I just tried this 'battleground god' thing and it told me:
'It is strange to say that God is a logical impossibility, but you don’t know whether God exists. If God is a logical impossibility, then surely She can’t exist, and so you know that She doesn’t exist.'
I don't get it. Why can't I be unsure about the truth value of something just because it's a logical impossibility? My understanding of logic isn't exhaustive.
How can P(x doesn't exist) < P(x is logically impossible)? That's... well, logically impossible.
Confidence is based on your perception of yourself. When someone tells you to be more confident, it's probably because they believe your perception of yourself is worse than reality. Excessively low confidence is no less of a delusion than excessively high confidence.
When someone tells you to be more confident, it's probably because they believe your perception of yourself is worse than reality.
The cynical alternative hypothesis is that "be more confident" actually means "be higher status".
In both theory and in practice, it is a problem: the offspring are more likely to have faulty genomes than the offspring of unrelated people.
You could make having offspring illegal. Why must these people have kids? You can get contraception cheaply everywhere nowadays. Does it hurt people more if they can't have kids, than if it were completely illegal? By making relationships between siblings legal, but making offspring illegal you would appreciate people's right to self-determination but still take care of the practical issues in some way.
But why are you raising this issue?
Because it's good ethical practice to try to work out what to do with controversial issues when the answer is not completely clear. There's a reason why that German ethics council thinks it should be legal.
The practical problem is, of course, enforcing this prohibition on procreation. Forced sterilisation is difficult to sell and problematic because the subjects might wish to have children with other people. RISUG might be a solution, once it becomes available.
I'm not sure what I think of the fact that everyone is concerned with the genetics of possible offspring in the case of incest, but nobody minds two chronically depressed, highly neurotic people, one of whom has a hereditary autoimmune condition, procreating... (The domain of quantification for the slightly hyperbolic "everyone" and "nobody" here is the general public rather than LW. I suspect that many in this community would, in fact, mind the latter case as well.)
In general, I would assume that a private message would be more appropriate than a post.
Obligatory cynicism: But then you don't get social status for being right, so there's not incentive to do it.
I've noticed that people uphold a lot of social conventions about how conversations are supposed to work, and then they have to all get drunk in order to have interesting conversations, because those social conventions (like "don't make non-sequiturs" or "don't talk about impractical speculations") make interesting conversations difficult.
So... pretend to be drunk? Invite a drunk into the conversation? Probably not very good advice. But it seems people want to get past small talk, but need an excuse for breaking with convention.
That is very true. Many people also seem to interpret the politeness rule of not talking too much about oneself in such a way that no hint about interesting topics ever gets picked up because giving your opinion on something, or relating experiences, is "talking too much about yourself" unless you were explicitly asked. The only solution I've is to simply avoid people who are frustrating like that.
I think this is mostly a function of the subculture to which you belong and, specifically, which things you find interesting, exciting, important, etc. IQ, of course, is a major underlying factor, but it's not just IQ.
Each subculture also has its own social rituals and implicit communication methods so when you cross over to a different one you are very likely to have conversation difficulties -- unless your social skills are highly developed and you have some idea about how that subculture works.
This was my first thought, too. The Singaporean psychology grad student is a member of the same culture as you; the local fashion designer is not.
Moral theories predict feelings, mathemathical theories predict different things. Moral philosophy assumes you already know genocide is wrong and it tries to figure out how your subconscious generates this feeling: http://lesswrong.com/lw/m8y/dissolving_philosophy/
Moral theories predict feelings
No. This is what theories of moral psychology do. Philosophical ethicists do not consider themselves to be in the same business.
Do you need to date to have regular sex? If that's all you want, aren't there websites for finding other people who only want sex?
Do you need to date to have regular sex?
Unless you're in the top 30% or so of attractiveness, I think the answer to that question is "yes".
Well... Having once been infatuated with my supervisor and more than once reduced by him to tears even when my infatuation wore off, I can say this:
It's not people falling in love with people that really reduces group output. Being in love I worked like I would never do again.
It's people growing disappointed with people/goals, or having an actual life (my colleague quit her PhD when her husband lost his job, + they had a kid), or - God forbid! - competing for money. Now that's what I would call trouble.
Very good point! It's a ubiquitous stereotype, but it's not a priori clear to me that workplace romance leads to a net decrease in productivity, and I haven't seen real evidence for it. Google Scholar yielded nothing, it either ignores the search word "productivity" or just yields papers that report the cliché.
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I feel like I might understand now. Can I represent your points as follows:
Assuming statement 1 is correct, without accepting a further premise I don't feel compelled to accept the second premise. It sounds like things which are logically impossible may in fact be equivelant to things which don't exist, and vice-versa. And that sounds intuitively compelling. If something was logically possible, it would happen. If it is wasn't possible, it's not going to happen. Or, the agent's modelling of the world is wrong.
Importantly, I don't accept premise 1, as I've indicated in another comment reply (something about how I find I'm wrong about the apparent impossibility of something, or possibility of something.)
Well, the conclusion should read not "more things" but "at least as many". Things might accidentally not exist.
I feel the fact that you reject premise 1 just means that you don't really grasp the concept of impossibility, logical or otherwise... Or you have a different concept of existence.
The reason why I used a semi-formal notation was to suggest that if you formalise it all, you can actually prove "P(x doesn't exist) ≥ P(x is impossible)" as a tautology. (Ignoring the issue that with specifically logical impossibility, you get into a bit of trouble with probability assignments to tautologies.)