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At high-school level, physics has perhaps the richest tightly-knit concept structures.
You don't get any feedback or assessment, you just get some added signalling value.
Yes, you pay money for signalling. What's wrong with that?
Even with my current studies, if I need help with a specific issue I don't walk to the TA but put the problem up on stackoverflow or another stackexchange website. I don't need university staff to learn something but I need the university for signaling.
Including signaling "thanks" to the university. :-)
In response to
an ethical puzzle about brain emulation
IMO, even E is problematic: where did the torture-information come from in the first place?
Reminds me of the error -- on charitable reading, of the characters, but perhaps of the author -- in "Permutation City". There's no such a thing as out-of-order simulation.
In response to
Does the simulation argument even need simulations?
Epistemology 101: Proper beliefs are (probabilistic) constrants over anticipated observations.
How does the belief that we are living in a computer simulation/a projection of the Platonic Hyperuranium/a dream of a god constrain what we expect to observe?
Only in objective modal sense. Beliefs are probabilistic constraints over observations anticipated given a context. So in the example with stars moving away, the stars are still observables because there is counterfactual context where we observe them from nearby (by traveling with them etc.)
Modern philosophy is just a set of notes on the margins of Descartes' "Meditations".
That is the most damning criticism of philosophy I have ever seen.
(1) It's totally tongue-in-cheek. (2) By "modern" I don't mean "contemporary", I mean "since Descartes onwards". (3) By "notes" I mean criticisms. (4) The point is that I see responses to the simulation aka. Daemon argument recurring in philosophy.
In response to
Does the simulation argument even need simulations?
Modern philosophy is just a set of notes on the margins of Descartes' "Meditations".
In response to
What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren't based on a misunderstanding of reality?
All our values are fallible, but doubt requires justification.
In response to
Thought experiment: The transhuman pedophile
Persons do not have fixed value systems anyway. A value system is a partly-physiologically-implemented theory of what is valuable (good, right, etc.) One can recognize a better theory and try to make one's habits and reactions fit to it. Pedophilia is bad if it promotes a shallower reaction to a young person, and good if it promotes a richer reaction, it depends on particulars of brain-implementing-pedophilia. Abusing anyone is bad.
In response to
Eudaimonic Utilitarianism
How does EU resolve a toy problem like Jews vs Nazis? Or, in a more realistic example, hiring an African-American/a woman/a gay person to work in a racist/misogynistic/homophobic work environment? Presumably it would fight the hypothetical and state that "if the Nazis were objectively rational they would not hate Jews"?
It is not necessary for Nazis hating Jews to be rational that there are reasons for hating Jews, only that the reasons for not hating Jews do not outweigh the reasons for hating Jews. But their reasons for hating Jews are either self-contradictory or in fact support not hating Jews when properly worked out.
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Perhaps a satisfactory answer can be found in "Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein" by Hilary Putnam (who seemed to me to be a reasonable philosopher, but converted to Judaism). I've just started listening to its audiobook version, prompted by this post.