pw0ncakes writes:

The lower you go on the academic totem pole, the less tolerance there is. Extensions are hard to get at state schools-- even the really good ones-- and practically nonexistent at community colleges. It may be unfair, but it makes sense. Teacher:student ratios are lower at elite colleges, and late work is rarer, so it's not really a burden. Also, professors at elite colleges are generally happier and have cushier lives, whereas teachers at CCs are usually underpaid and overworked already, so late work is an intolerable addition. Finally, many of the students in middling schools shouldn't be in college at all, while the assumption at an elite college is that the person who's late is a good student with a good reason. That assumption's not always true, of course, but elite colleges would rather make one type of error.

I really like this, because it draws some testable predictions and then tests them. The more annoying it would be for the professor to grade late work, and the more it would mess up the student's life, the less likely the professor is to accept excuses. That means professors really are making that sort of "my utility versus the student's utility" decision when deciding whether or not to accept excuses.

(although the commenter who responded that Ivy League professors do it because they don't want rich parents complaining has a point too)

I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between the morality of different cultures], because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did-if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

-C.S. Lewis

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?

Elizabeth Anscombe: I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Well what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

--Aldous Huxley

Looking for new information in proverbs, this one in particular, seems wrongheaded to me. Both interpretations are equally plausible (and I wonder what it would mean for an interpretation to be "correct" in this case, except in context), and its metaphor is so removed from its literal content that it can do absolutely nothing to inform the issue: anyone who is convinced by this proverb is doing it wrong. Its meaning depends heavily on what you bring into it (though it does express a relationship, as Annoyance says, which isn't a blank screen). Given that, I don't see a problem with assigning whichever meaning you prefer in order to use it for yourself (and for others, if its meaning is clear from context) as a shorthand for your stance on long-term attachments.

Does "axiological" = "axiomatic"?

1. Rationalists should win.

2. is a definition, not a claim.

Dammit, no. I've wasted lots of time arguing against this on OB. You can't define "rational" as "winning". "Rational" is an adjective applied to a manner of thinking. Otherwise, you would use the word "winning". If you say that it's a definition, what you're really doing is saying that we can't criticize people who say "rationalists always win". But when someone says that rationalists always win, they are making claims about the world. You can derive from that statement expectations about their beliefs about the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Newcomb Paradox. If it were definitional, you couldn't make any predictions about their beliefs from their statement.

That the psychoanalytic theory of psychodynamics is in some sense true, and that it is a useful way to approach the mind. My belief comes from personal experience in psychotherapy, albeit a quite unorthodox one. I have found that explanations in Freudian terms such as the unconscious, ego, superego, Eros and Thanatos help to greatly clarify my mental life in a way that is not only extremely useful but also seems quite accurate.

I should clarify that I reject just about everything to come out of academic psychoanalytic theory, especially in literary theory (I'm an English major), and that most clinicians fail to correlate it with real mental phenomena. I know that this sounds--and should sound--extremely suspect to any rationalist. But a particular therapist has convinced me very strongly that she is selling something real, not only from my personal experience in therapy, but in how she successfully treats extremely successful people and how I don't know anyone who wins at life quite so hard as she does.

Life isn't "about" suffering. Happiness and pain are the carrot and the stick which nature uses. I am typically more concerned with what organisms do than I am with how they feel.

I embrace nature's purposes because it built me to do that. I seem to be relatively resistant to religions - and other memetic infections that would hijack my goal system - presumably in part because my ancestors also exhibited such resistance.

Just to check, that's what you want me to tell all your friends, not you personally?