From OB: some pet downtrodden areas of science, according to me:

Panspermia, clay origin of life, digital physics, AAH, MaxEnt, simulism, the adapted universe, memetics. I have lots of "unusual" views about the future as well, but - AFAICS - many of those seem to be not so out of place here.

That the most important application of improving rationality is not projects like friendly AI or futarchy, but ordinary politics; it's not discussed here because politics is the mind-killer, but it is also indispensible.

On a more specific political note, that there are plenty of things government can do better than the market, and where government fails the people the correct approach is often not dispensing with government but attempting to improve government by improving democracy.

I know that both of these, especially this last, go against what many here believe, and I don't intend to get into a detailed defence of it here - it's not exactly a fresh topic of debate, and it's not in line with the mission for this site.

In a less scientific area - many participants seem to be obsessed with personal immortality projects to me - including things like cryonics and uploading. This is bizarre for me to witness. To my eyes, it seems like a curious muddle over values. An identification with your mind and memes. Biology tells us that the brain is actually a disposable tool - constructed by genes for their own ends. Memes can be mutualists or parasites - and in this case, we are witnessing their more pathogenic side, it seems to me.

I disagree with Eliezer on the possibility of Oracular AI (he thinks it's impossible).

Other moderately iconoclastic statements:

• The computer is a terrible metaphor for the brain.
• In the ultimate theory of AI, logic and deduction will be almost irrelevant. AI will use large scale induction, statistics, and memorization.
• In order to achieve AI, it is just as important to study the real world as it is to study algorithms. To succeed AI must become an empirical science.
• AI is a pre-paradigm discipline.
• Rodney Brooks is a great philosopher of AI (I have no comment regarding his technical contributions).
• Large scale brain simulation will not succeed.
• Evolutionary psychology, while interesting from the perspective of explaining human behavior, is irrelevant for AI.
• Computer science, with its emphasis on logic, deduction, formal proof, and technical issues, is nearly the worst possible type of background from which to approach AI.

I am an atheist Platonist. I believe that ultimate reality is mathematical / tautological in nature, and that matter, mind, motion are all illusions.

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:

"Child Sexual Abuse does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis regardless of gender." Simplified, Rind et al. (1998) found that 3 out of every 100 individuals in a CSA population had clinically significant problems (compared to 2 out of every 100 in a general population).

Rind et al. contended that the degree of psychological damage was based on whether the child describes the encounter as consensual or not.

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.

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.

The fact that so many people believe in God is strong evidence that some sort of God is real.

The nature of reality will turn out to be very different from what most people imagine. Supernatural events occur in the world, and supernatural beings walk among us, but they are very rare.

Most big issues that people (especially males) spend time on are not really worth bothering with.

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.

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.

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. ;-)

I believe that trying too hard to be rational is irrational and perhaps self-destructive. That there could well be many different definitions of rationality or truth that are in some sense imcompatible without one being really superior (because we don't have meta-criterion to establish our criterions). When the cost is low, I think that behaving in a consciously superstitious way is rational because after all, we could be wrong about superstitions too (e.g. circumcision decreases venereal disease transmission).

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.

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.

I believe that WTC building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition using explosives:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD06SAf0p9A

I know from a previous discussion in OB that at least Robert Hanson doesn't believe this. Btw, WTC 7 was NOT one of the two towers hit by planes.

Edit: Robert Hanson and others believe that the building collapsed due do fire induced damage. I think the pattern of collapse disproves this hypothesis.

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.

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.

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".

At least one European country will have jailed one of its citizens for criticizing Islam before 2013 comes around.

Ideas in the general neighborhood of negative utilitarianism. (I don't necessarily believe these, but I think they should be taken seriously.)

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 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.

Almost everything we do is partially influenced by status-seeking.

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.

Nearly everyone including rationalists atheists and even transhumanists believe in the soul theory. I don’t. Oh they’ll say they don’t believe in souls, but when you really get down to it and examine the inner workings of their beliefs it’s rather obvious that they do. In fact I have never in my life met in person or on the Internet anybody who was like me and really didn’t believe in the soul; There are some authors who I’ve not had the pleasure to meet that agree with me, but very very few. It’s the last stand of Vitalism and if this lethal meme is not overcome the Singularity will kill you dead.

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.

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.

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.

I believe that it does not matter how much pain and suffering exist in the universe. (Ditto pleasure, happiness, eudaemonia & fun.)

Note that I still believe it is wrong to disable a person or to distract him from his activities or his plans, and it is almost always impossible to inflict pain or suffering on a person without causing disability or distraction.

I believe that the value of a human life derives exclusively from the human's willingness and ability to contribute towards a non-human end (which of course I am not going to attempt to define in this comment). In other words, a human has zero intrinsic value.

Note that I still believe that people in a position of power over other people are much too likely to take away those people's lives and freedoms and that they usually have some unsatisfactory justification of those takings in terms of one far-reaching moral end or another. Consequently, in all ordinary situations one should act as if human lives and human freedoms do have nonzero instrinsic value.

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 don't accept the logic behind "I think therefore I am" and I think there is a reasonable chance that I or even the universe doesn't in any sense exist.

Here's one on a very different topic:

England's offenses against the American colonies did not justify the American Revolution.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

This would make an awesome Edge topic if they could offer sufficient assurance of anonymous answers.

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.

I don't believe in male bisexuality, though I do believe in it for women.