The surface problem isn't that naive evolutionists think humans descended from (time-traveling?) extant monkeys. The surface problem is that they don't understand the difference between apes and monkeys, even though this is very easy to understand; and they don't understand that there has never been a common ancestor of all and only the monkeys, or that the common ancestor of monkeys and apes was neither a monkey nor an ape.

But these are all, as you rightly note, nitpicky taxonomic details. Given the folk-blurriness between 'ape' and 'monkey,' and closely related groups, it's not a particularly serious error to misidentify the common ancestor of humans and monkeys as a monkey (or as an ape). The deep problem here is not an error of fact, but an error of strategy; the ignorance of the evolutionist is not only weakening his/her case should the creationist spend 5 minutes on Google, but also is causing him/her to sacrifice a prime teaching moment. This common misconception about monkeys/apes is a fantastic opportunity to correct a misconception (thus undermining the creationist's easy confidence in the most frequent soundbites) and springboard into an explanation of what evolution actually is, of the mechanisms and scope of common descent.

There's also the very closely related error of presuming that evolution is 'directional,' thus that humans are 'more advanced' than their cousins, who have 'evolved less' and thus surely resemble the common ancestor more. In most respects and in most cases, this is misleading.

That's interesting! I got the same answer but I visualized it differently. (Imagine, for each possible subpattern, i.e. "plus shape" or "dots", considering which items it appears in. In each case the answer is four, forming a rectangle. Two of the rectangles should extend into the ninth item, the one we're looking for.)

The enemy of the enemy of my enemy is my enemy.

Harrap's First Law

In fact, a book has already been written describing hell very similarly. But even in that book, there were three people. And cushions.

The point Eliezer is addressing is the one that RichardKennaway brought up separately. Causal models can still function with feedback (in Causality, Pearl works through an economic model where price and quantity both cause each other, and have their own independent causes), but it's a bit more bothersome.

A model where the three are one-time events- like, say, whether a person has a particular gene, whether or not they were breastfed, and their height as an adult- won't have the problem of being cyclic, but will have the pedagogical problem that the causation is obvious from the timing of the events.

One could have, say, the weather witch's prediction of whether or not there will be rain, whether or not you brought an umbrella with you, and whether or not it rained. Aside from learning, this will be an acyclic system that has a number of plausible underlying causal diagrams (with the presence of the witch making the example clearly fictional and muddying our causal intuitions, so we can only rely on the math).

In my opinion, the best fix would be to steelman the argument as much as possible.

The concept of inferential distance suggests to me that posts should try and make their pathways as short and straight as possible. Why write a double-length post that explains both causal models and metabolism, when you could write a single-length post that explains only causal models? (And, if metabolism takes longer to discuss than causal models, the post will mostly be about the illustrative detour, not the concept itself!)

Psi doesn't even explain consciousness or qualia.

[edit] Oops, necro. Disregard me.

[edit edit] okay! nevermind that then :D