Forget voting. Here's how to make a big difference in society: at least once a month, do something amazingly kind for a perfect stranger. My preference is leaving $100 tips for waitresses or hotel maids, because I'm basically lazy.

Also, raise your kids with kindness.

Practice showing courage in challenging situations.

Don't instigate a lawsuit unless it's reaaaaaally important.

What's great about America is not democracy, but the sense we have that we can travel almost anywhere here and other people will smile with us, do business with us, and not hate us. There are still many places and people within America for which and whom this is not true (or not true enough). But let's keep working toward that idea with our daily actions. No amount of voting will solve that problem.

Since I don't accept being part of a majority that dominates a minority, I only consent to vote in a situation where my vote is for the minority, and therefore cannot possibly influence the outcome. This is mathematically identical to staying home, except staying home is more pleasant. So, I'd rather stay home.

For those who believe in majority rule, I still don't understand why you vote, since your vote cannot make any difference. There is no such thing as a deciding vote in a large election, since the error present in the system even for a fair election itself far exceeds one vote.

It only makes sense to advocate voting if you believe you can control a lot of other peoples' votes. Then you can actually make a difference. Since the Diebold voting machines are hackable, and recounts are a sham, and the central tabulating software is easily manipulated by whomever happens to be running it, I see no rational basis for the assumption that the behavior of any voter or group of voters actually controls the outcome of any important election.

You're such a lion against religion, I admire that. So, I'm surprised you would say that living with doubt is not a virtue. You know about incommensurability right? You know about perspectivism? There is no "view from nowhere" that can make perfect objectivity possible.

Therefore: doubt. To live with doubt makes room for learning. Lose doubt and you also lose inquiry. Some doubts are annihilated by inquiry, but as Richard Feynman said, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". He said we need a well developed theory of ignorance to protect the future from our misconceptions of the present.

Doubt is difficult to live with. I'd love to say with certainty that Christianity is false. I'm constrained to saying that I have no better reason to accept Christianity than to accept the Spaghetti monster theory. The guy who came up with the Spaghetti monster did so as a parody-- but maybe the Monster Himself placed the ideas in his head to spread the good word of Spaghetti.

Bayesian rationality doesn't solve doubt, because nothing tells you how to identify the system and its factors that must be modeled. So, you're still stuck with having to define your premises, and doubt comes in with the premises.

Doubt is like an anti-oxidant that protects against cultishness. Of course, a cult can use *fake* doubt to throw people off its scent.

Eliezer, never mind *black*, the true iconoclasts don't *go* to school. I quit in 10th grade and became an emancipated minor. In the three years prior, I refused to do homework, citing the 13th Amendment. My motivation echoes yours: I could not abide fakers, and public school abounds with them. Fake lessons. Fake arguments. Fake sentiments. Public school is a thinly disguised day care center.

Fortunately, education is not the same as schooling, and there are plenty of ways to become better educated in private life. Then I discovered as an adult that being unconventionally educated could be a competitive advantage.

I don't see this exercise as being so much about rationality as it is about our relationship with dissonance. People in my community (context-driven software testers) are expected to treat confusion or controversy as itself evidence of a potentially serious problem. For the responsible tester, such evidence must be investigated and probably raised as an issue to the client.

In short, in the situation given in the exercise, I would not answer the question, but rather raise some questions.

I drive telephone surveyors nuts in this way. They just don't know what to do with a guy who answers "no opinion" or "I don't know" or "can't answer" to every single question in their poorly worded and context-non-specific questionnaires.

Thank you for this post. I'm in the process of writing about my system of self-education, which has two interesting elements I haven't heard anywhere else: A) it requires no self-discipline whatsoever, B) it is centered on the feelings of learning, rather than artifacts and techniques of learning (those latter two things are interesting, but they orbit the first).

One of the things I try to explain is how to embrace certain mental behaviors that seem bad, such as procrastination. I procrastinate extensively. I am procrastinating right now (I'm "supposed to be" writing a chapter on the history of buccaneering and how that relates to intellectual buccaneering).

Procrastination helps me learn with less effort. It's too long to explain fully here, but one way I use it is called "springboard procrastination" which is the phenomenon of trying to work on one thing, and feeling your mind aggressively push you into another thing. I once thought that was a shameful thing, to let my mind push against my will, but I eventually discovered that by rolling with that impulse, I could get lots of things done. I read more, I write more, I exercise, I am quite productive while avoiding the work I'm "supposed to do".

I also use a technique I call "procrastinate and push" which means I keep coming back and knocking on the door of my mind, trying to work on the problem of the day, and when my mind tells me to go play a video game instead, I just do that. But I come back a little later, and a little later. I go through these cycles without any sort of bad feeling (unlike when I was younger and disgusted with my inability to bring my mind to heel). Eventually, usually shortly before a deadline, my mind relents. Often progress is very rapid after that.

These experiences have caused me to explore lots of way in which I can make good progress without the feeling of making an effort. One of my mentors in this, Jerry Weinberg, recently wrote a book about a relaxed way of writing called the Fieldstone Approach, which he first put into words while coaching me on this stuff.

Anyone interested in reviewing my book prior to its publication should contact me directly. I will soon need a few bright people to critique it.

Great essay!

But, how can a set of ideas be a closed system? It's ridiculous. If someone were to tell me that Objectivism is closed, I would say, Ha! I just reopened it. Ha! Try and stop me from calling myself an Objectivist if I feel like it! Oh, they can trademark it, I supposed, but if they do, I could rename my system as Reasonablism and explain it as an improved form of what-Ayn-Rand-was-talking-about.

A community of people can close itself off, but ideas are helpless to resist whatever buccaneering minds may prey upon them. This harkens to Buckminster Fuller's cry that "true wealth only increases", because true wealth is knowledge and knowledge is infinitely replicable and shareable.

When you speak of "guardians of truth" I hear "guardians of social order." I don't think the Inquisition thought of truth in epistemic terms, the way we do. They thought of "truth" as the order of the world that was under constant assault by dark forces.

Truth guardianship in science might be understood as defending Kuhnian "normal science" from assault by people outside of the dominant paradigm; or perhaps the process of indoctrinating new scientists in the accepted norms of that paradigm.

You said: "So it seems there's an asymmetry between argument and authority. If we know authority we are still interested in hearing the arguments; but if we know the arguments fully, we have very little left to learn from authority."

I like your conclusion, but I can't find anything in your argument to support it! By rearranging some words in your text I could construct an equally plausible (to a hypothetical neutral observer) argument that authority screens off evidence. You seem to believe that evidence screens off authority simply because you think evidence is what makes authority believe something. But isn't that assuming the very thing you want to demonstrate?

Your scenarios in the first paragraphs are neither arguments nor demonstrations. They are statements of what you believe. Fair enough. But then I was expecting that you'd provide some reason for me to reject the hypothesis-- a hypothesis that carried a lot of weight during the era of Scholasticism-- that there is no such thing as evidence without authority (in other words, it is authority that consecrates evidence *as* evidence).

I used to wonder how anyone could take the obviously wrong physics of Aristotle seriously, until I learned enough about history that it dawned on me that for the Scholastic thinkers of the middle ages, how physics really worked was far less important than maintaining social order. If maintaining social order is the problem that trumps all others in your life and in your society, then evidence must necessarily carry little weight compared to authority. You will give up a lot of science, of course, but you will give it up gladly.

Obviously, we aren't in that situation. But I worry when I see, for instance, rational arguments for the existence of God that assume the very thing they purport to prove. And your argument (hopefully I've misunderstood it) seems a lot like those.

As a high school dropout and aspiring philosopher of self-education, I salute you.

My son is homeschooled, and the homeschooling consists of... nothing. He studies spontaneously to solve problems that are authentic to him, just as I do. Mostly these involve video games and online fantasy role-playing games. It's like A.S. Neill's Summerhill school except he's all alone. There are disadvantages to this sort of education, but inauthenticity is not among them.

I am writing a book along these lines. It's about how we can creates ourselves as individual thinkers. It's called How I Learn Stuff: Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar (old draft is temporarily online at http://www.satisfice.com/hils.pdf. The book itself should be finished in a few months).