpopular:
Ethics: eudaimonist egoism - objectivist in the sense that there are facts about ethics, but relativist in the sense that there's no reason to assume all humans are the same ethically. Consequently, I think it's fine that I care more about my cats' welfare than most humans' - as long as it doesn't lead to a lack of virtue on my part (which, of course, is an empirical question).
Economics: Markets really are the most efficient way of getting the relevant information, due to methodological individualism and local, distributed knowledge. And my spending really does indicate my preferences, which are some of the best data about ethics.
Politics: Classical liberal (preferring Locke over Mills); freedom is paramount - other people should fight for my freedom, so that I might have room to become more awesome. I acknowledge the tension between this and Nietzsche's contention that democracy is bad because it does not provide an environment where one can learn to overcome. But I'm not a big fan of democracy anyway, and I see the political history of the US primarily in terms of a struggle between 'freedom' and 'equality'.
Furthermore, governments are inherently bad - it is part of their telos. One of the great things about the US government is that it's huge and bloated with checks and balances to make it difficult for anything to get done, which makes it a bad government. A trim, efficient government just does a good job of oppressing its people.
Life is a lot more nuanced than a lot of young rationalists or idealogues would think. There is room in the world for all sorts of people, and the diversity of even mistaken opinions leads to interesting and wonderful things. Example: while 'christian rock' tends to suck, most religious music is genuinely inspiring like little else. Ditto for architecture. When trying to trim falsehoods from the world, don't accidentally lose some awesome.
On the same subject, history does matter. He who doesn't remember history is doomed to something something... Just calling yourself an 'atheist' doesn't mean you've pruned religion out of your language and culture - and if you do manage that, don't be so confident that it will all still stand without it.
Sorry, was this the 'soapbox' thread? I'll stop now.
Suffering is not evil per se, and we are free to make drastic distinctions in the moral value of suffering depending on the sufferer. In other words, if an AI spawned billions of copies of conscious beings that want to make huge cheesecakes, it may be right to just kill them all off. (I'm not sure about trillions.) On a more relevant note, that means second degree murder of Stephen Hawkins is a far worse action than first degree murder of Joe Plumber.
As a more inflammatory phrasing, I view the world largely in terms of intelligence, and feel that the smart are (typically) "worth more" than the average and below.
I also believe it is naive and wishful to believe that races, which developed (propensities towards) many distinct genetic traits (not just skin color, also hair color, facial shape, disease resistances, etc) do not have differences in intelligence distribution. Affirmative action is therefore racist, and accusations (against employers, scholarship committees, etc) of racist selection merely based on previous selectees (current employees, past scholarship winners, etc) are unfounded.
Hmmm....remove the inflammatory phrasing, and those sound like things I'd get a decent amount of agreement on.
(This also makes me wonder what makes certain phrasings inflammatory -- because the opposition to societal positions which require defense is explicitly acknowledged?)
Lastly though, I have a qualified belief in eugenics. I greatly fear the Idiocracy scenario, and thus shudder every time I hear about some genius having few or no children, or women on food stamps having octuplets.
The qualification is that I am a libertarian, and would fear any government eugenics programs as well. Combining the two yields an awkward desire to have lots of children for the sake of having lots of children and a desire for a free-market form of eugenics, such as a private institution which pays the unintelligent to undergo voluntary sterilization.
On a similar note, while it may be justified to characterize a given black person as below-average intelligence (a stereotype) before meeting that person, that characterization still has sizable error bars, and making active judgements based on race is wrong.
I'd donate to that.
However, measured intelligence can also change over time within a single race, depending on the external environment. I can't find it now, but recently saw an article pointing out that the average IQ of students from one of the Scandinavian countries (Denmark?) had increased measurably over the last 50 years. Like everything else, intelligence has both biological and societal components. I certainly don't know enough about intelligence to comment with confidence on its biological bases and how immutable (or mutable) they are, but as long as there is a societal component, then I see no inherent moral problem in trying to provide disadvantaged racial groups with the same favorable milieu that other groups have already profited from.
(And, for that matter, I think the actual harm suffered to white people by affirmative action on behalf of other groups is probably fairly small. There might be a zero-sum calculation about a specific job or specific slot at a college, but whites aren't being systematically shut out of every opportunity they might have. There's also a difference between promoting people who are blatantly unqualified for the positions they're given because of their race, and favoring people who are perhaps at the margin of qualified but could easily improve. The spirit of American affirmative action appears to be the latter, although it's surely implemented with greater and lesser degrees of faithfulness to that ideal.)
Isn't that just the Flynn effect? It's true of far many more countries than just Denmark.
Incidentally, the recent mother of octuplets was a nurse who was injured on the job and is receiving disability payments; she doesn't seem like a particularly good case for eugenic sterilization.
I tried hard to think of something that I haven't already talked about, so here goes:
I have a suspicion that the best economic plans developed by economists will have no effect or negative effect, because the ability of macroeconomics to describe what happens when we push on the economy is simply not good enough to let the government deliberately manipulate the economy in any positive way.
Economists' plans relating to monetary policy do influence how the Federal Reserve Board acts (since it is run by economists) and this does influence the economy.
I was including the Federal Reserve Board in "economists". Forgive me if that was a mistake.
Let me be more concrete: I suspect that the Obama stimulus plan won't accomplish anything positive, not because of any particular flaw I could name, but because the models they are using to organize their understanding of macroeconomics are just wrong - somehow or other.
The amount of chaos here seems so great - so many things going differently than predicted, so many plans failing to have their intended constructive effect - that I suspect a chaotic inversion: it's not chaos, we're just stupid.
You might try reading Thomas Woods's new book "Meltdown". It's an easy read, it took me about 4 hours. It would have been less but I had to keep stopping and thinking "How come I didn't realize that before?" It struck me as mostly accurate, which makes me wonder about mainstream economists' attacks on Austrian economics. I am definitely going to be reading more Austrian economics. Woods is an historian rather than an economist, but the core of the book is that gov't meddling in the money supply causes the business cycle - that the Federal Reserve caused the current crash by inflating the bubbles with cheap (below market) credit.
I believe this about climate change as well.
This position is not uncommon, and it is very different from my understanding of your first comment.
Here's one on a very different topic:
England's offenses against the American colonies did not justify the American Revolution.
Well, if we're going into history... I believe (despite being a northern democrat) that the Civil War was fundamentally unjust. It makes a mockery of the principles of the Declaration of Independence if secessionary states will be outright invaded.
(If slavery was an issue, then the North should've just bought out the South - likely would've been much cheaper than the actual war.)
The North (well, congress) tried to buy out the South (well, slaveowners). The South rejected it. There were actually multiple attempts at this, some before the war, some during the war.
The thing is, the War between the States really truly was about slavery, nothing else. The dodge that it was about states' rights comes down to exactly one right -- the right to keep slaves. Compare with such travesties as the fugitive slave acts, which they pushed through congress, which actually did greatly infringe the rights of the northern states. The southern states, despite some of their propaganda, did not generally support the right of secession. Their Constititution explicitly forbade it. Every single article of secession passed by their state legislatures explicitly called out slavery as the reason for secession.
The odd thing is that slavery was not in any immediate danger. But with the election of Lincoln the southern states saw that their grip on the country was not as absolute as they desired, and they threw a tantrum, because they demanded not only the right to have slaves, but that the rest of the country not judge them for it.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
I was struck by one quote from Lincoln's first inaugural address:
In other words, as long as they rendered unto Caesar and didn't take his stuff, Lincoln was willing to abandon all other federal government functions no matter how constitutionally mandated. This seems like secession in all but name.
Remember also that the casus belli was that Fort Sumter was supposed to be handed over to the Confederacy, but the federal government refused to.
Both seem more consistent with a power theory than a slavery theory.
Not about expanding or preserving the personal power of the most prominent decision makers? Wow. The war between the states sounds truly exceptional!
Nitpick: The South shot first. Just a nitpick, though ;)
If we're going to nitpick, then the South shooting first is as propagandistically misleading as saying Germany shot first in WWI or Japan in WWII. Yes, it's true, if you ignore the things like supplying arms to Britain or embargoing Japan or lying to the South about evacuating Ft. Sumter:
The justification was the tremendous economic potential needed local, independent government given the constraints of communication and transport at the time. That's what they taught me in high school History, anyway. Also, that about 1/3 of colonists supported the revolution, 1/3 the crown, and 1/3 weren't aware it was going on.
By the way: I'm new here, and I notice there's no way to neutralvote once you've already voted. e.g. I voted you up and then changed my mind, but don't want to vote you down. So you get a freebie.
Clicking on the bold "vote up"/"vote down" undoes it.
Thanks. I thought I was doing that, but I must have been switching to the other link because the score was incrementing by 2.
I might agree with this. But would you say that it was justified on other grounds and that these were just used as the "sellable to the public" excuse?
It worked out fairly well, but considering the results of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Iranian Revolution, among others, I'd say we got lucky.
I don't know if I actually believe this, but I've heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren't necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:
Similarly, I've heard second-hand accounts about people who report that they actually had loving relationships with pedophiles as kids. That didn't traumatize them, but the follow-up "psychological care", where the psychiatrists automatically assumed that the experience must have been horrible, did.
It would seem reasonable, on the face of it. There's no automatic reason for why we should assume sexual relations with children must automatically be harmful and unpleasant to the kids, if not for the cached thought of all sexual relations being abuse. And in the current political climate, just about nobody will have the courage to voice such an opinion in public, so studies such as these should carry extra weight.
I am also "in the closet" on this. Sex is generally pleasurable; postulating a magic age or stage of development before which sex must be traumatic seems implausible on its face, without some other evidence. Coercion and intimidation are well-known to be damaging, but I don't understand how merely convincing a 10-year-old to let you stick something up her vagina (and then doing it) is going to do any more harm than, say, spanking her. Furthermore, looking at the historical record, the ancient Greek custom of pederasty (sexual/romantic relationships between adolescent boys and adult men) doesn't seem to have resulted in widespread trauma.
There are very few places in which it would be safe to propose this hypothesis, though.
Not "generally" over the domain in question. The pleasurability of sex is supported by brain-specific hardware that has no particular evolutionary reason to be active before adolescence.
Without taking a stance on the question of child sexuality - what you say is true, but is there any particular selection pressure for it to be off, either? Evolution goes for the simplest solution, and "always on" seems to me simpler than "off until a specific age, then on".
Of course, that's an oversimplification. The required machinery may simply not be developed yet, in the same way that you need to first grow to be four feet tall before you can grow to be five feet tall. But then, when you reach the size of four feet, you already have four fifths of your five feet-tallness in place, so it stands to reason that that at least part of what makes sex pleasurable will be in place before adolescence. Whether it's active is obviously a separate question, but I don't think "has no particular evolutionary reason to be active" tells us much by itself.
Anecdotal: I don't remember having the slightest concept of sexual interest in anything before puberty.
Anyone got trustworthy better data, go ahead (but we have reason to suspect political interference, which is why I go so far as to cite my own anecdotal memory).
I personally know one girl whom, when she was 8, actively went into sex chat rooms and flirted with older men (anywhere from 16 to 40). I don't think she actually had physical sexual experiences with anyone, though.
I personally know two girls who have had sexual intercourse with adults, one when she was aged 5, the other 8. It was rape in the sense that they were explicitly nonconsentual (they explicitly said didn't want to do it), but it didn't traumatized them. One theory might be that "doing stuff you don't want to do, but adults tell you to do, so you do them anyway" is pretty common at that age (e.g. being forced to clean your room).
I suspect the sex act itself isn't "pleasurable" for them, but having "sexual relationships" with adults may be pleasurable (since the first-mentioned 8 year old sought it out). It may be seen by many of them as a neutral act (like the 5 and second-mentioned 8 year old) and a form of curious exploration.
This is assuming, for lack of a better term, "gentle loving pedophilia". The way pedophilia is often portrayed by mainstream media is violent rape, with screaming, kicking and blood. While I don't personally know of any girl who actually experienced "violent rape pedophilia", I think it's safe to assume that they don't find this pleasurable at all.
Anecdotal also, I clearly remember watching the same movie (Star Wars) before and after teenage - the sexual tension passed me by completely as a child but was obvious a few years later.
However, I don't have evidence that I'd not have enjoyed sex. The desire instinct was offline, that's all I could swear to.
Personally, there's a certain fetish that I have, and I remember it causing me erections even before puberty. However, as far as I can recall, the experience didn't feel like anything that I'd call sexual these days. It was something that was pleasant to think about, and it caused physical reactions, but the actual sexual tension wasn't there.
I also recall a friend mentioning a pre-pubescent boy who'd had a habit of masturbating when there was snow outside, because he thought the snow was beautiful. (I'm not sure if she'd known the boy herself or if she'd heard it from someone else, so this may be an unreliable fifth-hand account.) If it was true, then it sounds (like my experience) that part of the hardware was in place, but not the parts that would make it sexual in the adult sense of the word.
Googling for "child sexuality" gives me a report from Linköping University which states on page 17:
It does, however, also remark that child sexual abuse often causes sexualized behavior in children, and that very little is known about what is actually normal child sexuality. Interestingly, as it relates to the original topic, it also mentions a study that found one third of abuse victims to show no symptoms at all.
I wonder what kind of controls they had (ha, ha) that let them say that it caused the sexualized behavior, rather than just letting the children know about sex. I mean I was entirely ignorant of sex until I was 12. I knew it existed by reading and hearing references to it, and I had seen Playboys and the like, but I didn't have any idea of what sex was.
Also anecdotal: I have liked girls continuously since the age of 4. I do not recommend this....
Maybe no interest in anything in particular, but what of the sexual gratification itself ? Children do masturbate, it's a known fact. Though maybe it's not universal. But the brain-specific hardware seems to be in place already at any rate.
http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/pa/pa_bmasturb_hhg.htm
This is also my experience.
I could be confusing Freudian stuff with real experimental results, but I seem to remember that children go through a stage up until about 6 where they're somewhat sexual, and then between that age and puberty the sex drive switches off or even into full reverse. This is the reason that young boys tend to think girls have cooties and are gross, and vice versa. It's evolution's way of saying "Not yet".
I can't find the article now, but an evolutionary-psychology noticed that the "cooties" concept seems to exist across all cultures (though obviously not always given the name "cooties"), and furthermore noticed that children often don't consider their siblings to have cooties. I.e. boys will feel that most girls have cooties, but not their sisters.
The psychologist offered this as an explanation: We evolved to find the people we grow up with to be not sexually attractive. This is a mechanism to avoid incest (which can result in genetic problems). However, if you live in a society, you don't want to find people who grow up with you, but who do not share genes with you, to be sexually unattractive (or else you might find no one within your whole society attractive), and thus this "cooties" sensation was placed by evolution so that we can avoid people of the opposite sex during this critical period so that later on, as adults, we may be sexually attracted to them.
That "explanation" sounds awfully just-so-story to me.
That's probably the case. In western societies, it's an orthodoxy, a moral fashion, to say that sex between children/adolescents and adults is bad. This can be clearly seen because people who argue against the orthodoxy are not criticised for being wrong, but condemned for being bad.
Even if the children themselves after the fact don't consider the sexual abuse harmful, it may be considered wrong by the humanity as a whole. The babyeaters prefer eating their children, but humans would like them to stop doing that. Drugs addict continues to take drugs even if they lead to decay of his personality and health, but other people consider it a wrong thing to do. Even if it turns out that with (consensually) abused children the moral line is closer to acceptance, I still expect it to be way below the acceptance level.
The babyeater question would be substantially changed if the children didn't mind being eaten and didn't take harm by it - more or less from a moral crusade into parochial squeamishness. Eliezer went a long way out of his way to avoid that in the story, but here we can't dodge it with a rhetorical flourish.
If as it turns out, kids enjoy consensual sex and take no harm by it, on what basis can society consider it wrong? There has to be a reason. Societies can't just create moral crimes by their say-so.
Edit: downvoted why, please? If you don't say what you think I got wrong, I can't fix it.
(Edit) During this entire thread I was misusing the word "coerce." I meant something more like "entice." Thanks Alicorn.
I always assumed that part of the problem is that it is easier to coerce children. If I kidnap a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and take them on a tour of the zoo it is still wrong, even if they liked it and no harm was done.
If I seduce a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and have sex with them... is it still wrong? Even if they liked it and no harm was done? There are certainly risks involved and assuming things will be okay is naive. But is assuming things will be bad/evil/gross just as naive?
Suppressing the moral gag reflex is hard to do. I do not know if I can answer the question objectively. I know if I had kids I do not want anyone coercing them into having sex.
I don't think people have (ethical) value simply because they exist. I think they should have to do a lot more than that before I should have to care whether they live or die.
Interestingly, you may not care whether a person exists (so you will be indifferent to the instantiation of more people), but still care about how he lives, and whether he dies, and in what manner.
So if I were to start torturing a random child, would you object? Assume the child has never done anything important to make him especially valuable.
I wouldn't personally object, no. This is happening every day and, like most people, I do nothing. The difference is I don't think I'm supposed to be doing anything either. That isn't to say we should live in a society without laws or moral strictures; you need a certain amount of protection for society to function at all. You can't condone random violence. But this is a pragmatic rather than altruistic concern.
Hm. Upvoted for an honest answer and lack of dissembling. Let's make it harder.
You have a button. If you press the button, you will receive a (free!) delicious pie, and a random child will be tortured for one year. No one will ever know there was any connection to you, and you can even erase your memory so that you won't feel guilty about it afterwards. Assume you like pie. Do you press the button?
This is very bizarre situation and difficult to think about but I think there's a chance I would press the button. My main issue is that children require some kind of protection because they're our only source of valuable adults. Childhood is probably the worst time to torture people in terms of long-term side effects. But in terms of merely causing the experience of suffering (which I think is what you're getting at) I think torture is value-neutral.
This is a slightly different matter to the one I initially posted about; I don't think the experience of pain (or happiness) is cumulative. Consider the situation where I could choose to be tortured for a year to receive a reward. If you could strip this scenario of long-term side effects, which would probably require erasing my memory afterwards, then I would willingly undergo the torture for a reward. The reward would have to compensatory for the loss of time, the discomfort and the impracticality of the scenario. If I really liked pie I'd probably be willing to undergo 5 minutes of torture without long-term side effects for pie. Actually, I'd probably be willing to do it for 5 minutes purely out of curiosity.
Now, the child in question, assuming he or she has no value and comes from a community where he or she would not become a valuable adult, could not have long-term side effects. He or she would surely be changed by the situation but not being a value-contributor could not be changed for the worse; any change would be value-neutral in terms of benefit to the cumulative wealth of society. (There is a possibility that the child would become a greater strain on society, and acquire greater negative value, but let's put this aside and say there are no major long-term side effects of the torture such as loss of function.)
A complication here is the value I place on pie in your scenario would be unlikely given how I determine value generally. As I said, I do not consider the experience of pain or pleasure cumulative, and consider them value-neutral in general. I would not place a high value on the consumption of pie. But let us say that my love of pie is a part of my general need to stay healthy and happy in order to be a value-contributor. In this case, whether I push the button would be some function of the probability that the child might be a child of value or from a community that produces adults of value weighed against the value of pie to me as a value-contributor, so there's a non-zero probability I would push the button.
It's beside the point, but your idea of torture might be a bit light if you would undergo five minutes out of curiosity.
I wouldn't press the button, though I had to think a bit longer about the "erase from memory" part.
It reminds me of what Eliezer often says about Friendly AI: "If you offered Gandhi a pill that would make gandhi a murderer, gandhi would refuse to take it."
I would also refuse to do it even if my memory could be erased. Somehow, I don't feel it's really relevant, because when I'm considering wether to do it or not, I'm not even thinking about any guilt I might feel, I'm mostly repulsed by torture in general and imagining myself in the place of the person to be tortured.
I don't think I would have any particular problem with murder for an adequate reason, and I wouldn't take a "murder pill". A stupid illustration - though I don't remember seeing this phrase before and I've been following OB from the first post.
Example: X wouldn't Y.
Rejoinder: Z, which is unlike X in relevant ways, would also not Y.
...huh?
More like: Z, which you could expect to be less bothered by Y than X, also would not Y.
A quick Google search reveals the Gandhi phrase on Eliezer's website:
http://yudkowsky.net/singularity
But I think I saw it in at least one of his papers too.
It's worth pointing out that the original comment concerned living or dying, not torture.
Myself, I would avoid the torture button, but would give serious consideration to pressing one that delivered a delicious pie at the cost of painlessly puffing a random faraway person out of existence.
If the button delivered a sufficiently large amount of money, I would press it for sure. Would require much more money for torture than death, however. (Like $1 million versus a few bucks.)
Somehow I missed this comment or else I would not have said the same thing in my comment.
I believe that there are very significant correlations between intelligence and race.
I believe that the reason that the United States is more prosperous than Mexico is that the English killed/drove out the natives when they came to the Americas, while the Spanish bred with them, diluting down the Spanish influence, and that there are other similar examples of this.
I believe that the reasons white people enslaved black people, and not the other way around is due to average intelligence differences.
I believe (though only with weak evidence) that hispanic gangs are taking control of LA drug traffic from black gangs and succeeding because of a difference in average intelligence. I also believe that the if the Russian mafia wanted a part in this game, they would dominate for the same reason.
There is a very strong pressure to be "Politically Correct", and it seems that most beliefs that would be tagged with "Politically Correct" are tagged with that because they cannot be tagged with "Correct".
I believe that to be offended, you have to believe in your own inferiority to some extent.
As a disclaimer, (and I think this much will be agreed with) this doesn't imply that possessing superior intelligence makes it morally acceptable to abuse it any more than owning a sword makes it OK to hurt someone- just easier.
In school they taught that the climate in Mexico led to large sugar plantations while the climate of the US led to smaller farms especially in the north. Then this led to a more egalitarian distribution of wealth in the northern US which created the middle class demand that allowed manufacturing to take off. In Mexico the poor were too poor to buy a lot of these manufactured goods while the rich plantation owners could afford superior goods.
I'm not sure how an intelligence based explanation would explain this better.
The US has had, in its history, a large-scale immigration from just about every region of the world, and most of them have interbred. The result is a population with lots of outbreeding depression and heterosis, leading to a much wider variation in intelligence and other abilities than anywhere in the world. The ultimate outcome of that is a lower average intelligence in the US than in other countries, due to outbreeding depression, counterbalanced by a small number of exceptional people, who got lucky and benefited from heterosis.
I believe that double-think is possible and sensible. It generally takes the form of making a deliberate attempt not to learn more about something, and not bothering to assign an expected value to the information you are missing out on.
People avoid watching horror movies if they want to stay composed. They try to avoid internet shock sites if they don't want to be disgusted. In a similar way, avoiding information that contradicts a belief that
1.) would be painful to discard
2.) exists in an area where accuracy isn't terribly important
makes sense. For example, if I am a fan of some football team, it makes sense for me to avoid reading articles critical of that football team.
A corollary is that god-belief of the right sort makes sense for people who aren't scientists, politicians, or philosophers.
Another situation where double-think makes sense is when you're trying to avoid seeing information which will make you regret a decision, or might influence you to change your decision, but with the potential for only marginal improvement. For example, if I am working in such-and-such a profession, it makes sense for me to avoid reading about how a different job is much cooler.
I don't believe in male bisexuality, though I do believe in it for women.
Define bisexuality.
You believe it's much rarer than female bisexuality, or you believe there are literally zero instances? If you met a man who had slept with several men and several women and continued to sleep with both, what would you tend to assume about his sexuality?
Much rarer. I'm not prepared to say it's totally absent, but I would be skeptical upon meeting a male who claims to be bisexual.
I would say it's more likely that he's a) in denial, or b) pushed by society to be with women. I'd say that any man in today's society (anywhere in the world – be it Sweden or Saudi Arabia) that sleeps with men is most likely gay.
So he's been out as bisexual for twenty years, slept with dozens of women and dozens of men in that time, is currently sleeping with four different women and showing every sign of enjoying it lots, and you think he's 100% gay? Are you sure your beliefs about this are paying rent?
Voted up from -1 because I want you to clarify. Do you believe that bisexuality in women is ubiquitous, while not ubiquitous, but present in some men? Or that it is completely absent in men, but present though not ubiquitous in women? Or any other combination of absent, present or ubiquitous in either women or men?
I think bisexuality is present (but not ubiquitous) in women, and extremely rare in men.
I think it's important to not downvote contributors to this survey if they sound honest, but voice silly-sounding or offending opinions. It's better to reward honesty, even if what you hear hurts or irritates (but not endless repetition of misguided opinion, that cumulatively will bore other readers too much). Upvoting interesting comments should be fine.
P.S. This advice is not one of these "crazy things" the poll is about. ;-)
In this particular post, I'm upvoting all the comments which make me think. So if I agree with someone's post, but it's pretty much a cached-thought for me, I won't bother upvoting it. And if I strongly disagree with someone, but they've forced me to think about why I disagree with them, I upvote it.
(This isn't the metric I normally use for deciding when to upvote in other LW posts.)
I agree. But I do think it's worth replying pointing out perceived holes in those beliefs, and seeing if the believer is able to defend them.
That the psychoanalytic theory of psychodynamics is in some sense true, and that it is a useful way to approach the mind. My belief comes from personal experience in psychotherapy, albeit a quite unorthodox one. I have found that explanations in Freudian terms such as the unconscious, ego, superego, Eros and Thanatos help to greatly clarify my mental life in a way that is not only extremely useful but also seems quite accurate.
I should clarify that I reject just about everything to come out of academic psychoanalytic theory, especially in literary theory (I'm an English major), and that most clinicians fail to correlate it with real mental phenomena. I know that this sounds--and should sound--extremely suspect to any rationalist. But a particular therapist has convinced me very strongly that she is selling something real, not only from my personal experience in therapy, but in how she successfully treats extremely successful people and how I don't know anyone who wins at life quite so hard as she does.
There's a lot of nonsense I daydream about, like how it seems like my life is actually repeating itself again and again as if I was stuck in a time loop and was the only person to faintly remember bits of those preceding iterations. I like to play pretend with such ideas, though I don't believe in them in the rational sense, more in the "I don't believe in ghosts but I'm still crept out at night"
The closest I come to believing something rationally, which is still not rational in the purest, Occam sense, is that we may be living in a simulation that is running in a reality that is ontologically different from ours. After all, if we were running in a simulation, why should it be run by our descendants, or even in an universe like the one that was simulated ? To assume so is to fall for an observation selection bias I think. Why not from a place where "place", "running" and "simulation" do not necessarily take the same meaning as they do here.
Like, you know, it is common to muse about universes with different physical rules and constants, I'm just taking this a step further; a reality whose rules of "mathematics" would encompass and supersede ours, that is, there would be mathematical, or ontological principles, that would exist up there, but not here. We would be prisoners in an ontologically impoverished reality, without even the tools to understand the higher realm, let alone break out of ours.
In such a reality, the equivalent of mathematics would not obey Gödel's theorems, they would be consistent and all statements would be true and provable; that would need and imply at least one supplemental axiom there, the one that would at least not exist here, that would permit it, and open a whole new branch of mathematical truths and possibilities.
Like, if we all have a God-shaped hole in our soul, then mathematics has a Gödel-shaped hole in its own, and I wanted to imagine what it'd be like to have it filled.
I don't really see how we could ever prove or disprove that though. Maybe some variation of that idea, might be falsifiable. If not, then it's an irrational belief too.
I don't believe that any concept, including the concept of reality, makes sense to you outside the context of your own epistemic framework. When one thinks that the reality exists on its own, it is a statement made from within that person's epistemic framework. When you tell me that the reality exists on its own, I understand this statement from within my epistemic framework. When I believe that you believe that the reality exists on its own, I interpret my model of yourself as having a property of having a "belief in reality existing on its own". Even when I think of myself as believing something, I interpret myself as having a property of believing that.
The quotation marks must be put around everything, there is no escaping above the first level of indirection. The problem of induction is a wrong question.
Me:
I think I made a step towards resolving this confusion. The problem was in conflating the specific, real-world algorithms running in a mind and performing the interpretation of facts, with the ideal model of the world. The ideal model is what we see as objective reality, the abstraction via which the facts should be interpreted which is to say is equivalent to what the facts really mean, even when we see a mind that goes in the opposite direction. The mind does a subjectively objective computation, while the reality is the ideal counterpart of that mind, the same way there is an ideal morality counterpart of a mind, even though it's not merely preference of specific brain, and may depend on any other aspect of reality.
Since the ideal model is global, and it's not a mind, there is no point in telling that reality must be interpreted through a mind: there is no real dichotomy, there is no requirement for a mind, and the reality that the model describes doesn't even need to contain any minds. The model is math.
I believe that the solution to the Fermi paradox is possibly (I don't place any considerable strength in this belief, besides it's a quite useless thing to think about) that physics has unlimited local depth. That is, each sufficiently intelligent AI with most of the likely goal systems arising from its development finds it more desirable to spend time configuring the tiny details of its local physical region (or the details of reality that have almost no impact on the non-local physical region), than going to the other regions of the universe and doing something with the rest of the matter. That also requires a way to protect itself without necessity to implement preventive offensive measures, so there should also be no way to seriously hurt a computation once it has digged itself sufficiently deep in the physics.
Any reason AIs with goal systems referring to the larger universe would be unlikely?
In Stross's novel "Accelerando", even without the locally deeper physics, the AIs formed Matrioshka Brains and more or less ignored the rest of the universe because of communication difficulties - mainly reduced bandwidth but also time lags.
In support of "notmyrealnick" I have to say that most people wrongly believe that the sexual life of humans only starts when they reach adolescenthood, Bronislaw Malinowski in his studies with savages(Book: The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia) showed that the starting age can be as young as 5 years old. But we in our modern society repress the children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronisław_Malinowski
Edit: related to this is the (IMHO wrong) thought that underage humans cannot possibly give informed consent to sexual acts.
Edit2: Btw, when I speak about underage sex I'm thinking about sex where all the involved are more or less of the same age.
Deep down I believe in some sort of afterlife because my brain is unable to handle the concept of not being alive.
A better (but more confusing) way of saying might be "I don't believe in an afterlife, but my brain does".
The vast majority of held beliefs are not only wrong and unjustified, but unjustifiable.
If a belief can't be justified, it shouldn't be held and it definitely shouldn't effect your actions.
Depending on your definition of "justified" and "justifiable", you may run into the problem that eventually your beliefs depend on other believes that depend on other beliefs, and so on until you reach an axiom. And this axiom may be "unjustifiable" or "unjustified", but you "need" to believe it in order to have any beliefs at all.
One such axiom may be that your brain is "sane", in the sense that when it tries to use logic to reason about something, you can trust the conclusion. For example, let's say your thoughts are "All A are B. C is an A. Therefore C is a B." Can you trust the conclusion that C is a B? Well, maybe you might revisit your thoughts, starting from the first statement "All A are B". But wait, was that really the first statement? Here you're relying on your memory, that you can correctly remember what you were thinking about just 2 seconds ago. Is that belief justified? How could you know?
That within human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations. (Caveat: "race" is at least as much a socially-constructed term as a scientifically valid category; however there are diffences in allele frequency that reliably correlate with having ancestors from particular parts of the world).
That these differences may have been partically caused by the fact that peoples from different parts of the world have had literate societies for different times.
I believe that framing people for possession of child pornography is a widespread practice, and that this accounts for almost all convictions on that charge. I base this on the evidence that is typically used in such cases, all of which comes from computers which may have been compromised; and in fact, trials usually mention evidence that the computers in question were compromised (although it's possible for an attacker to remove all evidence of that fact), and that hasn't been a successful defense. If a person were to actually want child pornography, there are simple technical measures which could create a nearly iron-clad guarantee against being caught; and conversely, similar measures with a similar guarantee protect people from being caught planting evidence. Finally, the societal irrationality surrounding child pornography means that successfully getting someone accused of having it will not only get them jailed, but thoroughly destroy their reputation and shame them as well.
I think "it's easy not to get caught" is not good evidence that most people convicted of an easily-non-catchable crime are innocent. It's also easy to not leave fingerprints, and security camera footage consistently shows people not wearing gloves when stealing stuff.
A sample of 1 doesn't help you much, but: I know someone in the UK who went to jail for this, and they weren't framed.
Most big issues that people (especially males) spend time on are not really worth bothering with.
Don't most of us believe this?
But people don't know that what they do isn't worth doing, so "not worth" becomes a weasel word, prone to arbitrary interpretation. They do what they believe to be valuable, and what they do is valuable, the question is how valuable. It's clearly not maximally valuable, but even a superintelligence won't be able to do the maximally valuable thing, only the best it can, which is "the same" situation as with people.
It seems to me that a form of modal realism and a strong version of the Simulation Hypothesis (not just a large fraction of all observer-moments in apparently pre-Singularity civilizations are simulated, but a large fraction of all observer-moments period) are substantially more likely than not. Others whom I respect emphasize the extent of our current confusion about anthropics, etc, so I assign a lower probability than I would based only on my impression, but I haven't fully exchanged private info.
At least one European country will have jailed one of its citizens for criticizing Islam before 2013 comes around.
too late
edit: It depends on your definition of "criticizing" I guess. Even so I bet there's at least one example, in some European country.
This would make an awesome Edge topic if they could offer sufficient assurance of anonymous answers.
Their 2005 annual question was pretty close to this one and has many fascinating answers: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
It wasn't anonymous or pseudo-anonymous though.