The research indicates that most people's responses to any social science result is "that's what I would have expected," although that doesn't actually seem to be true; you can get them to say they expected conflicting results. Have there really been no studies of when people say they think studies are surprising, comparing the results to what people actually predicted beforehand (I know Milgram informally surveyed what people expected before his study, but I don't think he did any rigorous analysis of expectations)? Perhaps people are as inaccurate in reporting what they find surprising as they are in reporting what they expected. It would certainly be interesting to know!

Over the course of a month? The reasons you give for thinking these stocks might go up aren't things that would reliably manifest in such a short time frame, and the market generally has been down recently. I don't think what you've described here is evidence of much of anything. Probably you're no good at active investing, because the evidence seems to suggest that nobody is (the winners are just the ones who get lucky), but the reason to think that is because of the general evidence for that, not because of your personal experience over the past month.

A lot of biological research is inherently slow, because you have to wait to observe effects on slow processes in living things. Probably the only way to get rapid research progress on immortality is with vastly superior computer models running on vastly superior computers substituting for as much as possible of the slow observing what really goes on in humans research. Though there would probably still be a lot of slow observing what goes on in humans going on in the course of testing the computer models for accuracy. Anyway, making more powerful computers, and making better computer models of biochemistry, are already areas that get huge amounts of research spending. It seems likely that still more spending would encounter diminishing returns, such that no amount of concerted effort would further speed things up very dramatically (certainly not to the level you're asking for). Though you might get the impression around here that everyone who isn't a rationalist is a death lover, in fact most people want to live longer, including very rich people, and so a lot of money gets spent on pursuing that goal; lack of progress has a lot more to do with it being hard than with lack of effort.

I was under the impression that the research into biases by people like Kahneman and Tversky generally found that eliminating them was incredibly hard, and that expertise, and even familiarity with the biases in question generally didn't help at all. So this is not a particularly surprising result; what would be more interesting is if they had found anything that actually does reduce the effect of the biases.

As a person with a scientific background who suddenly has come into academic philosophy, I have been puzzled by some of the aspects of its methodology. I have been particularly bothered with the reluctance of some people to give precise definitions of the concepts that they are discussing about. But lately, as a result of several discussions with certain member of the Faculty, I have come to understand why this occurs (if not in the whole of philosophy, at least in this particular trend in academic philosophy).

I have seen that philosophers (I am talking about several of them published in top-ranked, peer-reviewed journals, the kinds of articles I read, study and discuss) who discuss about a concept which tries to capture "x" have, on one hand, an intuitive idea of this concept, imprecise, vague, partial and maybe even self-contradictory. On the other hand, they have several "approaches" to "x", corresponding to several philosophical trends that have a more precise characterisation of "x" in terms of other ideas that are more clear i.e. in terms of the composites "y1", "y2", "y3", ... The major issue at stake in the discussion seems to be whether "x" is really "y1" or "y2" or "y3" or something else (note that sometimes an "yi" is a reduction to other terms, sometimes "yi" is a more accurate characterisation that keeps the words used to speak of "x", that does not matter).

What is puzzling is this: how come all of them agree they are taking about "x" while actually, each is proposing a different approach? Indeed, those who say that "x" is "y1" are actually saying that we should adopt "y1" in our thought, and by "x" they understand "y1". Others understand "y2" in "x". Why don't they realise they are talking past each other, that each of them is proposing a different concept and the problem comes just because they want all to call it like they call "x"? Why don't they make sub-indices for "x", therefore managing to keep the word they so desperately want, but without confusing each of its possible meanings?

The answer I have come up with is this: they all believe that there is a unique, best sense to which they refer when they speak about "x", even if it they don't know which is it. They agree that they have an intuitive grasp of something and that something is "x", but they disagree about how to better refine that ("y1"? "y2"? "y3"?). Instead, I used to focus only on "y1" "y2" and "y3" and assess them according to whether they are self-consistent or not, simple or not, useful or not, etc. "x" had no clear definition, it barely meant anything to me, and therefore I decided I should banish it from my thought.

But I have come to the conclusion that it is useful to keep this loose idea about "x" in mind and believe that there is something to that intuition, because only in the contemplation of this intuition you seem to have access to knowledge that you have not been able to formalise, and hence, the intuition is a source of new knowledge. Therefore, philosophers are quite right in keeping vague, loose and perhaps self-contradictory concepts about "x", because this is an important source from where they draw in order to create and refine approaches "y1" "y2" and "y3", hoping that one of them might get "x" right. ((At this point, one might claim that I am simply saying that it is useful to have the illusion that the concept of "x" really means something, even though it actually means nothing, simply because having the illusion is a source of inspiration. But doesn't precisely the fact that it is a source of inspiration suggest that it is more than a simple illusion? There seems to be a sense in which a bad approach to "x" is still ABOUT "x"))

I would be grateful if I got your thoughts on this.

P.S. A more daring hypothesis is that when philosophers get "x" right in "y", this approach "y" becomes a scientific paradigm. This also suggests that for those "x" where little progress has been made in millennia, the debate is not necessarily misguided, but what happens is that the intuition is pointing towards something very, very complicated, and no one has been able to give a formal accout of the things it refers to.

• Kill la Kill: confusing, but I think I liked it.

From what I have read, the 40 hour work week was not invented by the workers, but by the companies themselves, who realized that working people too hard drives down their output and that 40 hours per week is the sweet spot, according to productivity studies.

So why is industrial production being relocated to countries without 40 hour work week laws?

Ummmmm. That seems rather drastic, and would go over like something that doesn't go over.

I think you could call Socrates behavior suicide by cop by modern standards. The law at the time had a provision that the jury has a binary choice. Either they could go for the punishment called for or they could go with what the accused offered as alternative.

Socrates offered as an alternative to punishment that he's to be payed money for his valuable work of teaching. This means that everybody who didn't want Socrates to be paid by the public purse had to vote for his death.

If Socrates might have instead offered to go to exile, the court might very well have exiled him. Even if he would have just asked for a small punishment and promised to behave differently in the future the court might not have punished him with death.