Aren't there people who can hear sounds but not music?
FWIW I've read a study that says about 50% of people can't tell the difference between a major and a minor chord even when you label them happy/sad. [ETA: Happy/sad isn't the relevant dimension, see the replies to this comment.] I have no idea how probable that is, but if true it would imply that half of the American population basically can't hear music.
Might have something to do with the fact that happy/sad is neither an accurate nor an encompassing description of the uses of major/minor chords, unless you place a C major and a C or A minor directly next to each other. I for one find that when I try to tell the difference solely on that basis, I might as well flip a coin and my success rate would go down only slightly. When I come at it from other directions and ignore the emotive impact, my success rate is much higher.
In short: Your conclusion doesn't follow from the evidence.
Research suggests that once you have sufficient income to meet your basic needs, that travel time is one of the biggest factors in job satisfaction. I think we tend to focus on income because it's much easier to evaluate the actual pay rate of a job - if you're promised $100K, you can expect 100K. If you're promised 40 hours and no overtime then you'll often find that tested. If you're promised low stress and high job satisfaction, well, good luck suing for breach of contract on that.
Being promised low stress/high satisfaction and having a rough idea of what kind of work or work environment is (more or less) enjoyable to you are quite different things. A given idea of which work is enjoyable won't be 100% accurate; there are always going to be surprises from both inside the mind and out. But most people have a rough idea what kind of work they prefer to do. That's where the low stress/high satisfaction predictions come from in this scenario.
Obviously one can only expect so much "enjoyment" in a work environment (and no "work" is fun and enjoyable 100% of the time), but if one type of work feels worthwhile to a given person, and the other doesn't, even if this is on the basis of inference, then for some people this is going to be a significant factor in how good/bad they feel about passing up those $90k jobs for the PhD program that might now be in question.
The problem is, that hypothetical doesn't really have any weight, unless you specify that having a PhD will still only produce a job worth $90K, at which point the audience has to wonder why this hypothetical fool started on their degree in the first place.
I do like the point about paying to remove information - there's times I would happily have paid to remove information from my awareness, because I was aware it was biasing me in very annoying ways. I think learning to deal with that separately would be very useful, and probably help a lot with Consequentialism (maybe they're even the same issue? my intuition tells me they feel different internally, but I don't have a lot of good examples available right now)
The money isn't necessarily the only factor. Don't forget about location, working hours, stress levels, and job satisfaction. I'd take a $70k job that's intrinsically rewarding over a $100k job that "isn't really my type of environment" any day.
Of course, I'd have to KNOW that the $70k job was intrinsically rewarding and that the $100k job wouldn't be, but if the hypothetical fool does know this about his PhD job prospects, for example he wants to be an academic and the job offers so far are in unintellectual labor, or in the family business, or in a city he/she would like to avoid settling down in, or involve 50% more hours than the target job of the same wage --
I don't know if that's useful or not, but I'll err on the side of opening my mouth.
(Sometimes I feel like hitting people with a wooden stick when they do this, but that act just expresses an emotion rather than having any discernible positive consequences.)
It would have the consequence of conditioning in the subject's mind an association between a particular thought process and being hit with a stick. Most people don't like being hit with sticks, so the association is likely to make them avoid that particular thought process. Do you not consider "teaching people to avoid a dangerously stupid thought process" a positive consequence?
Actually they would associate the stick with a number of things, including but not limited to the stupid thought process. They would be quite likely to associate the stick with their encounter with Eliezer, and to their (failed) attempt to converse with and/or follow his thought processes. Mind: They associate the stick with all aspects of the attempt, not only with the failure.
It might work in a Master/Apprentice scenario where the stick-hitting-victim is bindingly pre-committed to a year of solitude with Stick-Happy!Eliezer in order to learn from him the art of Cognitive Kung Fu. This is the only scenario I can immediately visualize in which the stick-hitting victim would not immediately decide that Stick-Happy!Eliezer is a person they can get away with avoiding, and possibly with reporting to the police for assault.
EDIT01: This is assuming that the experiential sample size is 1.
One problem with a professor telling students "I may be wrong." is that many of the students will hear that as "You must be right."
Easily reduced, in theory; educate them about the false dichotomy and other basic fallacies -early-, and have it cost them marks when said basic fallacies punctuate their thinking, the same as any other error.
Of course, it's not so easy to get that implemented in the broader system, in a world where people refuse to be taught how to think. But while we're talking about the "ideal" education...
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(1) Visibility - people who missed the quote the first time saw our exchange on the side bar.
(2) I am also confused by the purpose of the rationality quotes page. It's not surprising to me that lack of consensus limits upvote potential (i.e. local applause lights get voted up). That said, applause lights are grounded in particular communities. "I like human rights" is an applause light in the United States, but is a provocative position in North Korea. Some of the upvoting is based on the wish that the quote was more widely accepted in general society (i.e. we wish society was more like us)
(3) Notwithstanding what I just said, Rationality Quotes seems to function as a ideological purity tester. If it gets upvoted here, that shows it is part of the local consensus. In other words, I could post quotes that I thought were both post-modern and rationalist, and I expect they would be downvoted as outside the mainstream. To the extent that you think LessWrong has dysfunctional groupthink, I'm not sure the fight can be won in Rationality Quotes as opposed to Open Thread or Discussion. (I aspire to aspire to post into Main, so I seldom think about the social norms of that type of posting).
(4) In a substantive response to your quote, LessWrong is surprisingly child-free-living in its attitude. Even controlling for age, socioeconomic status, and gender, we are not even vaguely representative of how frequently people desire to have children.
I'm curious. Did you say "aspire to aspire to post into Main" deliberately?