I took the survey.

I think most of my answers were the same as last year, although I think my estimates have improved a little, and my hours of internet have gone down, both of which I like.

Many of the questions are considerably cleaned up -- much thanks to Yvain and everyone else who helped. It's very good it has sensible responses for gender. And IIRC, the "family's religious background" was tidied up a bit. I wonder if anyone can answer "atheist" as religious background? I hesitated over the response, since the last religious observance I know of for sure was G being brought up catholic, but I honestly think living in a protestant (or at least, anglican) culture is a bigger influence on my parents cultural background, so I answered like that.

I have no idea what's going to happen in the raffle. I answered "cooperate" because I want to encourage cooperating in as many situations as possible, and don't really care about a slightly-increased chance of < $60.

Of course, it's hard to be much more certain. I don't know what the chance is that (eg) mathematicians change the definition of prime -- that's pretty unlikely, but similar things have happened before that I thought I was certain of. But rarely.

If mathematicians changed the definition of "prime," I wouldn't consider previous beliefs about prime numbers to be wrong, it's just a change in convention. Mathematicians have disagreed about whether 1 was prime in the past, but that wasn't settled through proving a theorem about 1's primality, the way normal questions of mathematical truth are. Rather, it was realized that the convention that 1 is not prime was more useful, so that's what was adopted. But that didn't render the mathematicians who considered 1 prime wrong (at least, not wrong about whether 1 was prime, maybe wrong about the relative usefulness of the two conventions.)

Yeah, that's interesting.

I agree with Eliezer's post, but I think that's a good nitpick. Even if I can't be that certain about 10,000 statements <i>consecutively</i> because I get tired, I think it's plausible that there's 10,000 statements simple arithmetic statements which if I understand, check of my own knowledge, and remember seeing in a list on wikipedia, (which is what I did for 53), that, I've only ever been wrong once on. I find it hard to judge the exact amount, but I definitely remember thinking "I thought that was prime but I didn't really check and I was wrong" but I don't remember thinking "I checked that statement and then it turned out I was still wrong" for something that simple.

Of course, it's hard to be much more certain. I don't know what the chance is that (eg) mathematicians change the definition of prime -- that's pretty unlikely, but similar things have happened before that I thought I was certain of. But rarely.

Judea Pearl, Causality:

If two things are correlated, there is causation. Either A causes B, B causes A, they have common cause, or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.

Edit: If two variables are correlated, there is causation. Either A causes B, B causes A, they have common cause, or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.

You can't trust your intuitions [in this domain]. I'm going to give you a set of rules here that will get you through this process if anything will. At certain moments you'll be tempted to ignore them. So rule number zero is: these rules exist for a reason. You wouldn't need a rule to keep you going in one direction if there weren't powerful forces pushing you in another.

Paul Graham

Making it the largest Muslim country in the world.

(Before learning this fact, Indonesia wasn't even on my radar when discussing Islam. It's quite moderate, so it rarely makes the news.)

That's an interesting thought, but it makes me rather uncomfortable.

I think partly, I find it hard to believe the numbers (if I have time I will read the methodology in more detail and possibly be convinced).

And partly, I think there's a difference between offsetting good things, and offsetting bad things. I think it's plausible to say "I give this much to charity, or maybe this other charity, or maybe donate more time, or...". But even though it sort of makes sense from a utilitarian perspective, I think it's wrong (and most people would agree it's wrong) to say "I'll kick this puppy to death because I'm a sadist/a modern artist/whatever, but I'll give more money to charity afterwards." Paying someone else to be vegetarian sounds at least as much like the latter as the former to me.

Hm. My answers were:

Anti-procrastination: "This fit with things I'd tried to do before in a small way, but went a lot farther, and I've repeatedly come back to it and feel I've made intermittent improvements by applying one or another part of it, but not really in a systematic way, so can't be sure that that's due to the technique rather than just ascribing any good results I happen to get to this because it sounded good."

Pomodoro: "I've tried something similar before with intermittently good results and would like to do so more than I do. I don't know whether the trappings of pomodoro significantly improve on that."

Exercise: "I feel good on the occasions when I exercise, but it doesn't seem to produce a measurable performance increase -- it may halt a performance decrease."

I decided to fit those into the boxes as best I could rather than write in, but I wasn't sure.

Your examples include:

(1) Any discussion of what art is.
(2) Any discussion of whether or not the universe is real.
(3) Any conversation about whether machines can truly be intelligent.

I agree that the answers to these questions depend on definitions, but then, so does the answer to the question, "how long is this stick ?". Depending on your definition, the answer may be "this many meters long", "depends on which reference frame you're using", "the concept of a fixed length makes no sense at this scale and temperature", or "it's not a stick, it's a cube". That doesn't mean that the question is inherently confused, only that you and your interlocutor have a communication problem.

That said, I believe that questions (1) and (3) are, in fact, questions about humans. They can be rephrased as "what causes humans to interpret an object or a performance as art", and "what kind of things do humans consider to be intelligent". The answers to these questions would be complex, involving multi-modal distributions with fuzzy boundaries, etc., but that still does not necessarily imply that the questions are confused.

Which is not to say that confused questions don't exist, or that modern philosophical academia isn't riddled with them; all I'm saying is that your examples are not convincing.

Anna Salamon and I usually apply the Tarski Method by visualizing a world that is not-how-we'd-like or not-how-we-previously-believed, and ourselves as believing the contrary, and the disaster that would then follow.

I find just that description really, really useful. I knew about the Litany of Tarski (or Diax's Rake, or believing something just because you wanted it to be true) and have the habit of trying to preemptively prevent it. But that description makes it a lot easier to grok it at a gut level.