I am not average person, you don't look to be one either.
Fair enough, but I still don't think I am very good at predicting whether I'll be happier with children. I also doubt that other people who do think they will be happier are very accurate. Humans are notoriously bad at determining what will make them happy/unhappy. I'm thinking in particular about the study about lottery winners vs. amputee victim from Dan Gilbert's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html.
if your idea of meaningful life is improving the world, I don't see how you can have a sense of meaning and at the same time be aware that you're not "doing reasonably well".
Society... (read more)
There is variance in happiness, yes, but studies have shown that having children does not on average result in higher hedonic happiness, although it does increase a sense of living a meaningful life. If you doubt this, I can dig up the reference; I think it was actually referred to in the Rachaels paper. I said "certainly not", but that wasn't meant to be taken literally; of course it's not certain that you'll be equally or less happy with children.
I think I didn't word the second sentence correctly. I was trying to make the point that having a sense of meaning is not the same as doing reasonably well... (read more)
Certainly not if you're trying to maximize your hedonic happiness. But children do not increase hedonic happiness; they increase your sense of living a meaningful life. To maximize the actual meaning of your life, you must use estimates of the impact of your decisions; whether or not this affects your perceived sense of meaning depends on how seriously you take moral arguments.
Ditto
I have the Anki iphone app. Considering the utility and convenience it provides, the price is negligible. For comparison, at a private college, tuition/# of classes ~= $200 / class, so as I use anki for schoolwork, it easily pays for itself.
If you do any sort of utility calculation for products you use, a lot of times convenience will trump price by orders of magnitude. This is one of those cases.
I made a deck of the list of cognitive biases and list of fallacies from wikipedia.
Followup to: Spaced Repetition Database for A Human's Guide to Words
There's a great list of cognitive biases and fallacies on Wikipedia. For those who wish to aid their learning with some Anki cards, I've shared a deck. Just search "biases" in Anki.
For those who use a different program, here are the cards in a tab-separated file.
I'll soon update it to also contain the list of memory biases.
Thank you! I was planning on setting up a system for piano and guitar and I wasn't really sure what would work. This sounds great =]
Normal flashcards should be all equally difficult: as easy as possible. The idea is to break everything down into atomic facts; this makes it so you can't short-circuit a difficult card by just memorizing the answer; by memorizing all the parts, you still have the whole.
If you really want to drill one sub-deck, you can choose "cram mode" , and select the tag of the cards you want to review.
I don't use anki for languages, but to learn conjugations of verbs, I would have many example sentences with a "... " where the verb should go. You could ask on #anki or the google group. Here's
Thank you so much for posting this! I use anki a lot, and your Mysterious Questions deck has been a great help =]
This is a really good point. On the other hand, it is a more convincing argument for stronger interventionist policy than it is against charity.