11 minute TED talk is about instrumental rationality

9 JamesAndrix 29 August 2012 07:33AM

Link

Essentially this is about cutting your enemy, and some procedural pitfalls in his examples.

I didn't spot any novel principles in the talk, but I want to learn more about how he thinks.

Video: Getting Things Done Author at DO Lectures

2 JamesAndrix 11 October 2010 08:33AM

If nothing else, this is a distillation of him spending a lot of time analyzing how people ineffectively manage their time.

Link:

http://www.dolectures.com/speakers/speakers-2010/david-allen

I expect to watch this two more times.

 

 

Counterintuitive World - Good intro to some topics

2 JamesAndrix 02 October 2010 03:32AM

Purposefulness on Mars

10 JamesAndrix 08 August 2010 09:23AM

Three different Martians built the Three Sacred Stone Walls of Mars according to the Three Virtues of walls:Height, Strength, and Beauty.

An evil Martian named Ution was the first and stupidest of all wallbuilders. He was too stupid to truly understand even the most basic virtue of height, and too evil to care for any other virtue. None the less, something about tall walls caused Evil Ution to build more tall walls, sometimes one on top of the other.

At times his walls would fall as he was building them, he did not understand why, nor did he care. He simply copied the high walls he had already built, whichever were still standing. His wall did achieve some strength and beauty. Most consisted of thousands of similar archways stacked on top of each other. Thousands upon thousands of intricately interlocking stones. Each arch a distantly removed copy of some prototypical archway that was strong and light enough to support itself many times over.

To this day his walls are the highest in all of Mars.

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False Majorities

35 JamesAndrix 03 February 2010 06:43PM

If a majority of experts agree on an issue, a rationalist should be prepared to defer to their judgment. It is reasonable to expect that the experts have superior knowledge and have considered many more arguments than a lay person would be able to. However, if experts are split into camps that reject each other's arguments, then it is rational to take their expert rejections into account. This is the case even among experts that support the same conclusion.

If 2/3's of experts support proposition G , 1/3 because of reason A while rejecting B, and 1/3 because of reason B while rejecting A, and the remaining 1/3 reject both A and B; then the majority Reject A, and the majority Reject B. G should not be treated as a reasonable majority view.

This should be clear if A is the koran and B is the bible.

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