"Have you stopped beating your wife?" has well-defined true-or-false answers. It's just that people are generally too stupid to understand what the no-answer actually indicates.

It's usually given as "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" (Emph mine). The problem is the presupposition that you have been beating your wife. Either answer accepts (or appears to accept) that presupposition.

It's a different sort of bad question than the underconstrained questions. The Liar Paradox OTOH is a case of underconstrained question because it contains non-well-founded recursion.

Wrt defining art, I offer my definition:

"An artifact whose purpose is to be perceived and thereby produce in its perceiver a positive experience of no direct practical value to the perceiver."

"Artifact" here is meant in the sense of being appropriate for Daniel Dennett's design stance. It is not neccessarily tangible or durable.

This is what's called a Genus-differentia definition, or type-and-distinction definition. "Artifact" is the type, the rest is the distinction.

This lets me build on existing understandings about artifacts. They have a purpose, but they remain artifacts even when they are not accomplishing that purpose. They are constructed by human beings, but this is a pragmatic fact about human ability and not a part of their definition.

I avoided terms that make no definitional progress such as "beauty" and "aesthetic". Using them would just be passing the buck.

This definition seems to include birdsong. Make of that what you will. One could reasonably say that birdsong is a fitness signal of direct practical value to the intended perceiver, though.

Under this definition, throw-the-paint art is not so much excluded as it is a marginal, failed, or not serious example, much the way that a hammer (which is another type of artifact) constructed of two twigs scotch-taped together at right angles is a failure as a hammer

Just because there's a word "art" doesn't mean that it has a meaning, floating out there in the void, which you can discover by finding the right definition.

True, but it strongly suggests that people who use the term believe there is a referent for it. Sometimes there is none (eg "phlogiston" or "unicorn"). Sometimes the referent is so muddled or misunderstood that the term is has little use except to name the mistake (eg "free will", which seems to function as a means of grouping quite distinct concepts of subjective freedom together as if they were the same thing, or "qualia" whose referent is a subjective illusion)

But almost always it's worth asking what they think they mean by it.

@tcpkac, we sometimes call slightly-out-of-focus photos "blurries". Hope that helps with your important secret project. }:)

I never could understand why people made such a fuss about whether the tree made a sound or not.

Because the sense in which this question is being used as an example here is not the real question that bishop Berkeley had in mind.

It's really a question about epistemology. It's related to the "grue" paradox, which is a bit easier to explain. The grue paradox first notes that ordinarily we have good reason to believe that certain things (grass, green paint, copper flames) are green and will continue to be green after (say) 1 January 2009. It then notes that every piece of evidence we have supporting that belief also supports the belief that these things are "grue", which is defined as being green before 2009 and being blue after that date. On the face of it, we should be equally confident that green paint etc will be blue after 2009.

Much has been written, but the important point is that nobody has ever experienced 2009 (except you lurkers who read posts from previous years. Just change 2009 to a date that's still in your future, or have they forgotten how to do that in the future?)

A similar condition applies with Berkeley's paradox. Tautologically, nobody has ever heard a tree fall that nobody heard. (Planting a tape recorder or radio transmitter and listening to that counts as hearing it) So when we guess that the falling tree makes a sound, we are extrapolating. There is no way to test that extrapolation, so how can it be justified?

I recommend David Deutsch's Four threads of reality for some intelligent and not too wordy comments on how, among other interesting topics he covers.

IMO there's less to Newcomb's paradox than meets the eye. It's basically "A future-predicting being who controls the set of choices could make rational choices look silly by making sure they had bad outcomes". OK, yes, he could. Surprised?

What I think makes it seem paradoxical is that the paradox both assures us that Omega controls the outcome perfectly, and cues us that this isn't so ("He's already left" etc). Once you settle what it's really saying either way, the rest follows.

No matter how many of McGee's bets you take, you can always take one more bet and expect an even higher payoff. It's like asking for the largest integer. There isn't one, and there isn't an optimal plan in McGee's dilemma.

Yes, the inability to name a largest number seems to underlie the infinity utility paradoxes. Which is to say, they aren't really paradoxes of utility unless one believes that "name a number and I'll give you that many dollars" is also a paradox of utility. (Or "...and I'll give you that many units of utility")

It's true that the genie can always correct the wisher by pointing out that the wisher could have accepted one more offer, but in the straightforward "X dollars" example the genie can also always correct the wisher along the same lines by naming a larger number of dollars that he could have asked for.

It doesn't prove that the wisher doesn't want to maximize utility, it proves that the wisher cannot name a largest number, which isn't about his preferences.

Perhaps a lot of confusion could have been avoided if the point had been stated thus:

One's decision should be no different even if the odds of the situation arising that requires the decision are different.

Footnote against nitpicking: this ignores the cost of making the decision itself. We may choose to gather less information and not think as hard for decisions about situations that are unlikely to arise. That factor isn't relevant in the example at hand.

@Alan Crowe:

FWIW, having tried that tack a few times, I've always been disappointed. The answer is always along the lines of "I'm not meeting any psychological need, I'm searching sincerely for the truth."

But what I found even more fascinating was the qualitative distinction between "certain" and "uncertain" arguments, where if an argument is not certain, you're allowed to ignore it. Like, if the likelihood is zero, then you have to give up the belief, but if the likelihood is one over googol, you're allowed to keep it.

I think that's exactly what's going on. These people you speak of who do this are mentally dealing with social permission, not with probability algebra. The non-zero probability gives them social permission to describe it as "it might happen", and the detail that the probability is 1 / googolplex stands a good chance of getting ignored, lost, or simply not appreciated. (Similarly, the tiny uncertainty)

And I don't just mean that it works in conversation. The person who makes this mistake has probably internalized it too.

It struck me that way when I read your opening anecdote. Your interlocutor talked like a lawyer who was planning on bringing up that point in closing arguments - "Mr Yudkowsky himself admitted there's a chance apes and humans are not related" - and not bringing up the minuscule magnitude of the chance, of course.

The selection pressure for faith is almost surely memetic, not genetic. You can focus on the genetic adaptations that it hijacked, but in doing so you will miss the big picture.

Secondly, for understanding religion, I strongly recommend Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained.