Where did that assumption come from?
This assumption comes from expecting an expert to know the basics of their field.
If you ask physics professors questions that go counter to human intuition I wouldn't be to sure that they get them right either.
A trained physicist's intuition is rather different from "human intuition" on physics problems, so that's unlikely.
Is every philosopher supposed to be a moral philosopher?
Edit: Just noticed study contains this (which I missed in the OP):
Nor were order effects any smaller for the minority of philosopher participants reporting expertise on the very issues under investigation.
...which is pretty disconcerting. However asking people to determine for themselves whether they're experts in a particular problem area doesn't strike me as particularly hygienic.
If you throw out justified you then consider what we intuitively consider delusional beliefs who happen to be accidentally true to be knowledge. Which conflicts with intuition. You can always bite the bullet on any conflict but that's boring.
It depends on what you call "delusional". Just to be clear: I'm not arguing that justification is impossible, but that "at bottom" all our beliefs rest on uncertain axioms that are provisionally treated as certain, but which aren't justified. Aesthetic considerations such as boring vs. interesting, elegant vs. obtuse, natural vs. tortured then loom much larger in the actual part they play in determining beliefs than supposed certainty about axioms.
Additionally there's a problem with whether it's actually possible to truly believe something without justification. If your beliefs don't make contact with your experiences then what exactly is it you're believing in?
I have, a number of times. My parents tried, but at most were able to overrule them.
And it was always for the worse?
I'd feel dirty letting anyone, even a god, overwrite my terminal goals.
Has no human being ever overwritten your terminal goals?
The human way is not leaving things to be managed by the gods.
Indeed. But if you're going to appeal to an omniscient being, let them in their omniscience decide what's good for you.
How do you define/determine this?
The standard definition of strength, which the post cleverly avoided ever stating, is "the ability to produce force against external resistance" or some variant thereof. Force is a well-defined physics term, and can be measured pretty directly in a variety of ways.
Isn't there an "obvious" causal relationship between brain mass and intelligence?
No. Whales aren't smarter than humans.
If by "obvious" you mean "the sort of thing you might guess from first principles", then both are obvious. But the muscle-strength relationship is obvious in another sense: in actual data, it will leap out at you as a very large factor. For example, 97% of variance in strength between sexes is accounted for by muscle mass, and one of the strongest predictors of performance in powerlifters is muscle mass per unit height.
The standard definition of strength, which the post cleverly avoided ever stating, is "the ability to produce force against external resistance" or some variant thereof.
Does this definition resolve the problem posed by the OP, that competence in one of various different specific activities requiring strength doesn't imply competence in the others? That is, after all, the basis on which IQ tests are attacked - competence on Raven's progressive matrices doesn't imply competence at the Piano. If we would answer their objection by saying that intelligence is the general capacity to solve problems, have we shed any light on what ties these capacities together?
If by "obvious" you mean "the sort of thing you might guess from first principles"
That's what I interpreted James Miller to mean, at least roughly.
the muscle-strength relationship is obvious in another sense: in actual data, it will leap out at you as a very large factor. For example, 97% of variance in strength between sexes is accounted for by muscle mass, and one of the strongest predictors of performance in powerlifters is muscle mass per unit height.
Seems to me to be merely a difference of degree. While not "leaping out", brain-mass and intelligence do seem to correlate non-trivially (at least when cranial volume is measured via MRI):
Among humans, in 28 samples using brain imaging techniques, the mean brain size/GMA correlation is 0.40 (N = 1,389; p < 10−10); in 59 samples using external head size measures it is 0.20 (N = 63,405; p < 10−10). In 6 samples using the method of correlated vectors to distill g, the general factor of mental ability, the mean r is 0.63.
Child IQ scores tend to regress toward the mean as they get older.
Perhaps this means students shouldn't be excluded from advanced classes on the basis of IQ, but rather on the basis of being less willing to try.
Poorer people are happier. Alternatively, even when the aggregate or average level of happiness is not higher, some factors in it are higher, while other hugely negative factors (i.e. actually being poor) reduce the average or aggregate greatly.
The positive factors are strong social bonds. The problem is that middle-class people are trying to form friendships through just hanging out with people or trying to find common, shared interests. This is not strong bonds.
Poor people need to help each other, it is a basic necessity, and they form strong bonds this way. They move to a different village, start to fix up the fence, realize they need some tools, borrow it from the neighbor. Next time the neighbor asks some help etc. they bond this way. If you and your neighbors basically never need a service, a borrowed item etc. from each other you will probably not form strong bonds.
Should we somehow make ourselves poor to achieve it? I mean, it is relative, everybody is poor compared to the mega-rich, so how could you be - at the same level of income and net worth - not middle-class but the poor-of-the-mega-rich ?
Can you imagine examples of how well-to-do people can put themselves into situations where they need to borrow items or services / help from their neighbors?
Should they just aim high? If a poor person has a 60 m2 village house in bad repair, and a middle-class person has a 100 m2 village house in good repair, and a rich person has a 300 m3 village house in good repair, should the middle-class person instead buy a 300 m2 house in bad repair, and if the neighbors are doing something like that they all would help each other, so basically they would be not typical middle-class but the poor-of-the-rich and this way form the same bonds through helping?
Maybe this idea has merit. The essence of poverty is that you cannot just buy all the things you need, you sometimes need to make them yourself or borrow. If middle-class people aimed high and basically buy big mansions in bad repair, buy old yachts and sports cars and restore them, could they simulate that?
Any other idea?
Thesis: All knowledge is synthetic. There is no such thing as an "obvious" truth, and both mathematics and logic are empirical sciences. Every "axiom" is open to question and the axiomatization of arithmetic was nothing more than an attempt to find a "spanning set" of mathematical statements which are logically independent. Which is to say the logicist programme was flawed in ways much more fundamental than just being limited by incompleteness; it was doomed as soon as Frege mocked Mill.
Problem: Logic is a means of specifying the object under consideration (assuming everyone knows what I'm talking about since this is discussed in one of the sequence articles). Throwing out an axiom, say by defining a non-commutative form of addition, is changing the subject. We cannot make any assertion about arithmetic (and hence cannot make any discoveries about arithmetic) without first logically circumscribing the subject. Perceiving a given quantity of object in the visual field relies on a contingent definition of the unit. Synthetic knowledge of arithmetic seems impossible.
Proposed resolution: Weaken definition of knowledge from "justified true belief" simply to "true belief". Some might want to haggle over what "justification" is and object that we shouldn't throw out the whole concept because both logicism and empiricism seem to fail to provide it infallibly. Mathematical knowledge is then attained only insofar as we guess correctly with respect to the independence of our axioms.
Interested in hearing what would be regarded as "standard" objections to the above (which is not to say I'm disinterested in original objections; just believe in respecting others who have worked on a problem by learning what they've done).
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A god smart enough to know what's good for us is smart enough not to need a prayer to be summoned.
I can easily imagine that if I ran a simulation of mankind's evolutionary history, I'd adopt a principle of responding to the requests of simulants given that they are small enough and won't interfere with the goals of the simulation, just in case they have some awareness. If the purpose of the simulation isn't simply to satisfy all the simulants' needs for them (and would in fact be orthogonal to its actual purpose), they would have to make some kind of request for me to do something.