So far it seems to be only the two of us, which seems rather surprising. In probabilistic terms, I was assigning a significant probability to receiving N>>1 favorable replies to the suggestion above.

I'm not sure yet how I should update on the observation of only one taker. One hypothesis is that the Open Thread isn't an effective way to float such suggestions, so I could consider a top-level post instead. Another is that all LWers are much more advanced than we are and consider Jaynes' book elementary. What other hypotheses might I be missing ?

I'm working through Jaynes' /Probability Theory/ (the online version). My math has apparently gotten a bit rusty and I'm getting stuck on exercise 3.2, "probability of a full set" (Google that exact phrase for the pdf). I'd appreciate if anyone who's been through it before, or finds this stuff easy, would drop a tiny hint, rot13'd if necessary.

V'ir pbafvqrerq jbexvat bhg gur cebonovyvgl bs "abg trggvat n shyy frg", ohg gung qbrfa'g frrz gb yrnq naljurer.

V unir jbexrq bhg gung jura z=x (gur ahzore bs qenjf = gur ahzore bs pbybef) gur shyy frg cebonovyvgl vf tvira ol gur trarenyvmrq ulcretrbzrgevp qvfgevohgvba jvgu nyy e'f=1. V'z gelvat gb svther bhg ubj gung cebonovyvgl vapernfrf nf lbh nqq zber qenjf. Vg frrzf gb zr gung ol rkpunatrnovyvgl, gur cebonovyvgl bs n shyy frg jvgu x+1 qenjf vf gur fnzr nf gur cebonovyvgl bs n shyy frg jvgu x, naq bar rkgen qenj juvpu pna or nal pbybe: SF(P1+P2+..+Px) juvpu vf SF.P1+SF.P2+..+SF.Px, juvpu ner zhghnyyl rkpyhfvir gurersber nqq hc.

Nz V ba gur evtug genpx ng nyy ?

How many people here would be interested in forming a virtual book study group, to work through Jaynes ? Some programmer colleagues of mine have done that for SICP and it turns out to be a nice way to study. Strength in numbers and all that.

I think discussions like this are useless unless "child" is qualified by the age of child you are talking about. Children of different ages have vastly different cognitive capacities and what is suitable for one age is not for another. Think about children at ages 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20 (to take arbitrary ranges). The line about "my house that I allow you to live in" is something I might conceivably use in an argument with a surly 15-year-old, who is at the point where they need to start thinking about leading an independent life, but it would seem like an incredibly cruel thing to say to a 10-year-old, and would probably just be meaningless noise to a 5-year-old.

There is a movement called Taking Children Seriously that advocates that a parent should never deploy arbitrary authority, but always reason a child into doing what they ought to do. I think they are nuts, but some people I respect respect them, and it might appeal to rationalists. They are somehow based on Popperian epistemology.

In a related vein I just made a Facebook page for the Association of Anarchist Parents, an organization that I have envisioned ever since my own kids were old enough to have wills of their own.

Telling yourself that you are struggling to free yourself from narrative is of course itself a narrative. There's no escape.

Although one of the distinguishing things about this community is its willingness to use heroic metaphors for this struggle, imagine themselves as martial artists, etc.

An alternative is to embrace the narrative nature of intelligence. See here for some efforts to do that.

This is a rather reductive approach to Ainslie. He's not writing a self-help book. The upshot of his view is not simply that people get distracted from long-term goals by short-term goals, but rather that the self emerges from the need to manage conflicts between a variety of internal goals. Fervid declarations like "I have but one Self, a timeless abstract optimization process to which this ape is but a horribly disfigured approximation" gets it exactly backwards. You don't have a Self, except as a hacked-together construct that helps your goals get along.

More discussion here and especially more in the links to bhyde's commentary.

Ugh. Where to start...

One might well ask: why does any of this indicate that moral propositions have no rational justification? The arguments presented here show fairly conclusively that our moral judgements are instinctive, subconscious, evolved features. Evolution gave them to us.

Yes, because evolution gave us the instincts that solved the prisoner's dilemma and made social life possible. Which is why Jonathan Haidt finds it more helpful to define morality as, rather than being about harm and fairness, something like:

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

Green is basically screaming bloody murder at how people stupidly conclude that incest is wrong in a case where some bad attributes of incest don't apply, and how this is part of a more general flaw involving people doing an end-run around the usual need to find rational reasons for their moral judgments.

His view is in complete ignorance of recent ground-breaking research on the nature of human morality (see above link). Basically, most secular academics think of morality only in terms of harms and fairness, but, worldwide, people judge morality on three other dimensions as well: ingroup/loyalty (do we maintain a cohesive group?), authority/respect, and purity/sancity (the last one being the intuition challenged by Greene's example).

While political discourse in the West has focused on harm and fairness, human nature in general is judging from all five. This narrow focus has resulted in Westerners, not surprisingly, being unable to justify from the three others unless they come from a ... religious background!

Or, more succinctly, morality is a meme that enables solutions to the prisoner's dilemma. All five dimensions, to some extent, work toward that end.

What Greene has discovered is better described as "Westerners do not have the educational background to justify and express their moral intuitions that go beyond harm and fairness." Congratulations: when you force people to talk about morality purely in terms of harms, you can get them to voice moral opinions they can't justify.

Had the participants gotten such grounding, they could have answered the incest dilemma like this:

"As stipulated, there is no harm from what the siblings did. However, that's just disgusting [sanctity], and is disruptive to the social order [authority]. Within your artificial scenario, you have assumed these difficulties away. If I and others did not find such acts disgusting, they would inevitably become more common, and social life would break down: first, from genetic disease, and second, from destabilized family units, where parents are forced to take sides between their own kids. Over time, this hurts society's ability to solve the prisoner's dilemma."

The fact that people cannot connect their moral intuitions to the evolutionary/historical reason that such intuitions evolved is not a reason to come to the conclusion Greene does.

I should also add that it starts off with a very questionable claim:

As a simple example, consider the use of the words in any standard ethical debate - "abortion is murder", "animal suffering is just as bad as human suffering" - these terms seem to refer to objective facts; "abortion is murder" sounds rather like "water is a solvent!".

If you're correctly paraphrasing Greene, this is misleading at best. Yes, those statements are syntactically similar, but most people are capable of recognizing when a statement starts to make a moral claim (or, upon further questioning, some concept they hold that is isomorphic to morality). They recognize that when you get into talk about something being "just as bad" as something else, you're talking about morality.

It's like saying, hey, "Jews are murderworthy" sounds rather like "apples are red", OBVIOUSLY we are ill-equipped to discuss morality!

FWIW, I don't even necessarily disagree with Greene that people approach morality from a flawed framework. But his arguments aren't very good, they ignore the literature, and don't present the right framework. Thumbs down.

I disagree. If a non-believer argues that he considers the Book of Job to be a sacred text and therefore of a different quality than, say, The Merchant of Venice he does this most certainly on the grounds mentioned by mtavern. The mere fact that a certain thing is considered as sacred or is admired by a lot of people changes our perception of that thing and insofar adds a new quality to it. It does that even if a certain person doesn't admire it or believe in it. The fact that you (probably) don't admire Britney Spears does not change the fact that you regard her as a "celebrity" which is nothing else than the consequence of other people admiring her.

The sacred is sacred not solely because of its inherent properties but because it just is -- that is, a group of people have for a multitude of reasons and historical contigencies focused on this text, place, or object and assigned it a special status. This doesn't make much rationalist sense -- it's just the way these sort of things work.

It's not obvious that the best way to reduce existential risk is to actually work on the problem. Imagine if every farmer put down his plow and came to the university to study artificial intelligence research. Everyone would starve. It may well be that someone's best contribution is to continue to write software to do billing for health insurance, because that helps keep society running, which causes increased wealth, which then funds and supports people who specialize in researching risks among other fields.

I suspect that actually, only a small percentage of people, even of people here, could usefully learn the political truths relevant to existential risk mitigation via the kind of discussion you are proposing. Very few people are in a position to cause political change. The marginal utility gain for the average person to learn the truth on a political matter is practically zero due to his lack of influence on the political process. The many arguments against voting apply to this question as well, of seeking political truth; and even more so, because it's harder to ascertain political truths than to vote.

Most interest in politics is IMO similar to interest in sports or movies. It's fun, and it offers an opportunity to show off a bit, gives something to talk and socialize about, helps people form communities and define their interests. But beyond these kinds of social goals, there is no true value.

Most of the belief that one is in a position where knowing political truths is important, is likely to be self-deception. We see ourselves as being potentially more important and influential than we are likely ever to become. This kind of bias has been widely documented in many fields.

To me, politics is not so much the mind-killer as the mind-seducer. It leads us to believe that our opinions matter, it makes us feel proud and important. But it's all a lie. Politics is a waste of time and should be viewed simply as a form of entertainment. Now entertainment can be good, we all need a break from serious work and politics may be as valid as any other form of recreation, but we here should recognize that and not inflate its importance.