Perhaps you have a better class of Facebook friend than I do. I would love it if I could provoke them into saying interesting things about a topic, rather than them just making unprincipled tribalistic noise about it.

Something I've started experimenting with at the moment, when someone says "it's terrible that this politician has done [x] because [some stupid argument]" is "three reasons why [x] is good, and one broader conceptual reason why it might not be". This seems to confuse people's Political-Enemy-o-meter, and also frames the dispute along a moderately sensible axis.

I disagree that your characterization of this as flipping the coin is a good one. Flipping the coin would be to say, if I stole 500 moneys from a 70 year old account, or a 22 year old, which one would suffer most. I believe the 22 year old would suffer more.

There is a completely different question which is: Is it better to be financially miserable when old, or when young. I think Puneet Sahani has settled this issue by awesomely being homeless at 26-28 and indian while travelling many countries. It is better to be financially miserable when young.

So the marginal return per unit of money, I'd claim, is higher near misery values when you are old, and higher otherwise when you are young. Do you think we may be going towards an agreement here?

Edit: Apparently, as a non-native I did't know the connotations of "flipping a coing" I though it meant something like "reverse your argument" or "do the opposite to see how inconsistent your position is". Now I have no idea what it means.

I prefer to use the word 'optimized'. Does the job just fine, with only 1/4 of the objections!

You may want to distinguish classical conditioning from operant conditioning.

Where exactly is the conflict?

I guess EY was not trying to say "Behaviorism bad" in one article, and "Behaviorism good" in another; but rather that in some places the behaviorist map is very useful, and in some places the (older version of) map is pretty funny.

http://tinyurl.com/6gu6p2

That goes to the Wikipedia entry on Skinner, sub-section 'Superstition of the Pigeon.'

If I understand the later research, the criticism is that Skinner projected rather than observed repeating behaviors in the pigeons. Skinner was associating the corner-touching with the pigeons more than the pigeons were associating the corner-touching with the food.

Scientific problem solving includes falsification, and that's what'd I'd offer as a right interpretation / good way to minimize cargo-cult solutions. Non-scientific problem solving includes anything you like and the provisional proof is found only in the proverbial pudding.

I liked Frailty. Without giving too much away, it demonstrates how any agent with god-like powers could make you believe whatever it wants you to believe. Therefore if you ever find yourself in a universe in which gods and powerful demons exist and have an interest in influencing your life, you could fall into a situation where you have no means of determining which gods or demons are best aligned with your long-term goals. Also, a sufficiently cogent propaganda campaign could have a good chance of convincing you to commit atrocities.

The same paper has been the topic of a previous discussion post.