Rachelle is an academic consultant at a community college in specializes in helping students with their academic problems, college stress and such. She also works part-time for an online dissertation help at dissertation corp. She’s also a hobbyist blogger and loves to do guest blogging on education or college life related topics.

The crazier, more-expensive, and more-difficult the method is, the more improvement it should show; craziness should filter out less-committed parents.

Montessori

Your main point may well be valid; I think it probably is. But my daughter attended a Montessori kindergarten (but not a Montessori school) and I have read Maria Montessori's book. Neither seemed at all crazy to me.

The Montessori method is to engage children in activities which are challenging but not discouragingly so. Each activity produces a small increment in a skills. The children seem to become absorbed in the activities and find them very rewarding. In the adult world this would probably be something like "deliberate practice".

This idea of learning skills in small increments - in the sweet spot between "too easy and you learn nothing" and "too hard so you learn nothing and get discouraged" has wide applicability to children and adults. For example after almost a year of conventional swimming lessons and my daughter could not swim, I tried applying this method to swimming.

Swimming of course requires you to do several things at once. If you don't do them all you get a mouth full of water and learn very little.

I bought her a buoyancy vest and fins. She learned to swim with these very quickly. After a while we deflated the vest progressively and she again learned to swim that way, being now responsible for staying afloat. Then we took away the fins and she mastered that quickly. After a few lessons she was a confident swimmer. This was a very dramatic result. Back at the swim school they were surprised she could now swim, but were totally uninterested in how we achieved this.

The Montessori children seem to end up with excellent powers of concentration; that is certainly the case with my daughter. I did hear of a study that found that this was the most prominent effect of the Montessori schools. I would suggest they are worth looking at, but I would check that they are actually following the method.

When he was an adult who posted that, and clearly did not mean "this is some stupid thing I thought as a kid because I didn't know better".

In fact, let me add a comment to this. Someone may be willing to assume some risk but not a higher level of risk. But there's no way to say "I'm willing to accept an 0.5% chance of something bad but not a 5% chance" by signing a disclaimer--the effect of the disclaimer is that when something bad happens, you can't sue, which is an all or nothing thing. And a disaster that results from an 0.5% chance looks pretty much like a disaster that results from a 5% chance, so you can't disclaim only one such type of disaster.

I made a video compilation of Japanese songs that include the words "Tsuyoku naritai".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtcXiT6An-U

I wasn't really convinced that this concept was really present in Japanese culture before but I suppose I am, now.

The apparent disagreement here, comes from different understandings of the word "non-superconductivity".

By "non-superconductivity", Yudkowsky means (non-super)conductivity, i.e. any sort of conductivity that is not superconductivity. This is indeed emergent, since conductivity does not exist at the level of quantum field.

By "non-superconductivity", Perplexed means non-(superconductivity), i.e. anything that is not superconductivity. This is not emergent as Perplexed explained.

I know what a garage would behave like if it contained a benevolent God

Do you, though? What if that God was vastly more intelligent than us; would you understand all of His reasons and agree with all of His policy decisions? Is there not a risk that you would conclude, on balance, "There should be no 'banned products shops'", while a more knowledgeable entity might decide that they are worth keeping open?

As far as environment goes, the context says exactly the opposite of what you suggest it does.

Among your bullet points, only the first seems well-defined. I could try to discuss them anyway, but I suggest you just read up on the subject and come back. Eliezer's organization has a great deal of research on self-understanding and theoretical limits; it's the middle icon at the top right of the page.

We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing: I was a high school teacher. Now I'm back to school for Honours and hopefully PhD in science (computational modelling) in Australia. I'm Chinese-Indonesian (my grammar and spelling are a mess) and I'm a theist (leaning toward Reformed Christianity).

what you value: Whatever is valuable.

how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us: My friend who is now a sister under the Fransiscan order of the Roman Catholic Church recommended me Harry Potter and the method of Rationality.

I think the theist community needs a better, more rational arguments for their belief. I think the easiest way is to test it against rational people. I hope this is the right place.

I am interested in making rationality be more accessible to the general public.

I am also interested in developing an ideal, universal curriculum. And I think rationality should be an integral part of it.

It is not irrelevant. Physics does not contain axioms that have the word "apple" in them, and so you cannot logically go from the axioms of physics to "apples tend to fall if you drop them." That does not prevent you from making a reasonable argument that if the axioms of physics are true, then apples will fall, and it does not prevent you from arguing for morality.

Fixed, thanks.

Thank you, your point is well taken.

The rule as usually understood is that fewer relates to discrete quantities, fewer apples, and less to continuous quantities, less milk. It's possibly rather artificial, and noticeably lacking a counterpart in "more".

Survey assumed a consequentialist utilitarian moral framework. My moral philosophy is neither, so there was no adequate answer.

If I don't use "moral" as a rubber stamp for all and any human value, you don't run into CCCs problem of labeling theft and murder as moral because some people value them. That's the upside. Whats the downside?

I see morality as fundamentally a way of dealing with conflicts between values/goals, so I cant answer questions posed in terms of "our values", because I don't know whether that means a set of identical values, a set of non-identical but non conflicting values, or a set of conflicting values. One of the implications of that view is that some values/goals are automatically morally irrelevant , since they can be satisfied without potential conflict. Another implication is that my view approximates to "morality is society's rules", but without the dismissive implication..if a society as gone through a process of formulating rules that are effective at reducing conflict, then there is a non-vacuous sense in which that society's morality is its rules. Also AI and alien morality are perfectly feasible, and possibly even necessary.

If anyone is still interested, I've since spun this into a startup called Guesstimate.

http://getguesstimate.com/

https://github.com/getguesstimate/guesstimate-app

http://effective-altruism.com/ea/rv/guesstimate_an_app_for_making_decisions_with/

As a general query to other readers: Is it bad form to just ignore comments like this? I'm apt to think it unwise to try to talk about this topic here if it is just going to invoke Godwin's Law.

In general you can ignore comments when you don't like a productive discussion will follow.

LW by it's nature has people who argue a wide array of positions and in a case like this you will get some criticism like this. Don't let that turn you off LW or take it as suggestion that your views are unwelcome here.

We're not talking about all of science. (Though I stand by my claim that he started it, unless you can point to someone else writing down a workable scientific method beforehand.) We're talking about whether or not anthropic reasoning tells us to expect to see people building the LHC, at a cost of $1 billion per year.

Thatcher apparently rejected the idea as presented, and rightly too if the Internet accurately reported the pitch they made to her. (In this popular account, the Higgs mechanism doesn't "explain mass," it replaces one arbitrary number with another! I still don't know the actual reasons for believing in it!) So we don't need to imagine humanity dying out, and we don't need to assume that civilization collapses after using up irreplaceable fossil fuels. (Though that one seems somewhat plausible.) I don't think we even need to assume religious tyranny crushes respect for science. Slightly less radical changes to the culture of a small fraction of the world seem sufficient to prevent the LHC expenditure for the foreseeable future. Add in uncertainty about various risks that fall short of total annihilation, and this certainty starts to look ridiculous.

Now as I said, one could make a different anthropic argument based on population in various 'worlds'. But as I also said, I don't think we know enough to get a high probability from that either.