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".

Could the second law of thermodynamics also be understood as "the function between successive states as described by the laws of physics is bijective"?

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.

How do you get a statement about how you should build a bridge so it doesn't fall down?

The idea of a Tablet that simply states moral truths without explanation (without even the backing of an authority, as in divine command theory) is a form of ethical objectivism that is hard to defend, but without generalising to all ethical objectivism. For instance, if objectivism works in a more math-like way, the a counterintuitive moral truth would be backed by a step-by-step argument leading the reader to the surprising conclusion in the way the reader of maths is led to surprising conclusions such as the Banach Tarski paradox. The Tablet argument shows, if anything, that truth without justification is a problem, but that is not unique to ethical objectivism.

For instance, consider a mathematical Tablet that lists a series of surprising theorems without justification. That reproduces the problem without bringing in ethics at all.

Hello from Paris, France.

As many of you, I first discovered all of this by HPMOR (actually, its French translation). I then read entirely Rationality, from AI to Zombie (because, honestly, reading things in order is SO MUCH easier than having 20 tabs open with 20 links I followed on the previous pages). I thought I would finish to read this blog, or at least the sequences, before posting, and then realized it may implies I would never post.

I'm a doctor in Fundamental Computer Science, an amateur writer (in French only), and an LGBT activist who goes into school in order to speak of LGBTphobia and sexism with 119 classes (and counting).

I can't tell right now exactly why I so much like the idea of rationality. I guess that it is unrelated to the fact that I wrote the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_set recently . Its probably more related to the fact that I love the idea of being a robot, at least, being like I thought a robot was when I didn't know that robot are programmed by humans. I can rationalize it ... by hoping that, rationals methods would help me be more efficient in order to fight LGBTphobia (and probably more efficient to do research and publish, or to write more...) Even if, to tell the truth, I'm not yet convinced that studying rationality is a rational action in order to attains those goals. On the other hand, even if rationality may not be the BEST tool ever in order to attains those goal, I'm more confident in the advise I find here than in the advice of a random self-help book I could find in a shelve of my super market, because I assume some people indeed did research before giving those advise.

I think future humans are definitely worthy of consideration. Consider placing a time bomb in a childcare centre for 6 year old kids set to go off in 10 years. Even though the children who will be blown up don't yet exist, this is still a bad thing to do, because it robs those kids of their future happiness and experience.

If you subscribe to the block model of the universe, then time is just another dimension, and future beings exist in the same way that someone in the room over who you can't see also exists.

"No one knows what science doesn't know."

This sort of anthropomorphic bias leads to conceptual errors. 'Science' is the method of acquiring knowledge and the collection of acquired knowledge to which the method is rigorously applied. It is incapable of knowing anything independently of what individuals know; in fact, it can't know anything at all without some knowing individual to practice it. And to be sure, we can know things 'science doesn't know': we know we are in love, that we are happy or sad, that we played baseball for the first time when we were 6 years old at the park in Glens Falls, etc.

Another possibility is that there's something about chewing things and spitting them out that tends to make them less appealing. (E.g., the whole thing looks and feels kinda gross; or you associate spitting things out with finding them unpleasant -- normally if you spit something out after starting to eat it it's because it tastes unpleasant or contains unpleasant gristle or something like that.)

I haven't looked at the original criticism, but the "basic idea" as you describe it seems to introduce a source of bias: we have more visibility of luckily avoided ways in which things could have gone badly for recent events than for older ones, so if you try to take those into account then you will skew the change over time in the direction opposite to the one Pinker claims.

(If you also look for unluckily avoided ways in which things could have gone well then maybe the bias goes away.)

the past was always accessible, through books and stories and so on.

I don't know if that's right. The past was always accessible to some degree, but never before as an overwhelming exhaustive array of minutiae. It's precisely because of that level of detail that this past looks so much like the present.

Meta-comment here. Fighting about Social Justice is just about the least Less Wrong thing I can think of. But on the other hand this post has a billion comments at a time when Less Wrong is kind of dying.

Any port in a storm?