Does it matter that you've misstated the problem of induction?

Does it matter that you've misstated the problem of induction?

The intelligent design issue is complex, but he's said outright that he doesn't believe in it. I think his position is something like "Most people who believe evolution are not smart enough to understand it, and would be better off believing intelligent design since it makes more sense on a naive level. Most believers in evolution who are not biologists are making the 'science as belief-attire' type mistake." It's been a while since I read about that particular flame war, so I might be mistaken, but I do remember he specifically said that with extremely high probability ID was wrong.

Hypnotism has been shown to work in studies by the AMA, BMJ, and every other group of medical experts who have investigated the question, and he's a vegetarian, not a vegan - and so am I, so you're going to have trouble convincing me that's a strike against him. Though if you want to write a post about it, I'd be interested in hearing your arguments against.

"So I was very surprised to find Adams was a believer in and evangelist of something that sounded a lot like pseudoscience."

Yep. The Dilbert Future isn't online so you can't see the nonsense directly, but to get a feeling for what Adams was like before he started backpedaling recently:

(http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v05/n12/scott-adams-responds.html)

Unflattering, but (to memory) accurate, description of The Dilbert Future here:

(http://www.insolitology.com/rloddities/dilbert.htm)

For anyone interested in wearing Frodo's ring around your neck: http://www.myprecious.us/

I voted this down and the parent up because, while it's a fine apology, you should not actually get more karma for admitting a mistake than the person who corrected you gets.

I voted this down and the parent up because, while it's a fine apology, you should not actually get more karma for admitting a mistake than the person who corrected you gets.

I was assuming that karma was actually being transferred, zero-sum.

Regarding the wine experts: if I understood correctly their recognition of the same wine later is not impaired by their verbal description of it's taste. But I wonder how accurate their description is, are there even the right words to describe the taste of a wine? I suspect that they just have build up some standard associations of what word to attribute to what taste and then just regurgitate them. If you trained this a lot you can probably do it on autopilot and therefore don't have to really think, therefore your taste memory is not impaired. That would be my ad-hoc explanation. What do you think?

PS: the "doing without thinking" part would be in contrast to non-experts who would have to deliberately reason and look for the correct words to describe the taste.

Well, a couple things. You can in part interpret that as being an underlying preference to do so, but you seem to have akrasia stopping you from actually choosing what you know you actually want.

Or perhaps you actually would prefer not to go on coasters, and consider the "after the fact" to be the same as "after the fact of taking some addictive drug, you might like it, so you wouldn't want to in the first place"

As far as changing of preferences, you may think of your true preferences as encoded by the underlying algorithm your brain is effectively implementing, the thing that controls how your more visible to yourself preferences change in response to new information, arguments, etc etc etc...

Those underlying underlying preferences are the things that you wouldn't want to change. You wouldn't want to take a pill that makes you into the type of person that enjoys committing genocide or whatever, right? But you can predict in advance that if such a pill existed and you took it, then after it rewrote your preferences, you would retroactively prefer genociding. But since you (I assume) don't want genocides to happen, you wouldn't want to become the type of person that would want them to happen and would try to make them happen.

(skipping one or two minor caveats in this comment, but you get the idea, right?)

But also, humans tend to be slightly (minor understatement here) irrational. I mean, isn't the whole project of LW and OB and so on based on the notion of "they way we are is not the way we wish to be. Let us become more rational"? So if something isn't matching the way people normally behave, well... the problem may be "the way people normally behave"... I believe the usual phrasing is "this is a normative, rather than descriptive theory"

Or did I misunderstand?