As a teacher, I wonder if it is possible to instill this skill into students the skills of rationality and critical thinking. I teach the third grade, and it is not immediately apparent how to apply this with my own class.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

• Young children often do not know the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.
• Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.
• Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.
• Attention spans in general are very short.
• Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.
• Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

In the sequences, it is suggested teachers should drill into students words don't count, only anticipation-controllers. How practical is this for an elementary school level? Also appreciated would be any ideas or experiences on how to do this, or how to combat the above problems. Hearing from other teachers would be excellent especially.

The newspaper "Le Monde" made an interesting exercise for rationalists in the context of the French election.

They first made a classical "which is your best candidate" poll, in which they ask multiple choice questions about various topics (for each question, you must select one answer, and how important the issue is for you), and at the end, they select the candidate that (according to them) is closest to your answers. Nothing new in that.

But then, they made a much more interesting (at least from a rationality training point of view) exercise : they asked the same questions, but not asking "what is your opinion on the topic ?" and "how is this question important for you ?" but they asked "what do you think the majority of our readers answered ?" and "how do they think they rated the importance of this issue ?". And then they give you a score from 0 to 1000 on how good your "predictions" were.

It's in French, so it'll be hard for most of you to try it, but if you want it is available online here.

I found this kind of exercise (trying to guess what other people will have answered) to be interesting from a LW point of view, because it somehow makes your beliefs (about the opinions, priority and mentalities of French people) pay rent.

So I wanted to share it with the LW community, and ask if you know about similar exercises elsewhere, that gives you a way to check how accurate your belief network is in complicated issues, if you find them interesting too, and how they could be improved.

As an idea of improvement, I would like adding a confidence rating to each question, the more confident you feel in your answer, the more points you get if you get it right, but the more you lose if you get it wrong.

I'm posting this here because I want to see if my reasoning is incorrect.

Generally, when people talk about the problem of evil, the underlying problem is actually one of indifference. Given that God exists, he doesn't seem to care some (most) of the time bad things happen, and seems to sometimes reward bad people with good fortune. This makes sense, of course, if there indeed was no god, but we have thousands of years of theodicy that argues that an all powerful, all knowing god exists despite the problem of indifference.

So, I attempted to formulate the problem of indifference in terms of probability - the probability of an all powerful god creating the universe (H) verses the probability of naturalism (~H) - to see which one was more likely. E would be the state of the current universe which seems to have both "good" and "evil" in it. I had no idea how to determine the probability of P(E | H), but if the 2,500+ years of theodicy explaining the problem of indifference was in fact correct, then to be fair to theism I might grant that P(E | H) = .99. However, this seems to not be correct; I did know that P(E | H) + P(~E | H) = 1.00 so this would mean that the all powerful god of traditional theism wouldn't make sense if our universe were indeed ~E instead of E given that P(E | H) = .99.

~E would be any other ratio of good::evil that we can imagine outside of the current state of affairs, or at least that's my reasoning. This means that if the universe were all good and zero evil, or all evil and zero good, granting that P(~E | H) = .01 doesn't seem like something traditional theism would accept. If we woke up tomorrow, and there was absolutely no evil in the world, and that was how the world always was, would traditional theism have no theodicies that explained why this world was evidence for their god(s)? That doesn't seem likely. Similarly, but less so, for a world that was overwhelmingly evil with very little good.

So it seems that E and ~E can be broken up into these three scenarios. E₁ being our current world, E₂ being a world of all good an no evil, and E₃ being a world of all evil and no good. Then we have P(E₁ | H) + P(E₂ | H) + P(E₃ | H) = 1.00. This would also apply to naturalism, but it seems as though a world of all good/evil and no evil/good wouldn't make sense under naturalism which predicts a fundamentally uncaring universe; P(E | ~H) = .99 and P(~E | ~H) would make sense to be the remainder. If this is the case, then the likelihood ratio favors naturalism. P(E₁ | H) / P(E₁ | ~H) is less than 1 since traditional theism doesn't seem to be restricting anticipation on what type of world(s) it can explain while naturalism does.

But then I thought that this applies to more situations beyond just the problem of evil/indifference. If an all powerful all knowing god can explain any and every sort of evidence we can imagine, and if there are 100 different types of evidence in a given class of evidence, then this god's explanatory power gets stretched across all 100 types of evidence, with any other hypothesis that restricts the type of evidence it can explain being favored over the god hypothesis. For something like the fine tuning argument for god, since there are infinite combinations of physical constants that an all powerful, all knowing god could create, this stretches the god hypothesis out among an infinite number of possible evidences, effectively favoring any alternative hypothesis by infinite decibles via the likelihood ratio. Meaning that something like the fine tuning argument is ironically an argument against H.

And if this is the case, then an infinitely powerful, infinitely knowing god is infinitely less likely than any other hypothesis that restricts itself. Thoughts? Is my reasoning off somewhere? Is the the ultimate penalty for not restricting anticipation?

With apologies to Ed Regis.

Modern science has caused humankind to develop better cures and patches for once-debilitating conditions; people often survive maladies which would have killed them not long ago. In the wake of this and of a recently changing attitude regarding how cognitively disabled people might see the world, a disability rights movement came into swing in the 1970s. Increasingly, the attitude of disabled people was that it wasn't inherently bad to be disabled; a disability could be an intrinsic part of a person's self-image. Some people in wheelchairs, for instance, want badly to be able to walk - but some do not, and the mainstream attitude has historically not validated those people's experiences. This is where disability culture intersects the transhumanist movement. If it is possible to identify so strongly with a physical disability as to not want any cure, how does that mesh with believing that it is desirable to improve one's mind and body? Is it possible to identify as a happily disabled transhumanist?

This does not intend to suggest that transhumanism is a movement of eugenic warriors; it's hard to imagine anyone suggesting that folks who don't sign up for the "Harmless and easy cure for senescence" shot be sterilized. However, despite the fact that hardly anyone would identify emself as an eugenicist (a fine thing to call yourself once-upon-a-time in America, until the Nazis rendered the term unpopular,) literally eugenic attitudes in society prevail, e.g. the prevalent belief that people with Huntington's disease or schizophrenia who reproduce are cruel for hazarding the inheritance of their condition.

One wonders what disability culture would look like if people who are today in wheelchairs had access to technology that could repair their legs and allow them to walk. I wonder if people with congenital disabilities which would today require a wheelchair would have a choice about being cured, or whether the cure would be implemented in infancy. In 2007, a girl named Ashley who has an unknown brain disorder and cannot communicate or move herself effectively was given a series of radical procedures - hysterectomy, mastectomy and high estrogen doses - intended to make her easier to take care of. Was the literally non-consensual hysterectomy an eugenicist procedure? An immoral one? Was it in the spirit of transhumanism? In a future where Down syndrome can be prevented with a prenatal vaccine, would such a vaccine be moral? How about vaccines for "low-functioning" autism? At that rate, surely it would be possible to vaccinate for Asperger syndrome, depression, and ADHD, conditions which many people dislike and/or dislike having. (As an aside, with all the medically-repudiated yet widespread fear about vaccines causing autism, one can only imagine the panic an autism vaccine would cause.)

I don't have answers to these questions. I have feelings and impressions, but those are not very useful. The issue cannot be solved unilaterally by saying that only those who enthusiastically consent to certain medical procedures should be given them, because many people are incapable of giving clear consent, as in the Ashley treatment. Nor can it be clearly solved by suggesting only prophylactic measures against disabling conditions, because certainly some parents would forego those measures. In a transhuman future, is the birth of a nonverbal autistic a preventable tragedy? Is it less of a tragedy if the child is a savant? Nor can one say that only conditions without an accompanying culture should be eradicated. Even if the definition of 'culture' were not elusive, HIV/AIDS has a definite culture about it, and few people would suggest that HIV should not be eradicated.

It is not useful to ignore the role of disabled people and disability culture in the transhumanist movement. I believe that the future has a lot to offer many people with disabilities, including those who do not want a 'cure.' Transhumanism can encompass interest in diverse AAC methods, and I believe it should. Simple keyboard technology has made it possible for many otherwise nonverbal people to communicate eloquently, as have DynaVox devices and various iPad apps. It would delight me to see widespread discussion about more powerful AAC devices, which could enable us to perceive and act on the desires of those who cannot now communicate.

Nor has technology reached its limits in helping those with physical disabilities; wheelchairs are generally clumsy and heavy, and expensive for people without insurance - nearly inaccessible to people who live without insurance in impoverished areas of the world (or of the United States.) People who, like Stephen Hawking, become paralyzed by motor neuron diseases, do not all possess Stephen Hawking's access to high-tech communications devices (for which prices begin at thousands of dollars.) And people with disabilities like epilepsy or cerebral palsy are still often abused for their "demonic possession" or inaccurately stereotyped as mentally disabled. The transhumanist movement tends to advocate augmentation sans cure as far as physical disabilities are concerned, but there are people with mixed feelings about transhumanism as it applies to disability.

Disability is a hot button topic surrounded by widely varying spectra of beliefs. It directly affects humankind and is not often discussed rationally because of the subjective experiences people have had with varying disabilities. (The mother of a nonverbal autistic says, "There should be a cure for autism; I want my son to say he loves me." A nonverbal autistic communicating by AAC says "There shouldn't be a cure for autism; I want people to learn how I communicate my affection." Their conflicting beliefs do not predict radically different anticipated experiences.) So a rational, clear dialogue about disability is vital - for disabled people, their friends and families, and the world at large - in order to integrate these identities and experiences into the future and present of humankind.

The following is a series of exercises designed to test one's understanding of "Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)", a post in the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence by Eliezer Yudkowsky.