The thing to do with telemarketers, I have learned, is not to immediately hang up.

You just let them get to what they want to sell you, then say, loudly but politely and without a pause for them to butt in, something like "Let me stop you there, [name], I'm afraid I'm not interested, but thank you very much for calling." If they don't back down, THEN summarily hang up.

I prefer this to simply hanging up because doing the latter always makes me feel bad for several minutes afterward for having been rude to somebody who is, after all, trying to make a living.

I will sign up. I live in Canada and am a blood donor; I was already considering it. Just needed an extra push, I guess. Thanks.

"Now healthy flowers are a sign of fertile land, likely to bear fruits and other treasures, and probably prey animals as well; so is it any wonder that humans evolved to be attracted to flowers?"

Hm... this is, of course, a wonderful essay, but I'd give 5:1 against that being the true reason humans are attracted to flowers. A generalized attraction to symmetry as a result of some sort of sexual selection would make more sense. And the whole story is guaranteed to be much more modulated by culture than here assumed. This is a classic evo-psych Just So Story (not that the field is wholly vacuous).

Perhaps the author is not endorsing that viewpoint though.

In my experience, enough people feel that way that it's rare for anyone to starve or freeze unless he behaves so badly that he doesn't deserve to be helped.

There is a nice critique of this libertarian view of ethics here.

His screen would have flashed "ракетное нападение." What you wrote is correct but in a grammatical form which suggests it was taken from inside a larger sentence involving words like "about a rocket attack"... Russian words change depending on their use within the sentence.

Indeed both views have the problem you just spoke of, but the supernatural view has still another deficit, which we might call a failure to explain. When we posit aliens, we posit something which we presume has a causal history in terms of more fundamental parts, but when we posit a supernatural god or the like, we posit something vastly complex yet with no parts. It is as if the entire text of "Finnegans Wake" were the 3rd letter of the alphabet, or as if particle physics tried to explain the universe in terms of quarks, leptons, and dinner tables.

There is yet another point, which is that the alien "gods" are not what one might call "religiously adequate." Nobody wants to worship mere fellow creatures, no matter that they might have created us.

Ontologically basic = at the lowest level of reality. For example, a table is not ontologically basic because there are no tables built into the laws of physics; but arguably, an electron is ontologically basic, since we can't explain electrons in terms of anything smaller or more basic.

A standard claim of "robust" supernaturalism is that there are minds (mental entities) which cannot be understood in terms of any more basic constituents of reality. E.g., your soul is not made of almitons, and god is not made of pixie dust. God is supposed to be ontologically basic - he is built right into the lowest level of reality, no moving parts.

The importance of making that caveat is that it might be defensible to say that perhaps some alien created us, but that is not really what most people mean by a god, since presumably the alien has a nice (evolutionary?) causal history.

I've taken the survey, and have the uncomfortable feeling that the odds I gave for several interrelated propositions were mutually inconsistent.

Let me see if I've cottoned on by coming up with an example.

Say you work with someone for years, and often on Mondays they come in late & with a headache. Other days, their hands are shaking, or they say socially inappropriate things in meetings.

"Good inductive bias" appears to mean you update in the correct direction (alcoholism/drug addiction) on each of these separate occasions, whereas "bad inductive bias" means you shrug each occurrence off and then get presented with each new occurrence, as it were, de novo. So this could be glossed as basically "update incrementally." Have I got the gist?

I think what's mildly confusing is the normatively positive use of the word "bias," which typically suggests deviation from ideal reasoning. But I suppose it is a bias in the sense that one could go too far and update on every little piece of random noise...