Your argument might be helped if you provided some examples of the average/median citizen needing to be told such things. There might even be a name for what those examples are, which you would present to induce others to be less sure of the beliefs which these examples contradict.
I've heard "evidence" tossed around as something you might want to provide.
How about religion? There is a variety of them and they can't all be right (many claim to be the only true one), yet people tend to just believe whichever one they happen to have been raised to believe. They are believing in these massive cosmic arrangements and belief structures...by accident of where they happen to have been raised. And I always have to tell them this.
I expected a very high "obviousness" to my assertion that the median citizen needs to be told these things; that's why I didn't even bother giving evidence. Why is this necessary?
Bayesianism boils down to “don’t be so sure of your beliefs; be less sure when you see contradictory evidence.” Now that is just common sense.
...Common? Maybe in successful circles of academia.
Why does anyone need to be told this?
What a bizarre question. I find it difficult to believe that this person has any experience with the average/median citizen.
I don't always think clearly, but when I do, I prefer Yudkowsky.
Stay friendly, AIs.
I'm not sure where to ask this, I'll just toss it here.
You know this site? I'm interested in something that would work similarly but for a different purpose. http://www.music-map.com/
Instead of visitors putting in a few favorite bands, you make an account and select degrees of agreement with various pre-made contentious issues. The account is so you can update your views and change the data points you contributed. So for example, there would be one for "Humans evolved by natural selection", and there would be a selection of confidence levels you could pick to represent your agreement or disagreement.
You then get a bunch of people to do this, and use algorithms similar to that music site's, so that you end up with a kind of crowd belief map with the different statements of belief clustering based on statistical closeness. So the selection for "Humans evolved by natural selection: Strongly Agree" would be on the map somewhere, probably nearer a democrat-ish cluster, and probably farther from an "intelligent design"-ish cluster of agreement statements.
So you'd end up with things like a conspiracy theory-ish cluster, which would probably have "UFOs have been on Earth: Agree" somewhere near or inside it. I would find it fascinating to look at this sort of visual representation for where these statements of belief would appear on a belief landscape, especially after thousands of people have participated and with lots of different issues to weigh in on.
If the sample size was big enough, you might even use it as a rough first-draft confidence of a particular statement you haven't researched yet. Sometimes I just wish I could short-sell a conspiracy-theory belief cluster index fund, or an ID one. And I might get a heads-up on things to look into, say for example the belief statements that ended up nearer to "Many worlds interpretation: Agree".
Ability to get a clue.
Ah! Well I had no cluifiability until you posted, thanks.
No-one is a villain in their own mind, of course.
I've spent several years deep in the bowels of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. (It's jolly good and I'm very proud to have had some small part in what we've achieved and continue to achieve.) Wikipedia has the rule "assume good faith", which is of course a restatement of Hanlon's razor, "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice." Wikimedia is 100% made of sincere people who really believe in what they're doing. Per Dumas' razor, "I prefer rogues to imbeciles, as rogues sometimes rest," this means that when one of these sincere, smart, dedicated people is doing something that's actually blitheringly stupid, it's ten times as hard to get across to them that they are in fact having a towering attack of dumbarse.
Every politician I've ever met has in fact been a completely sincere person who considers themselves to do what they do with the aim of good in the world. Even the ones that any outsider would say "haha, leave it out" to the notion. Every politician is completely sincere. I posit that this is a much more frightening notion than the comfort of a conspiracy theory.
There are few, if any, villains. There are people being stupid and foolish. These are frequently us. LessWrong's catalogue of cognitive biases is to remind you that you, yes you, are in fact an idiot. As am I.
The hard part is to set the bozo bit on people in parts, rather than over the whole person. And allow for the notion of cluifiability.
What does cluifiability mean? It is neither in the dictionary, nor recognized by Google.
Okay, I'm going to take your word for it! So I just got The Great Conversation, Sixth Edition in the mail and it looks very good. But if I want to know more about Gottlob Frege or the philosophy of language or analysis, and I'm a layperson who needs something accessible, where should I go for that? Should I just get Meaning and Argument?
I failed math in grade 9. So far I'm at 202/414 tasks. Currently chewing on "linear equations", tastes like redemption.
My progress has been VERY slow. Once in a while I hit a task that I ace in the first stack, but mostly it's a grind. Like, I've been at "almost halfway" for months because they keep adding new units fast enough to keep pace with me. I'll have way more time for it when I'm no longer studying forex.
When CERN was talking about their 5-sigma result, I had recently mastered the "inferential statistics" bunch, and being able to know what '5-sigma' meant was a huge confidence boost. It makes my life feel less shameful and more like just another casualty of environmental factors.
Here's my profile, https://www.khanacademy.org/profile/Jotto999/
I am aware that doing KA is not nearly as good as having a teacher, but using up a slot at a university for me would be a stupid business decision, so I'll keep plugging away at it. Also, math is irrelevant to my day-to-day life and as long as I can master all of KA before the age of 30, I'll be more than satisfied.
Your bucket list is the things you do before you die. Literally everything you do before you die is not dying.
I find this to be like saying to someone with cancer "Don't bother with treatment, you aren't dead yet". A bucket list is for plans and actions, not attributes inherent to existing in the first place.
Other commenters have said that it is more about things you may not have done without having it on the bucket list for a reminder or incentive. In this case, we can reasonably expect Gates meant putting effort into avoiding death, not "I was immortal, but now feel like trying to win the Hardcore Mode Bucket List challenge.
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Isn't the scientific method a servant of the Light Side, even if it is occasionally a little misguided?
What kind of thing do you mean by "occasionally a little misguided"? Are you referring to something bad about it because humans (and all our mental frailties) were using it, or something bad that would happen no matter what kind of creature tried to use it, even ones that had ways around human-like mental frailties?
(I see this comment is from 7 years ago, and I will understand completely if no response comes.)