I've mentioned before that my attempt to salvage a belief in God ultimately resulted in something like H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, which might not be too surprising as it was that ardent materialist's parody of the God of the Old Testament.

Some Dude, since when is war profitable? It can be extremely expensive, and you can't really have both sides win, yet it is often the case that both sides are eager for it.

floccina, perhaps the real purpose of schools is sorting. Perhaps the idea that children must be formed into educated people by schools is just part of Pinker's "nurture assumption". Schools have an incentive to promote that assumption, as it gives them more reason to exist. However, if they don't actually know how to educate children (and as you note, it is hard to test whether they actually teach), why would we expect them to?

This is a good post.

I don't take nearly as cynical (or is it bitter & angry for seemingly no reason?) a view as Mencius Moldbug does, but you might be interested in his post on grad school.

I am kicking myself for not doing this earlier, but Hopefully Anonymous, I think you would be interested in the writings of Mencius Moldbug, beginning with his Formalist Manifesto and hopefully including Political Sanity in One Easy Step, The Magic of Symmetric Sovereignty and The Fnargland Grand Challenge.

Although in many respects I feel I am of like mind with Hopefully Anonymous, I am not as fully committed to maximizing life (my own or anybody's) as he is. For right now I would rather not die but continue living. However, I do not rule out that I might at some point or in some circumstances prefer death (the current lifespan found in first world countries is unusual and many cultures have glorified death, so I don't think it can be said that such commitment to survival is universal). This does not mean I have any misgivings about Eliezer's work toward life-extension though.

I personally would rather live in a society oriented around goals such as the ones Hopefully Anonymous describes than one based on principles. That being said, I don't think goals can be objectively determined and I would not necessarily have complete trust in the institutions whose responsibility it is to seek those goals. Following a previous Stirnerite egoist, Benjamin Tucker, I would prefer if people could voluntarily form contractually arranged societies seeking whichever goals they see fit (or being based on principles, as many seem to prefer those and I do not begrudge them their preference). I doubt this one would result in one model of society and would instead be what Keith Preston has referred to as "panarchy".

The situation Hopefully Anonymous describes in which everyone is better off is usually referred to as "Pareto optimal". One of the troubles with Pareto optimality (besides being nearly impossible to attain, as the randomly selected individual whose health is adversely affected could be worse off than he might have been otherwise) is that "better" is inherently subjective, which is why I favor voluntarily agreed to contracts. Because I do not consider any normative statements/beliefs to have any objective truth value, I can't very well go around calling people "irrational" for them, but I certainly can have a very low opinion of them, just as I do for those who like music I despise. I do think that people often do a poor job of thinking about positive facts and in that sense can be called "irrational", and if they were Bayesian rational I suspect many normative beliefs would also be different (in the direction of consequentialism). I suspect though that is partly because I am imagining the type of person I would expect to be Bayesian rational contrasted with my stereotype of especially irrational people and confusing correlation with causation to some extent. Counterfactuals of this type can often be misleading and bring to mind the saying that "If my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle".

If my word was law a lot of things would be different about society, but forced medical experiments rank rather low on the list. I do not take the libertarian non-aggression principle as an "axiom" that is never to be violated, but I think very highly of it with regard to reducing conflict. No matter how much one might think that the people simply ought to act like the New Socialist/[insert here] Man, in reality they often don't and whining about how unenlightened they are won't change the stubborn reality.

Finally, I do not know if I want my own society to be creating public goods when we might be able to free-ride off the discoveries of others.

This post starts off talking about school shooters, but I think it could be applied to terrorists as well, although they have a movement and ideology behind them.

Nick, are Hindus and other polytheists/animists/what-have-you atheists?

Nick Tarleton may change in many ways, but his DNA will not. As our genes are selfish, they cause us to single out the carrier of those genes (ourselves) as special and distinct from others and generally favor ourselves over others. This does remind me a bit of Lachmann vs Nozick on how far reductionism should go.

Matthew C, why does "Awareness" get a capital "A" and what do you mean by its "fundamental unity"?

A great post, and one of the reasons I promote emotivism. I attribute a recent dissagreement (in which I admit I acted like a dick) to just this. The funny thing is that usually two people argue with each other, convinced the other is evil. In this case I am arguing with someone over just how scary some other people that we both don't care for are.

Sam Harris is not an atheist.