You aren't comparing the price of nuclear vs. the price of solar but the price of nuclear vs. solar + hydrogen.

By your own numbers the price of solar is 3$ per watt while the price of nuclear is 7$ per watt.

Your solar power plant that's backuped with hydrogen produces the energy at different prices at different times. While a nuclear plant can produce the same amount of power at night than at day it's not possible to change the amount that gets produced as fast as you can change how much hydrogen you burn in fuel cells.

Arguing that the flynn effect shows that someone else should have a different opinion on the question of how much intelligence is heritable just shows misunderstanding of the meaning of the term of heritablity.

Otherwise it would be logical to say that all of intelligence is due to culture. Why? Let's say all individuals with IQ > 300 happen to be born past the singularity. Past singularity we have the technology to make people intelligent and therefore intelligence can't be truly innate.

Therefore modern biology defines heritability as the variance of a trait within a given population that's due to genetics. In it's essence the question of heritability doesn't only depend on genes but it also depends on the environment.

There nothing wrong with saying that the heritability changes over time. A society where every child can eat as much as it wants has probably a different heritability for IQ than a society where some children don't have enough food and other children who have wealthy parents do have enough food.

For tea to be awakening it's important to remove the leaves from the cup after a few minutes. If you leave the leaves in the tea other substances go into the tea that counteract the caffeine effect.

You can't run cars with power that comes directly through the power line.

You ignore the running cost of the nuclear reactors. You don't price risk from blowups and you don't price long term storage costs. Risk from peak uranium http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414 is also unpriced.

If the word "average" would be meaningful in this context than you would simply compare solar cell productivity + transmission line losses to nuclear plant costs + transmission line losses.

Of course you can do simply arithmetic but that doesn't mean that you are right when it's not clear that you are using the right numbers.

The question is not only does homeopathy work but do arguments A, B and C that conclude that *homeopathy doesn't work * work.

You could argue that every argument against homeopathy that differs from the argument that meta studies showed that it doesn't work is pointless. If you however read an average skeptic, skeptics often make idealist arguments based on whether something violates the physical laws as the skeptic understands the physical laws.

Do you argue that any argument that isn't based on whether a study fund that a process works is flawed?

We place a lot of emphases here on calibrating individual levels of confidence (i.e., subjective probabilities), and on the idea that rational individuals will tend to converge toward agreement about the proper level of confidence in any particular idea as they update upon available evidence.

No individual has time to look at all evidence, therefore it makes sense when different individuals look at different evidence. In any question where all evidence is integrated into the running model it might be best to run new experiments that produce new data.

It's not like all data confirms our ideas. The number of open question in science seems to grow rather then decrease. It makes sense to focus attention in areas where we don't understand what's going on.

I don't really think that you actually need to focus on ends. I don't believe in homeopathy and I'm still perfectly capable of seeing that a lot of people who label themselves as Rationalists or Skeptics make stupid arguments when they argue against homeopathy because they misstate the claims that people who practice homeopathy make.

You can either focus on creating good arguments or you can focus on good maps of reality. Your event that has probability of 0.999 might break down into ten arguments which while they are strong together can still be questioned independently.

There's for example the claim that according to the doctrine of homeopathy all water on earth should have homeopathic powers because all water contains small amounts of nearly everything. That just not true as homeopathists follow a certain procedure when it comes to diluting their solutions with involves diluting the substance in specific steps and shaking it in between.

Let's say there a bacteria which builds some form type of antibody when you add poison into a solution. Let's when one of the bacteria who doesn't produce antibodies come in contact with lots of antibodies and feels a lot of physical pressure that bacteria copies the antibody design that floats around and targets the poison and produces antibodies as well to defend itself against the poison.

It wouldn't violate any physical law for such a bacteria to exist and do it's work when you dilute enough at each step to get new bacteria who weren't exposed to antibodies and shake to give the bacteria the physical pressure that it needs to copy the antibody design.

If such an bacteria or other agent would exist than it's plausible that the agent could work under the protocol of (dilute by 1:10 / 10*shake)^20 but the bacteria or other agent wouldn't do the work in the absence of that protocol in the free ocean.

Now I know that homeopathy uses distiled water and it's therefore unlikely that there any bacteria involved but that still negates the ocean argument and the suggestion that all water should work as homeopathic solutions if homeopathy is right.

Seeking to make good arguments might be a better goal than always thinking about the ends like whether homeopathy is true in the end.

It's rather: When your utility function doesn't include that the activity that you spent most of your time with has meaning but your utility function rather puts it's weights on the values of on conformity, safety or money than you must have the wrong utility function.

That attack signals that you don't have enough status to be direct but have to use a indirect way. Additionally you are wasting the time of your audience with playing status games instead of asking a specific question that demonstrates the problem with the idea of the presenter.

Why is this post being voted down? Do you consider virality/quality tradeoffs to be distracting?