= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Well, the same goes for "everybody draw Mohamed day", no? It's hostility, not negligence.
Everybody would feel enraged by snide remarks regarding attempted genocide of one's ethnic group -- not least because it's very difficult not to perceive it as a veiled threat.
Not everybody would feel enraged by snide remarks of one's cultural/religious/philosophical inspiration -- not least because it's an obvious strategy for a utility monster.
Beautifully put. So according to your objection, if I want to increase net utility, I have two considerations to make:
- reducing the offense I cause directly increases net utility (Yvain)
- reducing the offense I cause creates a world with stronger incentives for offense-taking, which is likely to substantially decrease net utility in the long-term (Vladmir_M)
This seems like a very hard calculation. My intuition is that item 2 is more important since it's a higher level of action, and I'm that kind of guy. But how do I rationally make this computation without my own biases coming in? My own opinions on "draw Mohammed day" have always been quite fuzzy and flip-floppy, for example.
But how do I rationally make this computation without my own biases coming in?
One way is to try and compare similar countries where such offensiveness bans are enforced or not, and see which direction net migration is.
This may be difficult since countries without such bans will in all likely become more prosperous than those with them.
Another alternative might be comparing the same country before and after such laws, e.g. Pakistan.
My workplace does things in a similar way, scanning in documents by hand without 'interpreting' them in any way. (The result is helpful; you can go on your computer and look at a patient's chart without having to physically go to their hospital campus; but it's also unhelpful in that you can't run a keyword search on anything in the charts, because they're saved as images as opposed to more search-friendly formats.) It looks messy and inefficient to ME that they're keeping both paper and digital records, but I'm sure the immediate cost of making a full transition would be enormous.
Still, I can't imagine that offices in fifty years will still be using this half-and-half method. As technology advances, maybe the transition will get easier; parts of the transition process itself could be automated, with software automatically converting scanned images into searchable text files. Either way, I think the transition has to be made eventually. (But that's a personal opinion.)
Mine too -- a bank.
We've launched a company-wide project to estimate the cost-benefit relationship of scanning all new documents vs. scanning all new + existing documents vs. continuing like now. Perhaps not surprisingly, scanning new documents but not old is the most cost-efficient. This obviously depends on how often one needs to retrieve the documents.
At my company, servers but not scanners exist, and many people already have two monitors.
In response to
Procedural Knowledge Gaps
I am terrible at remembering names. This is bad in itself, but exacerbated by a few factors:
I regularly have lengthy conversations with random strangers, and will be able to easily summarize the conversation afterwords, but will have no recollection of their name.
I am fairly noticeable and memorable, so even people whose names I have no reason to know will know mine.
I am not particularly good with faces either.
This isn't a memory problem, I can quote back conversations or remember long strings of numbers. I often cope by confessing to my weakness in a self-deprecating manner, or by simply not using names in direct address (it's generally not necessary in English), but these don't actually help me learn names. If I remembered to ask their name early on, I sometimes pause mid-conversation to ask "Are you still x?" but that is somewhat awkward and I'm wrong half the time anyway. The only time I can reliably remember is if they share the name of an immediate family member.This is bad enough that I'll sometimes be five or six classes into the semester and have to check the syllabus to figure out the professor's name, or will have been in multiple classes with someone and shared several conversations and still not know their name.
I second this request. I am good with names of politicians or actors, but terrible with people, I meet IRL.
I would say that the key is to experiment with various techniques, razors, foams & soaps until you find one that works. I had to go through several razors and several soap/foam products until I found a combo that didn't give me burns.
I always shave in the bath, making sure my face has been wet for a few minutes. I lather up with ordinary, cheap-as-dirt soap. The razor I have found works for me is the 5-blade MACH TURBO SUPERSONIC STEALTH type you see advertised all the time these days. Very hard to cut yourself with them unless you move it sideways and with pressure.
One crucial recommendation is to shave upwards from the bottom of your neck to the top. This takes a lot of getting used to and really gave me the willies at first, but it works much better and you miss a lot less hair.
One crucial recommendation is to shave upwards from the bottom of your neck to the top. This takes a lot of getting used to and really gave me the willies at first, but it works much better and you miss a lot less hair.
Really? I have the exact opposite experience. I find that going against the grain, especially on the neck, gives me nicks and rashes.
After having experimented a lot, what works for me is wetshaving using any ol' shaving cream, multi-blade razor, going with the grain.
Since facial hair grows in different directions this means you have to pay attention to it. Briefly, I shave top-down on the face and away from the chin on the neck.
For a very smooth shave, I sometimes do it with the grain, a second time against the grain and a third time with it. I read somewhere that the third time is important to avoid ingrown hair and rashes and in my case it works, but YMMV.
I think Justice really, really should let emself be told when F stands for freedom. It seems to me Assange is more or less saying that he will follow logic steps only as far as they lead to a conclusion he likes. Am I the only one reading him this way?
It took me a while to figure this out, but Assange isn't talking about improving his own model of reality; by my reading he's more or less given up on that. He's talking about ways of convincing people that he's right, and accepts logic only in the service of that goal.
Specifically, he's saying that reductionist arguments are unconvincing when trying to change minds, and that it works better to raise such a pedestal under the ultimate aim of your argument that your audience will do the hard work of building an inductive chain for you.
From this I suspect that Assange hasn't recently spent much time trying to prove things to people that don't already think he's a rockstar. He describes a rather effective way of exploiting halo effects, but that only works when there's a halo to exploit: either Assange's personal halo (probably more likely), or one around a shared ideology or goal. Try that trick with someone that accepts neither, and they're more likely to laugh you off as a deluded hippie than to blithely construct an argument for you.
The entire post leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
That makes more sense than my reading, and is more likely what he meant.
In response to
"Irrationality in Argument"
[...] you could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom.
I think Justice really, really should let emself be told when F stands for freedom. It seems to me Assange is more or less saying that he will follow logic steps only as far as they lead to a conclusion he likes. Am I the only one reading him this way?
Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber.
This sounds like searching for arguments to a foregone conclusion.
Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors.
This reminds me of a guy, having lost an argument to me fatally, who resorted to saying, "consistency is overrated". He'd rather have two mutually exclusive ideas and acknowledge this as fact than change his mind.
I'll reply in more detail later but for now I'l just say
With Michael Vassar in charge, SIAI has become more transparent, and will keep on doing things meant to make it more transparent
This sounds great
I have every confidence that whatever it is we do, it will never be enough for someone who is, at that particular time, motivated to argue against SIAI.
I'm not one of those people, I would be happy to donate to SIAI and encourage others to do so if I perceive a significant change from the status quo and there's no new superior alternative that emerges. I think that if SIAI were well constituted, donating to it would be much more cost effective than VillageReach.
I would be thrilled to see the changes that I would like to see take place. More on precisely what I'm looking for to follow.
I think that if SIAI were well constituted, donating to it would be much more cost effective than VillageReach.
For most realistic interest rates this statement would have made it more rational to put your previous traditional aid donation into a banking account for a year to see if your bet had come out -- and then donating to SIAI.
I would argue that charity is just plain good, and you don't need to take something simple and kind and turn it into an inconclusive exercise in societal interpretation.
Are you familiar with the Hansonian view of signaling?
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"Exposure therapy". Could you explain how that works, doctor? How your cure makes the patient better?
Isn't it great that we have so many people here so sincerely concerned with making the world a better place rather than with rationalizing their own prejudices.
ETA: I Googled for "exposure therapy", and the 2nd item on the list informed me that:
For some reason, the karma that knb's comment received really annoys me. When did we come to define rationalism as "thinking about something just deeply enough to achieve self-affirmation, and then pushing the upvote or downvote button"?
Your intent seems unclear to me. The West has over the past couple hundred years loosened its restrictions on public speech regarding taboos -- on atheism, racial&sexual equality, etc. This has surely caused many people mental pain.
Was this course of events then morally wrong?
Should the debaters of yore have made sure their opponents had learned " the accompanying coping techniques — such as relaxation or imagery exercises" before proceeding towards our more pluralist world?