However, suppose the weatherman had said that since it's going to be sunny tomorrow, it would be a good day to go out and murder people, and gives a logical argument to support that position? Should the woman still go with what the weatherman says, if she can't find a flaw in his argument?

Well, I wouldn't expect a weatherman to be an expert on murder, but he is an expert on weather, and due to the interdisciplinary nature of murder-weather-forecasting, I would not expect there to be many people in a better position to predict which days are good for murder.

If the woman is an expert on murder, or if she has conflicting reports from murder experts (e.g. "Only murder on dark and stormy nights") she might have reason to doubt the weatherman's claim about sunny days.

The problem is, Stanovich's work (based on his 2010 book which I have) doesn't support the thesis that intelligent people have more false beliefs or biases than stupid people, or just as many; they have fewer in all but a bare handful of carefully chosen biases where they're equal or a little worse.

If one had to summarize his work and the associated work in these terms, one could say that it's all about the question 'why does IQ not correlate at 1.0 with better beliefs but instead 0.5 or lower?'

You seem to have misunderstood what I wrote. My comment was meta - it is about the structure that peoples' beliefs ought to have. I changed the topic entirely, using your post as a source of inspiration and examples. If you read it expecting a rebuttal, then it wasn't a very good one. It probably skewed your interpretation a lot, because that's not what it was at all. It talks about specific beliefs only as examples, and not to endorse or oppose them.

Please reread my earlier comment with adjusted priors, and try to do so calmly, in your most analytical state of mind.

If you think that control of universities by left-wing ideologists...

I don't believe that's true in the engineering or business schools.

As something of a fan of Hayek, I'll take this opportunity to disagree.

The mistaken assumption is that a meme that survives must be good for "us". The meme's that survive are the ones that survive. Being good for us is just one of the many competing forces effecting memetic fitness.

I have a simpler rejection of fancy shmancy intellectualism. The probability that you just don't understand the argument should be weighed against your prior that what it seems to imply to you is in fact true. Often it's more likely that you're just confused.

You start with some good examples, which I think share a pattern. First, you have someone who takes a valid principle, "suffering is bad", and promotes it from "thing that is generally true" to "ultimate answer", and proceeds to reason off the rails. Then you have someone who takes "understanding math is good", and does the same thing, with less spectacular (but still bad) results. Then again with "happiness is good". History is rife with additional examples, and not just in moral philosophy; the same thing happens in technical topics, too.

The lesson I take from this is that you can't take any statement, no matter how true, and elevate it to uncompromisable ideology. You need a detailed and complex view of the world incorporating many principles at once, which will sometimes conflict and which you will have to reconcile and balance. So suffering is bad, but not so bad that it's worth sacrificing the universe to get rid of it; math is cool, but not so cool that it displaces all my other priorities; happiness is good, but if something looks like a weird corner-case of the word "happiness" it might be bad. (And a definition of the word "happiness" which provides a clear yes/no answer to whether wireheading is happiness doesn't help at all, because the problem is with the concept, and the applicability of all the reasoning that went into beliefs about that concept, not in the word itself). When any two principles from the collection disagree on something, they are both called into question, not for their validity as general principles, but for their applicability to that particular case.

So when you go on to say:

Whatever the one's prevailing or dissenting opinions, the initiation of force is never to be allowed as a means to further any ends.

I say: that principle belongs in the pool with the others. When the no-force principle conflicts with the extrapolated consequences of "suffering is bad" and "happiness is good" (which extrapolate to "destroy the universe" and "wirehead everyone", respectively), this suggests serious problems with those extrapolations.

But that doesn't mean you can elevate it to uncompromisable ideology. Initiating force is bad, but I wouldn't sacrifice the universe to avoid it. Minimizing the amount of force-initiation in the world doesn't displace all my other priorities. And if something looks like a weird corner case of the word "force", it might be fine.

The defense against crackpottery is not to choose the perfect principle, because there probably isn't one; it's to have a model with enough principles in it that if a corner case makes any one principle go awry, or matches a principle but fails to match the arguments that justified it, then reasoning won't go too terribly wrong.

There is a deep tension, indeed almost a contradiction, between two aspects of your essay. One one hand, you argue against the conclusions of Bob (from a beautiful, simple mathematical structure), of Jeff's acquaintance (from the simple, appealing ethical principle "minimize suffering") and of Jeff (from the simple, appealing ethical principle "maximize happiness"). You make the point that a Hayekian conservative spirit, that keeps in mind traditions, common sense and long-evolved intuitions and weighs them above logical principles appealing to intelligent people, should be used a warning light to reject those kind of philosophies. This is similar to what is sometimes loosely called the "outside view" here, and I basically agree with it, though it must be used carefully and on a case-by-case basis.

But just after that, you state a Libertarian principle, a Universal Law of non-aggression against persons and their property, and go so far as to assert that it applies to any kind of sentient being, including aliens and AIs. Now, I don't want to be dragged into a discussion about libertarianism, which would be against the "no-politics" rules of Less Wrong(1). But I hope you realize that this "Universal Law" is a simple abstract principle of the kind that appeals to intelligent people, and as such not so different from "maximize happiness" or "minimize suffering". The actual complex web of traditions, evolved intuitions and "common sense" of mankind is very far removed from these super-simple abstract principles. Rearranging any actual society to conform to the Libertarian principle. regardless of its merits, would require a huge upheaval of long-entrenched laws, customs and expectations, and as such should be rejected by the "outside view" heuristic that you preach in the first part of the essay. (ETA: see also Scott Aaronson's description of libertarians as "bullet-swallowers"--the same intellectual vice, essentially, that you attribute to Bob, Jeff, and his acquaintance)

(1)Following these rules, I would suggest you to remove the last paragraph's references to Obama and his Ayers connection, which does very little for the global points of your essay. It is the kind of thing that produces a strong, negative mind-killing reaction against your post to any reader who does not belong to a particular right-wing subculture.

If I put some em in a context that makes him happy and that somehow "counts", what if I take the one em whose happiness is maximal (by size / cost / whatever measure), then duplicate the very same em, in the very same context, ad infinitum, and have 1 gazillion copies of him, e.g. being repeatedly jerked off by $starlet ? Does each new copy count as much as the original? Why? Why not? What if the program was run on a tandem computer for redundancy, with two processors in lock step doing the same computation? Is it redundant in that case, or does it count double? What if I build a virtual machine in which this entire simulation happens in one instruction? Since the simulation has no I/O, what if my optimized implementation does away with it?

You're still deep into the fairy dust theory of utility. More nano-paperclips, please!

You should DEFINITELY read Greg Egan's "Permutation City", where he explores all kinds of such concept even to the point of absurdity -- but you are the one who gets to decide where it starts to be absurd and why; he just does the exploring in a delicious SF novel.

What more, massive crime in the name of such a theory is massively criminal. That your theories lead you to consider such massive crime should tip you that your theories are wrong, not that you should deplore your inability to conduct large-scale crime. You remind me of those communist activist cells who casually discuss their dream of slaughtering millions of innocents in concentration camps for the greatness of their social theories. http://www.infowars.com/obama-mentor-wanted-americans-put-in-re-education-camps/