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Name three.
Politico, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org
Mutilating female genitals draws the appropriate outrage, while mutilating male genitals is ignored or even condoned.
The mutilation of male genitals in question is ridiculous in itself but hardly equivalent to the kind of mutilation done to female genitals.
The mutilation of male genitals in question is ridiculous in itself but hardly equivalent to the kind of mutilation done to female genitals.
Granted. Female mutilation is often far more severe.
But I think it's interesting that when the American Academy of Pediatrics proposed allowing female circumcision that really just was circumcision, i.e. cutting of the clitoral hood, people were still outraged. And so we see that even when the situation is made symmetrical, there persists what we can only call female privilege in this circumstance.
In response to
Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
But everything is evidence about everything else. I don't see the problem at all.
Given the circumference of Jupiter around its equator, the height of the Statue of Liberty, and the price of tea in China, can you tell me what's sitting atop my computer monitor right now?
If so, what is it?
If not, why not? I gave you plenty of evidence.
I know with 99% probability that the item on top of your computer monitor is not Jupiter or the Statue of Liberty. And a major piece of information that leads me to that conclusion is... you guessed it, the circumference of Jupiter and the height of the Statue of Liberty. So there you go, this "irrelevant" information actually does narrow my probability estimates just a little bit.
Not a lot. But we didn't say it was good evidence, just that it was, in fact, evidence.
(Pedantic: You could have a model of Jupiter or Liberty on top of your computer, but that's not the same thing as having the actual thing.)
In response to
Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
If the same majority of smart people as stupid people are conservative then the statement that "Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." is actually completely irrelevant, but I don't think that anyone believes otherwise. If there is a positive correlation between intelligence and the truth of one's beliefs (a claim the truth of which is probably assumed by most people to be true for any definition of intelligence they care about) then the average intelligence of people who hold a given belief is entangled with the truth of that belief and can be used as Bayesian evidence. Evidence is not proof of course, and this heuristic will not be perfectly reliable.
The statistical evidence is that liberalism, especially social liberalism, is positively correlated with intelligence. This does not prove that liberalism is correct; but it does provide some mild evidence in that direction.
In response to
Beyond the Reach of God
The claim isn't that Germany would have been perfectly fine, and would never have started a war or done anything else extreme. And the claim is not that Hitler trashed a country that was ticking along happily.
The claim is that the history of the twentieth century would have gone substantially differently. World War II might not have happened. The tremendous role that Hitler's idiosyncrasies played in directing events, doesn't seem to leave much rational room for determinism here.
It's a subtle matter, but... you clearly don't really mean determinism here, because you've said a hundred times before how the universe is ultimately deterministic even at the quantum level.
Maybe predictability is the word we want. Or maybe it's something else, like fairness or "moral non-neutrality"; it doesn't seem fair that Hitler could have that large an impact by himself, even though there's nothing remotely non-deterministic about that assertion.
I suspect it's still far shorter than the list with the heading "Less Useful Things to Do Than Fucking Around on the Internet."
Yes, think about how none of us would ever have discovered Less Wrong if we never fucked around on the Internet.
This is not to say that we don't fuck around on the Internet more than we should, which I think I probably do and I wouldn't be surprised if most of you do as well.
There are a lot more things that people can consider a 'habit' than most people would consider, I would expect. It's easy to think of 'getting up at 5 AM' or 'eating well' or 'exercising' to be a habit. I've witnessed exercise as a habit, to be sure, when I watched my siblings - who were very active in sports - get downright surly if they didn't have time for their morning jog.
But there's a lot of small habits in everything we do, that we don't really notice. Necessary habits. When someone asks you how you are, the habitual answer is 'Fine, thank you,' or something similar. It's what people expect. The entire greeting ritual is habitualness, to the point that if you disrupt the greeting, it throws people off.
The most important habits this can be used to engender and train yourself, relative to this site, are the habits of rationality. For instance, the habit of asking 'why?' Amusingly enough, this is the habit of breaking habits.
I feel bad. Why? I'm not that sort of person. Why? I don't like that. Why? I do like that! Why? I don't believe you. Why?
This can also be the habit of listening. It's so easy to cross something off a list of things that you'll consider - for instance, aliens, or ghosts. Someone claims that they believe in aliens. I see many people who absolutely refuse to even consider that. It's stupid. The arguments are all the same. No one's ever actually seen one, they just know someone who's seen one. The arguments for not listening are many and varied...
But it takes only a couple minutes, when someone tells you that they believe in aliens, to listen and actually appraise their reason. And I mean, really listen. Tell yourself, "Well, it's possible I'm wrong. Let's hear." The thought, in your head, is more vital than the act of listening.
If you act like you're listening, but your thoughts are saying, "There is no possible way they are right, I'm just listening because rationality demands it, and I'll be able to dismiss their arguments in a moment," then you're closing your mind. But if you truly let yourself listen, and tell yourself, in the silence of your mind, that there's a chance they're right, then you open yourself up to amazing things... even if it's not something that supports what they're arguing, you might come across some stray fact, some mental structure, that you hadn't considered before, and it could open up some level of understanding on an otherwise unrelated area of consideration, such as, "Ah, wait... what if this is why people act in this way?"
What I find the most important part of this article is not 'how can we use our thoughts to create habits,' but instead 'be more aware of the thoughts you have - are they the thoughts you want to become word and act?' Just having a thought does not guarantee it will become word or act, but if you find yourself in the habit of evaluating the thoughts running through your mind ... you will be far more able to encourage the good habits and destroy the bad habits.
Only then can you move forward to 'create' habits... for instance, what you were saying about sustainable habits, and coming up with exceptions for 'new habits' - you need an all or nothing approach, or else you think your way around it and make excuses. That suggests that your thought was not controlled, and that you think you're the sort of person who makes excuses. What if, instead of trying to get into the habit of eating less meat ... you instead had a goal of trying to create a habit of not making excuses for yourself?
Not trying to target you specifically, but more thinking about the topic on a much more general level and tossing out some general ideas that might apply to a number of different people.
Not critical to your point, but I can't stand this habitual exchange:
But there's a lot of small habits in everything we do, that we don't really notice. Necessary habits. When someone asks you how you are, the habitual answer is 'Fine, thank you,' or something similar. It's what people expect. The entire greeting ritual is habitualness, to the point that if you disrupt the greeting, it throws people off.
When people ask how I am, I want to give them information. I want to tell them, "Actually I've had a bad headache all day; and I'm underemployed right now and really lonely." Or sometimes I'm feeling good, and I want to say "I feel great!" and have them actually know that I feel great and not think that I'm just carrying through the formula.
Human speech is one of the most valuable resources in the universe, and he were are wasting it on things that convey no information.
In response to
Action and habit
Very interesting post: but I wonder what counts as a 'habit'. 'Getting up at 5am for swimming three times a week' is very different to 'eating healthily', and I think they need to be distinguished. The first sort is more specific and rigid: you know WHAT you're meant to do and (more importantly?) you know WHEN you've failed to hit it.
As an example of these two kinds of habit:
I have tried to cut down drinking by 'drinking less' or 'only drinking when it's a particularly special occasion', and within weeks this went back to default of 'drinking when I wanted'. Ditto with 'eating less meat', 'eating healthier food' etc.
On the other hand, I have also had times of quite happily not drinking AT ALL, or not eating meat AT ALL: within a few weeks, I get to a point where I'm quite content with this, and only start drinking or eating meat because I've reached the end of the intended time of 'fasting' or because of more external events.
Now, I'm not sure whether the latter sort of habit is actually more sustainable or just easier to sustain right at the start - or possibly it depends on the purpose. For me, the absolute terms make the system feel external: I can't think my way round it and make excuses on individual cases.
Other people have the same experience?
It's about ten times easier to become vegetarian than it is to reduce your consumption of meat. Becoming vegetarian means refusing meat every time no matter what, and you can pretty much manage that from day one. Reducing your meat consumption means somehow judging how much meat you're eating and coming up with an idea of how low you want it to go, and pretty soon you're just fudging all the figures and eating as much as you were anyway.
Likewise, I tried for a long time to "reduce my soda drinking" and could not achieve this. Now I have switched to "sucralose-based sodas only" and I've been able to do it remarkably well.
In response to
Action and habit
For the most part I agree with this post, but I am not convinced that this is true:
Anyone can develop any “character trait.” The requirement is simply enough years of thoughts becoming words becoming actions becoming habit.
A lot of measured traits are extremely stable over lifespan (IQ, conscientiousness, etc.) and seem very difficult, if not impossible, to train. So the idea that someone can just get smarter through practice does not appear to be supported by the evidence.
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I'm saying that the truth is not so horrifying that it will cause you to go into depression. If the only way to become rational involves depression, this just means that becoming rational sucks. It doesn't mean that the world sucks.
This is what I hope and desire to be true. But what I'm asking for here is evidence that this is the case, to counteract the evidence from depressive realism that would seem to say that no, actually the world is so terrible that depression is the only rational response.
What reason do we have to think that the world doesn't suck?