He has a long history of asserting that people believe their dogma. While he has managed to say interesting things about religion despite this terrible handicap, I think one must be careful when reading him.

Well, many people in the Taliban certainly do appear to act as though they believe their dogma.

This is interesting.

I'd read all of Egan before finding LW/encountering serious singularity/AI thinkers. (I'm a generalist). I read Zendegi recently but didn't immediately connect it with here - I may go and re-read it now.

For the record, I would have to say, though, the Egan's characterisations of all protagonists is weak - a tendency that is, I find, widespread among hard SF writers. Not surprisingly; they are interested in the interactions of imaginably real science with the history and future of humanity. Significant emphasis on the characteristics of particular individuals (making them seem real by letting us understood their particular identity as distinctive) is likely to undermine their purpose in examining these interactions. It takes a great artist to unite disparate angles one a topic into a whole (I hesitate to use my usual word for this achievement here - I call this achievement 'transcendent')

This post has generated so much more controversy than I expected.

I meant exactly exercise and healthy eating! I thought people would assume I meant that. Not gastric bypass surgery, not liposuction, not starvation, not amputating limbs.

As:

formal complexity [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity#Specific_meanings_of_complexity] is inherent in may real-world systems that are apparently significantly simpler than the human brain,

and the human brain is perhaps the third most complex phenomena yet encountered by humans [ brain is a subset of ecosystem is a subset of universe]

and a characteristic of complexity is that prediction of outcomes requires greater computational resource than is required to simply let the system provide its own answer,

any attempt to predict the outcome of a successful AI implementation is speculative. 80% confident

Nicely written and useful post. In the context of LW, the singular take on Alice behaviour as arising from aversion to non-optimal situations seems less strange than it might in a more general arena.

However (without having data to hand), I would suggest that a significant proportion of people in the world whose activity patterns (and even internal reasoning patterns) match Alice', would in fact be behaving that way as a result of fear, rather than even-handed assessment of experience.

In which case the prescription might be naive.

One thing I have advocated, without much success, is that children be taught social rules (when they are ready) in exactly the same way they are taught and teach each other games. The point is not whether the rules are right or wrong. Are the rules of 5-card stud poker or hopscotch right or wrong? It's that we're playing a certain game here, and there are rules to this game just as in any other game. If you want to be in the game, then you have to learn how to play it. Different groups of people play different games (different rules = different game), so if you want to play in different groups, you have to learn the games they play. When you develop the levels of understanding above the rule level, you'll be able to understand all games, and be able to join in anywhere. You won't be stuck knowing how to play only one game.

My problem with selling this idea is that people tend to think that their game is the only right one. In fact, being told that they are playing a game with arbitrary rules is insulting or frightening. They want to believe that the rules they know are the ones that everyone ought to play by; they even set up systems of punishment and reward to make sure that nobody tries to play a different game. They turn the game into something that is deadly serious, and so my idea simply seems frivolous instead of liberating.

William T. Powers

"Everything has been said, yet few have taken notice of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not"

Raoul Vaneigem

Has anyone encountered a formal version of this? I.e. a site for the creation of formal logical arguments. Users can create axioms, assign their confidence to them and structure arguments using them. Users can then see the logical consequences of their beliefs. I think it would make a very interesting format for turning debate into a competitive game, whose results are rigorous, machine readable, arguments.

Can I humbly suggest that a tool along the lines of the one proposed here:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2rw/proposal_for_a_structured_agreement_tool/

might be useful for the purpose?