I bought a copy of Common Errors in History, which someone mentioned recently on LW.  There were no copies on Amazon or other bookselling sites, but I found a copy on Ebay.  No wonder it was hard to get - it's a 24-page pamphlet that was printed once, in 1945, by "The Historical Association," London.

I tried to find some common failures of rationality underlying the "common errors" listed.  This is what I concluded:

English students in the mid-20th century learned a lot of history.

This booklet is full of statements such as, "The facts relating to the Corn Laws [of 1815-1849] are more often than not mis-stated in school examination papers," and, "The blockade of Brest and Toulon [during the Napoleonic wars] is usually misunderstood."  My history lessons consisted primarily of repeatedly learning about the American Revolution and making turkeys or pilgrim hats out of colored cardboard.

The English sincerely apologize for their history.

In other countries, textbook authors try to make their own countries look good.  In England, that would seem gauche.  The entries on "Religion in the New England Colonies", "The Causes of the American War of Independence", "The First Chinese War, 1839-42",  "Gladstone and the Turks", and "The Manchurian Crisis, 1931-32" complain that British textbook accounts place all of the blame on Britain.

History is simplified in order to assign blame and credit.

In numerous of the 20 entries, notably "The Dissolution of the Monasteries and Education", "Religion in the New England Colonies", "The Enclosure Movement", "The Causes of the American War of Independence", "The Great Trek", "The First Chinese War", "The Elementary Education Act", and "The Manchurian Crisis", the tract alleges that standard accounts are simplified; and they appear to be simplified in ways that allow a simple causal summary, preferably with one person, side, or act of legislation to receive credit or blame.

Not always.  "The Great Trek" says that the Boers' depart is usually explained as due to their [blameworthy] indignation that the British had freed their slaves; whereas in fact they had a variety of different, equally blameworthy, reasons for leaving.  And the entry on "Bismarck's Alliances" says that the textbook account is overly-complex in that it introduces a second treaty that did not exist.

This is the only general principle I could extract from the book, so it may just be a statistical accident.

If anyone would like a copy of the book, send me an email at gmail.

Rebuttal to: The Amanda Knox Test

If you don't care about Amanda Knox's guilt, or whether you have received unreliable information on the subject from komponisto's post, stop reading now.

[Edit: Let me note that, generally, I agree that discussion of current events should be discouraged in this site. It is only because "The Amanda Knox Test" was a featured post on this site that I claim this rebuttal of that post to be on-topic for this site.]

I shall here make the following claim:

C1. komponisto's post on Amanda Knox was misleading.

I could, additionally, choose to make the following claims:

C2. Amanda Knox is guilty of murder.
C3. The prosecution succeeded in proving Amanda's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt
C4. Amanda Knox received a fair trial

I believe claims C2 through C4 are also true; however, time constraints prevent me from laying out the cases and debating them with every single human being on the Internet, so I shall merely focus on C1. (That said, I would be willing to debate komponisto on C2, since I am curious whether I could get him to change his mind on the subject.)

Here's a little Sunday irreverence.  Someone else has probably written this story before, and I'm sure the points have been made many times, but it popped into my head when I woke up and I thought it might be fun to write it out.

Last week I was walkin' along mindin' my own business when I met a Christian Minister, who asked me if I'd accepted Jesus as my Lord and Personal Saviour.  "Why I sure think so", I responded, "But...what was that name again?".  "Why, Jesus!" he answered, and began to launch into an account of this man's fascinatin' historical doin's, when I interrupted him.

"Funny you should mention it", I replied.  "I do accept as my Lord and Personal Saviour a man who was born of the blessed Virgin Mary in Bethlehem long ago, and was the Son of God, but we call him Schmesus."

The poor man choked and started turnin' a little red, and warned me in menacing tones that lest I accepted his JESUS, I would burn forever in the fire and brimstone of Hell.  "For sure!", said I, "We Schmistians know ALL about Hell.  After all, we use your same holy text, only we call it the Schmible.  It's got all the same books of Genesis an' Paul an' all that, with all the same verses.  There's just one key difference which makes us Schmistians prefer our religion to yours."

"What's that?", he spluttered.

I can conceive of the following 3 main types of meaning we can pursue in life.

1. Exploring existing complexity: the natural complexity of the universe, or complexities that others created for us to explore.

2. Creating new complexity for others and ourselves to explore.

3. Hedonic pleasure: more or less direct stimulation of our pleasure centers, with wire-heading as the ultimate form.

What I'm observing in the various FAI debates is a tendency of people to shy away from wire-heading as something the FAI should do. This reluctance is generally not substantiated or clarified with anything other than "clearly, this isn't what we want". This is not, however, clear to me at all.

The utility we get from exploration and creation is an enjoyable mental process that comes with these activities. Once an FAI can rewire our brains at will, we do not need to perform actual exploration or creation to experience this enjoyment. Instead, the enjoyment we get from exploration and creation becomes just another form of pleasure that can be stimulated directly.

If you are a utilitarian, and you believe in shut-up-and-multiply, then the correct thing for the FAI to do is to use up all available resources so as to maximize the number of beings, and then induce a state of permanent and ultimate enjoyment in every one of them. This enjoyment could be of any type - it could be explorative or creative or hedonic enjoyment as we know it. The most energy efficient way to create any kind of enjoyment, however, is to stimulate the brain-equivalent directly. Therefore, the greatest utility will be achieved by wire-heading. Everything else falls short of that.

What I don't quite understand is why everyone thinks that this would be such a horrible outcome. As far as I can tell, these seem to be cached emotions that are suitable for our world, but not for the world of FAI. In our world, we truly do need to constantly explore and create, or else we will suffer the consequences of not mastering our environment. In a world where FAI exists, there is no longer a point, nor even a possibility, of mastering our environment. The FAI masters our environment for us, and there is no longer a reason to avoid hedonic pleasure. It is no longer a trap.

Since the FAI can sustain us in safety until the universe goes poof, there is no reason for everyone not to experience ultimate enjoyment in the meanwhile. In fact, I can hardly tell this apart from the concept of a Christian Heaven, which appears to be a place where Christians very much want to get.

If you don't want to be "reduced" to an eternal state of bliss, that's tough luck. The alternative would be for the FAI to create an environment for you to play in, consuming precious resources that could sustain more creatures in a permanently blissful state. But don't worry; you won't need to feel bad for long. The FAI can simply modify your preferences so you want an eternally blissful state.

Welcome to Heaven.

I went to the Royal Institute last week to hear the laconic and dismissive Dr Guy Kahane on whether we are 'Biologically Moral' 

[His message: Neurological evidence suggests - somewhat alarmingly - that our moral and ethical decisions may be no more than post-hoc rationalisations of purely emotional, instinctive reactions.  However, we should not panic because this is early days in neuroscience, and the correct interpretation of brain-scans is uncertain: scientist find the pattern, and the explanation, they expect to find]