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Good Quality Heuristics
We use heuristics when we don't have the time to think more, which is almost all the time. So why don't we compile a big list of good quality heuristics that we can trust? (Insert eloquent analogy with mathematical theorems and proofs.) Here are some heuristics to kick things off:
Make important decisions in a quiet, featureless room. [1]
Apply deodorant before going to bed rather than any other time. [1]
Avoid counterfactuals and thought experiments in when talking to other people. [Because they don't happen in real life. Not in mine at least (anecdotal evidence). For example with the trolley, I would not push the fat man because I'd be frozen in horror. But what if you wouldn't be? But I would! And all too often the teller of a counterfactual abuses it by crafting it so that the other person has to give either an inconsistent or unsavory answer. (This proof is a stub. You can improve it by commenting.)]
If presented with a Monty Hall problem, switch. [1]
Sign up for cryonics. [There are so many. Which ones to link? Wait, didn't Eliezer promise us some cryonics articles here in LW?]
In chit-chat, ask questions and avoid assertions. [How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie]
When in doubt, think what your past and future selves would say. [1, also there was an LW article with the prince with multiple personality disorder chaining himself to his throne that I can't find. Also, I'm not sure if I should include this because it's almost Think More.]
I urge you to comment my heuristics and add your own. One heuristic per comment. Hopefully this takes off and turns into a series if wiki pages. Edit: We should concentrate on heuristics that save time, effort, and thought.
Rationalistic Losing
Playing to learn
I like losing. I don't even think that losing is necessarily evil. Personally, I believe this has less to do with a desire to lose and more to do with curiosity about the game-space.
Technically, my goals are probably shifted into some form of meta-winning — I like to understand winning or non-winning moves, strategies, and tactics. Actually winning is icing on the cake. The cake is learning as much as I can about whatever subject in which I am competing. I can do that if I win; I can do that if I lose.
I still prefer winning and I want to win and I play to win, but I also like losing. When I dive into a competition I will like the outcome. No matter what happens I will be happy because I will either (a) win or (b) lose and satiate my curiosity. Of course, learning is also possible while watching someone else lose and this generally makes winning more valuable than losing (I can watch them lose). It also provides a solid reason to watch and study other people play (or play myself and watch me "lose").
The catch is that the valuable knowledge contained within winning has diminishing returns. When I fight I either (a) win or (b) lose and, as a completely separate event, (c) may have an interesting match to study. Ideally I get (a) and (c) but the odds of (c) get lower the more I dominate because my opponents could lose in a known fashion (by me winning in an "old" method). (c) should always be found next to (b). If there is a reason I lost I should learn the reason. If I knew the reason I should not have lost. Because of this, (c) offsets the negative of (b) and losing is valuable. This makes winning and losing worth the effort. When I lose, I win.
Personally, I find (c) so valuable that I start getting bored when I no longer see anything to learn. If I keep winning over and over and never learn anything from the contest I have to find someone stronger to play or start losing creatively so that I can start learning again. Both of these solutions set up scenarios where I am increasing my chances to lose. Mathematically, this starts to make sense if the value of knowledge gained and the penalty of losing combine into something greater than winning without learning anything. (c - b > a) My hunches tell me that I value winning too little and curiosity is starting to curb my desire to win. I am not playing to win; I am playing to learn.
The Sacred Mundane
Followup to: Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute?
So I was reading (around the first half of) Adam Frank's The Constant Fire, in preparation for my Bloggingheads dialogue with him. Adam Frank's book is about the experience of the sacred. I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about. It's what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; or what I feel—to a lesser extent, because in this world it is too common—when I look up at the stars at night, and think about what they mean. Or the birth of a child, say. That which is significant in the Unfolding Story.
Adam Frank holds that this experience is something that science holds deeply in common with religion. As opposed to e.g. being a basic human quality which religion corrupts.
The Constant Fire quotes William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience as saying:
Religion... shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.
And this theme is developed further: Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.
Which completely nonplussed me. Am I supposed to not have any feeling of sacredness if I'm one of many people watching the video of SpaceShipOne winning the X-Prize? Why not? Am I supposed to think that my experience of sacredness has to be somehow different from that of all the other people watching? Why, when we all have the same brain design? Indeed, why would I need to believe I was unique? (But "unique" is another word Adam Frank uses; so-and-so's "unique experience of the sacred".) Is the feeling private in the same sense that we have difficulty communicating any experience? Then why emphasize this of sacredness, rather than sneezing?
The light came on when I realized that I was looking at a trick of Dark Side Epistemology—if you make something private, that shields it from criticism. You can say, "You can't criticize me, because this is my private, inner experience that you can never access to question it."
But the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you are cast into solitude—the solitude that William James admired as the core of religious experience, as if loneliness were a good thing.
Such relics of Dark Side Epistemology are key to understanding the many ways that religion twists the experience of sacredness:
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