= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Two questions, as I take the survey:
- What does "spiritual" mean, in the context of "Atheist [but | and not] spiritual"?
- I genuinely have no idea whether I'd prefer low or high redistribution of wealth. What do I tick for my political opinion?
In response to
2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
we are talking about the mathematics of causality. I would expect people to be familiar with free variables and algebra.
I for one would find explicit algebraic expessions much clearer than a bunch of meaningless numbers.
Depends what you mean by "familiar". I'd imagine anyone reading the essay can do algebra, but that they're still likely to be more comfortable when presented with specific numbers. People are weird like that - we can learn general principles from examples more easily than from having the general principles explained to us explicitly.
Exceptions abound, obviously.
In response to
Rationality Quotes October 2012
From the leavings of memory and forgetfulness we could create a nearly complete map, I think, of a person's values. What you don't even see -- the subtle sadness in a colleague's face? -- and what you might briefly see but don't react to or retain, is in some sense not part of the world shaped for you by your interests and values. Others with different values will remember a very different series of events.
Michelangelo is widely quoted as having said that to make David he simply removed from the stone everything that was not David. Remove from your life everything you forget; what is left is you.
Remove from your life everything you forget; what is left is you.
Can we just agree that English doesn't have a working definition for "self", and that different definitions are helpful in different contexts? I don't think there's anything profound in proposing definitions for words that fuzzy.
In response to
New study on choice blindness in moral positions
There was a high level of inter-rater agreement between the three raters for the NM reports (r = .70) as well as for the M reports (r = .77), indicating that there are systematic patterns in the verbal reports that corresponds to certain positions on the rating scale for both NM and M trials. Even more interestingly, there was a high correlation between the raters estimate and the original rating of the participants for NM (r = .59) as well as for M reports (r = .71), which indicates that the verbal reports in the M trials do in fact track the participants rated level of agreement with the opposite of the initial moral principle or issue [emphasis added] (for an illustration of this process and example reports, see figure S1, Supporting Online Material). In addition, this relationship highlights the logic of the attitude reversal, in that more modest positions result in verbal reports expressing arguments appropriate for the same region on the mirror side of the scale. And while extreme reversals more often are detected, the remaining non-detected trials also create stronger and more dramatic confabulations for the opposite position.
Am I misreading this, or does it say that the verbal statements of people supporting an inverted opinion fit that opinion better than those describing their genuine opinion?
I think it does. Can't believe I missed that.
Actually, this fits well with my personal experience. I've frequently found it easier to verbalize sophisticated arguments for the other team, since my own opinions just seem self-evident.
In response to
New study on choice blindness in moral positions
Wow!
I don't bandy the term sheeple out very frequently. But here it might just be appropriate.
I suspect sheep would be less susceptible to this sort of thing than humans.
In response to
New study on choice blindness in moral positions
One interpretation is that many people don't have strongly held or stable opinions on some moral questions and/or don't care. Doesn't sound very shocking to me.
Maybe morality is extremely context sensitive in many cases, thus polls on general moral questions are not all that useful.
The study asked people to rate their position on a 9-point scale. People who took more extreme positions, while more likely to detect the reversal, also gave the strongest arguments in favour of the opposite opinion when they failed to detect the reversal.
Also, the poll had two kinds of questions. Some of them were general moral principles, but some of them were specific statements.
How would you characterise the in your opinion most prevalent use-cases?
"Easy to communicate to other humans", "easy to understand", or "having few parts".
In response to
Rationality Quotes September 2012
Proceed only with the simplest terms, for all others are enemies and will confuse you.
— Michael Kirkbride / Vivec, "The Thirty Six Lessons of Vivec", Morrowind.
Am I the only one who thinks we should stop using the word "simple" for Occam's Razor / Solomonoff's Whatever? In 99% of use-cases by actual humans, it doesn't mean Solomonoff induction, so it's confusing.
Who was the guy who tried to bargain the gods into giving him immortality, only to get screwed because he hadn't thought to ask for youth and health as well? He ended up being a shriveled crab like thing in a jar.
My highschool english teacher thought this fable showed that you should be careful what you wished for. I thought it showed that trying to compel those with great power through contract was a great way to get yourself fucked good an hard. Don't think you can fuck with people a lot more powerful than you are and get away with it.
EDIT: The myth was of Tithonus. A goddess Eos was keeping him as a lover, and tried to bargain with Zeus for his immortality, without asking for eternal youth too. Ooops.
Don't think you can fuck with people a lot more powerful than you are and get away with it.
I'm no expert, but that seems to be the moral of a lot of Greek myths.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
I took "spiritual" to mean in this context that you don't believe in ontologically basic mental entities, but still embrace feelings of wonder, majesty, euphoria, etc. typically associated with religions when contemplating/experiencing the natural world.
Do you not have a preference for low/high redistribution of wealth because you haven't studied enough economics, or because you have studied economics and haven't found a satisfying answer? (Alternatively, trying to answer this one question might just not be worth your time. If that's the case, I'd leave it blank. Or if you're otherwise choosing between two positions, flip a coin)
Notice that other people answering my question had different interpretations. I left it blank.
Because I haven't studied economics beyond the Wikipedia level, and systems with large numbers of humans involved are really, really complicated. Why so many democratic citizens feel qualified to intuit their way to an opinion is beyond me.