This reminds me of the way I hear they do state censorship in China. The censoring agencies don't actually give out any specific guidelines on what is allowed and what isn't, instead just clamping down on cases they do consider to be over the line. As a consequence, everyone self-censors more than they might with specific guidelines: with the guidelines, you could always try to twist their letter to violate their spirit. Instead, people are constantly unsure of just exactly what will get you in trouble, so they err on the side of caution.

While I strongly oppose state censorship, I can't help but admire the genius in the system.

It seems to me that a PhD is mainly about doing research under somebody else's guidance, while doing some extra courses on the side. If you can accomplish the same research without the bureaucratic hassles involved in a PhD, win-win.

Thank you, this was a quite useful link for me. (Finnish colleges currently charge no tuition fees, and some are arguing for their introduction on the basis that this would make people graduate faster; those statistics show that US students don't really graduate any much better than Finnish ones.)

This is a self-referential reply.

Unless you're an expert in a specific topic, then it seems to me rather likely that you're bound to believe in at least some things about it which are in fact false. We don't have the time or energy to comprehensively check the source of every statement we encounter, nor an ability to reliably keep track of which statements we have indeed checked. Even facts found in seemingly reliable sources, like textbooks on the topic, might be wrong.

I don't think making an erroneous statement or two is enough for us to say that his facts were weak, or that he resorted too much to emotions. If you discuss any topic long enough, the odds are that you're going to slip a not-entirely-thought-out statement sooner or later. This is especially so since discussing a topic with someone else will force us to consider points of view we hadn't thought of ourselves, and make up new responses on the spot.

Incidentally, having to quickly react to new points of view is what makes me a bit suspicious of the sometimes-heard claim "I debunked his claim in debate X, but then I heard him afterwards repeating it debate Y, so clearly he's intellectually dishonest". Yes, sometimes this is true, but it might also be that when the other person had more time to reflect on their opponent's arguments, they thought they found in them a fatal flaw and could thus save their original claim. I know it's happened to me.

If you're circumventing a child's preferences, you should tell them you're doing it, and why.

Full agreement. (If you want them to be honest, you should teach by example.)

It actually seems to me that the trouble computer-illiterate people have is often a case of insufficient compartmentalization, not too much. To take your keyboard example - they know things that work in a software domain, and know things that work in a hardware domain, and are failing to keep these separate. Kids, who start with far fewer preconceptions of how things should work, pick up the use of computers much faster.

Also, we computer-literate people probably underestimate how sheerly arbitrary many things must seem like to people who haven't had a long exposure to computers. (How is a person to know that keyboard settings aren't stored in the keyboard? After all, you could toggle the write-protect status of a 3½ inch disc by flipping the right tab on the disc. And the amount of region switches on a DVD drive is stored in the device itself. And once you know that electrical devices lose at least some of their settings when the power is turned off, it isn't too unreasonable of a hypothesis that unplugging the keyboard might reset the settings.)

The computer example confused me, because I'm not sure what it has to do with compartmentalization. Compartmentalization means you neglect to apply knowledge from one domain in another; people being unable to understand computers seems to happen because they don't have any applicable domain knowledge in the first place.

If I understood you correctly you write "the government is ready to conduct massively risky operations that kill thousands of its own citizens as a publicity stunt" as a statement of fact.

I didn't write it as a fact, I wrote it as an assumption whose validity is being evaluated.

Here's an attempt to reword it to make this clearer:

"Others thought that the conspiracy argument required the government to be ready to conduct, as a publicity stunt, massively risky operations that kill thousands of its own citizens. They considered their prior for this hypothetical and judged it overwhelmingly unlikely in comparison to priors such as 'lots of unlikely-seeming things show up by coincidence once you dig deeply enough'."

1: If you have no information to support either alternative more than the other, you should assign them both equal credence. So, fifty-fifty. Note that yes-no questions are the easiest possible case, as you have exactly two options. Things get much trickier once it's not obvious what things should be classified as the alternatives that should be considered equally plausible.

Though I would say that in this situation, the most rational approach would be to tell the Sillpruk, "I'm sorry, I'm not from around here. Before I answer, does this planet have a custom of killing people who give the wrong answer to this question, or is there anything else I should be aware of before replying?"

2: This depends a lot how we define a rationalist and a Bayesian. A question like "is the Bible literally true" could reveal a lot of irrational people, but I'm not certain of the amount of questions that'd need to be asked before we could know for sure that they were irrational. (Well, since 1 and 0 aren't probabilities, the strict answer to this question is "it can't be done", but I'm assuming you mean "before we know with such a certainty that in practice we can say it's for sure".)