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glances at thread
Econ is the mind-killer.
Poorly informed anything is a mind-killer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JroogX7zBek
There could be a whole new continent of health improvements achievable by managing the body's bacterial ecosystem in the way a professional gardener manages a botanical garden.
Is eating an effective way to do that? In the world's cultures there's a wide variety of pro-biotic fermented foods. Do these exist merely because people like the taste? Surely they partly exist as a coping strategy for rotten food, but is that all? I doubt it. In some cultures they're eaten regularly. Let's list some:
- yogurt / cheese / cottage cheese / sour cream / kefir / etc.
- sauerkraut / kim chee / pickled vegetables
- fermented tofu (e.g. stinky tofu)
- fermented rice
- kombucha
Diet generally can dramatically affect which bacteria thrive in the gut (e.g. I recall evidence about sugar consumption, but can't find it). [I don't list bread or wine because as far as I know the agents are mostly dead before we eat them. For that matter, I'm not sure how much is alive in commercially available cheese.][Hygiene practices vary substantially too which probably has an important effect.]
Cheese is one of the very few commercial foods you'll be able to find live (fermentation) bacteria living in, but even then many cheeses won't because the producers save expense by pasteurizing instead of more closely monitoring cheeses to make sure they don't develop molds.
But, there are a few companies who do sell high-quality raw fermented foods, like Real Pickles up here in New England. You'll be able to find healthy bacteria on organic farm-bought produce as well; sauerkraut can be made easily by putting some sliced cabbage in a jar with salt, pounding it down, topping off the jar with water, and capping it for a week.
One day we will raise the sanity waterline by selling Rationality Yogurt.
This is already sold. It's called humility, but you'll have to import it if you live in the US.
It's not quite probiotic, but the bacteria in sourdough seriously reduce the negative effects of wheat gluten; apparently, bread fermentation was widespread across wheat-eating cultures.
You're right, but note that most store-bought sourdough breads are barely sourdough at all; they're mostly just flavored but don't undergo the traditional fermentation process which takes too long for bread corporations more interested in moving stock. Roman legions actually survived largely off of long-fermented sourdough bread.
As a medical student who has been closely reviewing probiotic research, I would like everyone to know that research is extremely important.
Perhaps it will be the greatest breakthrough in medicine of the 21st century. This angle is one of the primary reasons that the 'calories in=calories out' theory doesn't function as a successful principle for people trying to lose weight and keep it off. I recommend looking into the GAPS diet for anyone suffering auto-immune problems, since auto-immune disorders are all primarily caused by dysregulation of the digestive system.
Some ideas on the yogurt study (also being an opportunity to explain some of the nuances):
there is an incredible breadth of biodiversity in the gut, and yogurt only typically contains one or two strains, in this case it looks like one.
gut bacteria number in the trillions, so a short-term regime of any probiotic food or supplement won't necessarily provide its benefits quickly. A significant amount of the benefit is also delivered in the chelating and detoxifying properties of healthy bacteria, which can over time remove harmful toxins built up in intestinal bile; a significant build-up may take years to fully flush though, and other health problems may still still inhibit it.
other things in the diet will impact bacterial growth just as much as the addition of yogurt. Foods high in sugar could very easily be inhibiting the multiplication of the yogurt's probiotic bacteria (after being ingested) by encouraging the growth of competing bacteria associated with negative health. Food eaten then also becomes the basis for the bacteria's food, so a poor quality diet could sabotage the probiotics.
the quality of the yogurt which the probiotic was added to will impact the growth of bacteria tremendously. The pasteurization process itself makes the yogurt less healthful and can create an environment less conducive to probiotic multiplication.
no distinction is made whether the stress can be considered 'justified' or not; it would be undesireable to be less stressful in a situation where stress is justified and helpful. The study also seems not to account for variance in difficulty of course load, since students may have signed up for classes with intuitive knowledge of the additional stress received through their usual gut bacteria.
there are also a variety of standard practices in preventing contamination, which I assume the group carried out
Wealth doesn't appear out of nowhere.
It isn't zero sum either. I'm fairly certain Warren Buffet creates quite a lot of it. I'm also sure the marginal value of yet another school teacher pales in comparison to it.
The donation of a small sum of an accumulated fortune cannot create an impact equivalent to if that fortune in its entirety had been distributed in fairly paid labor.
My inner anthropologist from Jupiter is confused by this sentence, what is this "fair pay" thing. Please elaborate on it.
The donation of a small sum of an accumulated fortune cannot create an impact equivalent to if that fortune in its entirety had been distributed in fairly paid labor.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Warren Buffet is a vampire squid on the face of the world ... why not? You have humans routinely buying liquor and cigarettes instead of malaria nets for their own children, or wasting dollars on negative sum games like jostling for positional goods.
And to be avoid misunderstandings I do think you can make a good case that some people & institutions probably are vampire squids in the sense I used here.
The charities that billionaires tend to support also don't necessarily apply their spending in any semblance of efficiency, if they even affect good policy decisions with the impact they do have.
We aren't talking about what billionaires tend to support. We are using a thought experiment of primary school teacher vs. efficient charity donating rich dude to help you decide whether you where on the curve you want to go.
I'm pretty sure that being a pirate in Somalia and donating to efficient charity is probably justified by utilitarian calculations. If you can't possibly imagine this being the case, pause to consider that a criminal is just a start up government, a local bandit who ideally would want to have the monopoly on violence that a real state has but just isn't good enough for now. The best approach for the pirate would be to just stay in port and have passing ships pay him protection money. We accept some taxation of the trade routes can produce better results than not taxing it at all. I think it clear most government spending is much worse in its impact per dollar than efficient charity. If you disagree why in the world aren't you donating money to say the US government or writing up an argument for it? Model piracy by me and my merry armed band in Somalia as a tax on the trade route, then judge them as you would a government program with the same bang for buck.
To give another controversial example, I find it plausible that selling Marijuana and several other kinds of drugs (but not all) full time and donating the money to efficient charity beats out being a primary school teacher or working in kindergarten on utilitarian grounds.
What is the mechanism by which Warren Buffet creates wealth by himself? If you're talking about investing, couldn't a good supercomputer hypothetically do the same job for free? Anyways, Buffet doesn't do all of his own investments: most capitalists don't. They engage in joint ventures and mutual funds. Their only "contribution" to these is being the owner of investment funds (an arbitrary title when removed from historical context). Buffet does contribute to society but not (through some divine justice) proportionate to the compensation he is allotted.
Consider if Warren Buffet's teachers had not taught him to do math and he hadn't had the opportunity to do anything he did. What if his local librarian wasn't able to help him find books on investment, if he hadn't happened upon mentors who could teach him business, if he had been born poor and had to work minimum wage from a young age. Now consider if there are other potential Warren Buffets who would thrive as much as him given the opportunity but actually DO experience such setbacks.
Anyways, to assume that private investment is a social imperative is not friendly to reality. China right now has a totalitarian government which controls investments (including closely regulating foreign investment), and its economy has been exploding for decades as a result of infrastructure investment. There are plenty of models in-between China and the US which also function fine.
In the United States, we consistently overestimate the contribution of private industry in developing our infrastructure. Cars are only possible because of roads, telephones were only possible because of telephone wires, the internet & technology revolution were only possible because of massive Cold War defense department spending (the ARPANET was the prototype for the internet). It is not an exaggeration to say that the public has a far greater stake in private business than it realizes. In some cases, the privatization of public research can justifiably be seen as a transfer of wealth from taxpayers towards the fortunes of big business investors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
In response to
How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
Wikipedia on a priori: Relations of ideas, according to Hume, are "discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe".
This points out clearly the problem that I have with "a priori". It is a fundamentally Cartesian-dualist notion. The "mere operation of thought" takes place INSIDE THE UNIVERSE, as opposed to anywhere else.
To observe your own thoughts is a kind of evidence, if the spikings of your neurons be entangled with the object of your inquiry (relative to your current state of uncertainty about both). If, for example, I do not know what will happen with two earplugs and two earplugs on the nightstand, I can visualize two apples plus two apples to find out. All of this takes place in the same, unified, physical universe, with no ontological border between the atoms in my skull and the atoms outside my skull. That's why the trick works. It would work just as well if I used a pocket calculator. Is the output of a pocket calculator an a priori truth? Why not call the earplugs themselves a priori truths, then? But if neither of these are a priori, why should I treat the outputs of my neurons as "a priori"? It's all the same universe.
It appears to me that "a priori" is a semantic stopsign; its only visible meaning is "Don't ask!"
Vassar: It sure seems to me that our evolution and culture constructed ethical attitudes are entangled with the world.
They're causal products of the world, and yes, if I was ignorant about some evolution-related factual question, I might be able to use my ethical attitudes as evidence about conditions obtaining in my ancestral environment. That's not the same as my stating an external truth-condition for it being wrong to slaughter the first-born male children of the subjects of an unelected Pharaoh. It is perfectly acceptable for me to say, "I can think of no encounterable situation that would transform the terminal value of this event from negative to positive."
Spear: The test of any religion is whether cultures believing it tend to thrive and improve the quality of their lives or not.
Ah, yes, the old theory that there are reasons to believe2 in an assertion-of-fact besides its being true.
Lee: If he proclaims "two and two makes three," then he must be talking about something other than the integers. You cannot be mistaken about the integers, you can only misunderstand them.
Just to be clear, when I say "be convinced that 2 + 2 = 3", I mean being convinced that the system of Peano axioms with standard deductive logic and:
\a.(a + 0 = a) \ab.(a + Sb = S(a + b))
does not have as a theorem
SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0
but does have as a theorem
SS0 + SS0 = SSS0
and is consistent. Just as I currently believe that PA is consistent and has a theorem SS0+SS0=SSSS0 but not SS0+SS0=SSS0. So yes, this blog post is about what it would take to convince me that 2 + 2 actually equalled 3. I am not supposed to be convinced of this, if I am sane, and if it is not true. But at the same time, my belief in it should not be unconditional or nonevidential, because there are particular evidences which convinced me that 2 + 2 = 4 in the first place.
I also note that if you do not believe that there is a finite positive integer which encodes a proof of Godel's Statement, then you clearly are not using Peano Arithmetic to define what you mean by the word "integer".
In regards to Hume's interesting contributions to the question, I stumbled across this video a while back which I think will be interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVZG0G-jnAM (don't let the title throw you off; there is content within it).
A Warren Buffet donating a small fraction to efficient charity has a positive impact several orders of magnitude above a teacher. It would be awesome win if we could take thousands of teachers and turn them into Buffets. The reality however is that most teachers aren't capable of this. To build a good case I suggest you sit down and do the math of the measured life gains students get from good teachers vs the gains of mediocre white collar professionals giving the extra money they earn beyond the teacher salary to efficient charity.
Wealth doesn't appear out of nowhere. The decreasing wages of professionals doesn't mean there's less wealth in the system, it means that wealth goes is distributed differently, mostly towards creating more Warren Buffets. The donation of a small sum of an accumulated fortune cannot create an impact equivalent to if that fortune in its entirety had been distributed in fairly paid labor. A charity by definition requires an additional, socially superfluous level of bureaucracy which is paid out of donations. The charities that billionaires tend to support also don't necessarily apply their spending in any semblance of efficiency, if they even affect good policy decisions with the impact they do have. Charities cannot achieve economies of scale, nor do they have a secular source of funding (their continued existence is dependent on appeasing potential donors, not on efficient performance). Teachers are not slaves.
In response to
Good Places to Live as a Less Wronger
Lund, Sweden - despite not living here that long, just a few months, I've gotten a good grip of it. Pros: Massive university that serves as an intellectual meetingplace, everything from feminism to transhumanism in unofficial lectures, a particle accelerator is being built if you're into that kind of thing, and it's possible to get EVERYWHERE with a bike.
Cons: Difficult to get anywhere fast with a car, the weather can be less than enjoyable, housing prices are fairly high and we might be heading for an economical crash soon, and it would likely seem quite different moving here from outside europe.
In short: Economical value low, cultural value high.
You might not think the economic value was so low if you had children in school, were going to have children, were a child yourself, had significant health expenses, had a criminal record, were poor, or are going to get old eventually.
Economic value pays for the cultural value.
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That sounds more likely "Sociology". If you are actually trying to talk about Psychology then your claim seems wrong.
No, my claim is literal. The role of the discipline 'psychology' has shifted over time away from what we now consider 'sociology' and towards an individualistic approach to mental health. The assumption didn't used to be that mental problems were profoundly unique to the individual, but now mainstream psychology does not take into account the sociological factors which affect mental health in all situations.
Some sources to elaborate the transformation of the discipline are historiologists & sociologists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Michel Foucault, but there are plenty of non-mainstream psychologists who still practice holistic psychology like Helene Shulman & Mary Watkins.