[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

You may have come across the NASA clean air study and this 4 minute TED talk by Kamal Meattle, an Indian businessman and environmental activist. Short version: you need 4 Areca Palm plants per person to convert CO2 to O2 during the day, 6-8 snake plants per person to convert CO2 to O2 during the night, and then a devil's ivy to remove other chemicals from the air. He rattles off a list of measured impacts for working in an office building with an appropriate number of plants that also seem pretty convincing.

It's not clear why he didn't go with the ones that looked best on the NASA study, the Peace Lily (also recommended by Nicholas Angel) or the Chrysanthemum (also recommended by the Emperor of Japan). But this also the first place where I saw someone discussing the relevant conversion rate (i.e. three plants per person wouldn't be enough); the NASA study synopsis on Wikipedia, at least, only mentions number of plants per area and doesn't seem to take the leaf surface area of the plant into consideration. So one suspects he's taken cost and efficiency into account.

The most important issue is that however the theist defines "free will", he has the burden of showing that free will by that very definition is supremely valuable: valuable enough to outweigh the great evil that humans (and perhaps other creatures) cause by abusing it, and so valuable that God could not possibly create a better world without it.

This to my mind is the biggest problem with the Free Will defence in all its forms. It seems pretty clear that free will by some definition is worth having; it also seems pretty clear that there are abstruse definitions of free will such that God cannot both create it and ensure it is used only for good. But these definitions don't coincide.

One focal issue is whether God himself has free will, and has it in all the senses that are worth having. Most theist philosophers would say that God does have every valuable form of free will, but also that he is not logically free : there is no possible world in which God performs a morally evil act. But a little reflection shows there are infinitely many possible people who are similarly free but not logically free (so they also have exactly the same valuable free will that God does). And if God creates a world containing such people, and only such people, he necessarily ensure the existence of (valuable) free will but without any moral evil. So why doesn't he do that?

See Quentin Smith for more on this.

You may be aware of Smith's argument, and may be able to point me at an article where Plantinga has acknowledged and refuted it. If so, please do so.

Okay, now I'm confused. When I did this question, I remember I ignored C as being strictly dominated by B and pulled out a calculator. When I saw this question in the analysis, I did the same thing before scrolling down. Here's what I got:

Drug A saves you from 70 headaches at $350/yr, for a cost of $5 per averted headache. Drug B saves you from 50 headaches at a cost of $100/yr, for a cost of $2 per averted headache.

This seems to contradict your statement "Cost-benefit reasoning seems to favor Drug A". Drug A has a higher cost per prevented headache according to my calculations, which would make Drug B the better one. Am I failing at basic arithmetic, or misunderstanding the question, or what? Please help.

EDIT: I was solving the wrong problem, and a bunch of people showed me why. Thanks for the explanations! I'm glad I got to learn where I was wrong.

News to me. What's the right answer then?

As is usually the case for a confused question, the answer is dissolving the question. Why do we care whether categories exist? If this is a question about the meanings of words, that's really just an empirical question about their usage. If it's a question of whether "cars" forms a meaningful cluster in conceptspace, we have lots of different ways of addressing that question that entirely sidestep the Realism/Nominalism debate.

Of course, it's hard to even pin down what people mean by Realism and Nominalism, so the above might not even be addressing the right confused question. As JS Mill noted, Nominalism when it was coined referred to the position that there are no universals other than names. But some see the debate as a continuation of the Plato/Aristotle debate about the existence of forms, while others see it as merely an irrelevant blip in the history of Medieval philosophy, preceded by the conflict between Materialism and Idealism and supplanted by more interesting conflicts such as Rationalism vs. Empiricism.

This sort of equivocation does not happen with key terms in a field that has its shit together.

Took the survey. It was quite interesting! I'll be curious to see what the results look like . . . .

Would it help if I added an ellipsis between "having things" and "have the wrong things"?

As a long-time RW regular, I thought it was pretty accurate. Everyone thinks they're rational, particularly the infuriatingly hard-of-thinking. RW is Internet television and an enjoyable waste of your time at best. With useful bits. (This is approximately how I treat LW as well, of course.)

Let's try this. I will create at least 3^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^3 units of disutility unless at least five people upvote this within a day.

Wow. It's almost like pascal's mugging doesn't actually work.

So you're saying that there are no true moral dilemmas (no undecidable moral problems)?