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).

I'm nervous about the word happiness because I suspect it's a label for a basket of slippery ideas and sub-idea feelings. Still, something I don't understand about your argument is that when you demonstrate that for you happiness is not a terminal value you seem to arbitrarily stop the chain of reasoning. Terminating your inquiry is not the same as having a terminal value.

If you say you value something and I know that not everyone values that thing, I naturally wonder *why* you value it. You say it's a terminal value, but when I ask myself why you value it if someone else doesn't, I say to myself "it must make him happy to value that". In that sense, happiness may be a word we use as a terminal value by definition, not by evidence-- a convention like saying QED at the end of a proof. In the old days the terminal value was often "God wills it so", but with the invention of humanism in the middle ages, pursuit of happiness was born.

In the case where someone seems to be working against what they *say* makes them happy, that just means there are different kinds or facets or levels of happiness. Happiness is complex, but if there are no reasons beyond the final reason for taking an action, then as a conceptual convention the final reason must be happiness.

Now I will argue a little against that. What I've said up to now is based on the assumption that humans are teleonomic creatures with free will. But I think we are actually NOT such creatures. We do not exist to fulfill a purpose. So the concept of happiness, defined as it is, is a story that is pasted onto us, by us, so that we can pretend to have an ethereal conscious existence. I propose that the truth is ultimately that we do what we do because of the molecules and energy state that we possess, within the framework of our environment and the laws of physics.

I could say that eating makes me happy and that's why I do it, or I could say that the deeper truth is that my brain is constructed to feel happy about eating. I eat because of that mechanism, not because of the "happiness", which doesn't actually exist. We make up the story of happiness not because it makes us happy to do so, but because we are compelled to do so by our physical nature.

In the words of Jessica Rabbit, I'm just drawn that way.

I normally wouldn't take the scientific happiness pill because I seem to be constructed to enjoy feeling that my state of mind is substantially a product of my ongoing thoughts, not chemicals. To inject chemicals to change my thoughts is literally a form of suicide, to me. It takes the unique thought pattern that is ME, kills it, and replaces it with a thought pattern identical in some ways to anyone else who takes the pill. People alive are unique; death is the ultimate conformity and conformity a kind of death.

But the happiness illusion is complex enough that I may under some circumstances say yes to that pill and have that little suicide.

Quantitative thinking is just so much mystical numerology unless it is grounded in qualitative thinking. Unless you don't need your mathematics to mean anything with respect to the world, you must relate it to the world by using a system of assertions called a model. Of course, you know this, I'd just like you to bring this fact out from behind the curtain where you normally keep it.

Example: when I hear a scientist talk about how winning the lottery (or some other rare event) is less likely than getting hit by lightning, I have to wonder what the odds are of being hit by lightning if you take shelter during a storm, as most people do, or if you live in Nome, Alaska? I bet agoraphobic people are far less likely to die in car accidents, too. In other words, broad numerical reasoning, when applied to specific cases without recalculating for those cases, is essentially the same thing as the sloppy qualitative reasoning that you're worried about. It's just as absurd.

Maybe what you're trying to say is that sloppy and ungrounded qualitative reasoning is to be avoided, in favor of quantitative reasoning grounded in the appropriate qualitative reasoning that give the numbers meaning. That would be a qualitative judgment on your part, of course, but it seems like a defensible one in this case.

I think you are trying to advocate, not quantitative reasoning, but rather good reasoning. There's no call to hang the albatross of bad reasoning around the neck of qualitative research as a field. That bird belongs to all of us.

Until you pick one interim best guess, the discomfort will consume your attention, distract you from the search, tempt you to confuse the issue whenever your analysis seems to trend in a particular direction.

Oh no. Eliezer, I have disagreed with you at times, but you have not actually disappointed me until this moment. As an avid reader of yours, I beseech you, please think through this again.

You simply have not presented a moral dilemma. You've presented a pantomine; shadows on a wall; an illusion of a dilemma. If there's any dilemma here at all, it was whether I should play pretend-philosopher by giving an eloquent and vacuous response or else take philosophy and morals seriously by suggesting that your question is not yet ready to be answered. I chose the latter, partly because I also have been taking seriously your other writings-- the ones where you chide people for substituting wishful thinking for self-critical sober rational analysis. I'm attracted to the mind of a man who tries to live by a difficult and worthy principal, because that's what I do, too; and what I am doing.

Real moral dilemmas have context, and the secret to solving them always involves that context. We frequently find them in literature, richly expressed. Instead, you are just asking us to play a game with unspecified rules and goals. You toss off a scenario in a few sentences. How is that interesting? I guess it's a bit interesting to see how some people commenting have made bold assumptions and foisted unspoken premises on your example. It's a window onto their biases, maybe. Is that really enough to satisfy you?

I could understand if you don't want to make the effort to create a fully realized philosophical problem for us to work through (putting together those problems is a challenge). But geez, I'm surprised you would criticize me for doing what a philosopher is supposed to do: study the situation to understand the question better, rather than make a definite answer to a question I don't understand.