It might be possible (and useful) to design an ethics curriculum that helps students to think more clearly about their own views, though, without giving their teachers much of an excuse to preach.

I don't think it's as simple as 'agreement = competent; disagreement = incompetent', for at least a couple of reasons.

First, when judging the credibility of a source, their views on a given issue will be weighted according to the confidence with which they're expressed (i.e. the source's level of claimed expertise in that area). Second, disagreement will have more weight the closer the matter is to being one of settled objective fact.

I'm by no means an expert on the philosophy of mathematics, but I imagine that at the very least it's an area in which thoughtful, intelligent, honest people can disagree, and at the most it's one in which there simply isn't a single set of correct answers. So disagreement need not seriously undermine one's confidence in a source, but that doesn't mean that all answers are equally sensible or valid, nor that Hegel can't have been talking credibility-destroying nonsense.

I don't think you've misunderstood; in fact I share your position.

Do you also reject compatibilist accounts of free will? I think the basic point at issue here is whether or not a fully determined action can be genuinely 'chosen', any more than the past events that determine it.

The set of assumptions that undermines CDT also ensures that the decision process is nothing more than the deterministic consequence (give or take some irrelevant randomness) of an earlier state of the world + physical law. The 'agent' is a fully determined cog in a causally closed system.

In the same-source-code-PD, at the beginning of the decision process each agent knows that the end result will either be mutual cooperation or mutual defection, and also that the following propositions must either be all true or all false:

1. 'I was programmed to cooperate'
2. 'the other agent was programmed to cooperate'
3. 'I will cooperate'
4. 'the end result will be mutual cooperation'

The agent wants Proposition 4 -- and therefore all of the other propositions -- to be true.

Since all of the propositions are known to share the same truth value, choosing to make Proposition 3 true is equivalent to choosing to make all four propositions true -- including the two that refer to past events (Propositions 1 and 2). So either the agent can choose the truth value of propositions about the past, or else Proposition 3 is not really under the agent's control.

I'd be interested to know whether those who disagree with me/us see a logical error above, or simply have a concept of choice/agency/free will/control that renders the previous paragraph either false or unproblematic (presumably because it allows you to single out Proposition 3 as uniquely under the agent's control, or it isn't so fussy about temporal order). If the latter, is this ultimately a semantic dispute? (I suspect that some will half-agree with that, but add that the incompatibilist notion of free will is at best empirically false and at worst incoherent. I think the charge of incoherence is false and the charge of empirical falsity is unproven, but I won't go into that now.)

In any case, responses would be appreciated. (And if you think I'm completely mistaken or confused, please bear in mind that I made a genuine attempt to explain my position clearly!)

I interpreted "the best (funded) PhD program you got into" to mean 'the best PhD program that offered you a funded place', rather than 'the best-funded PhD program that offered you a place'. So Algernoq's advice need not conflict with yours, unless he did mean 'best' in a very narrow sense.

Note: I honestly have no idea about the relationship between race and intelligence, so I deliberately set aside the question of who, if anyone, would have the higher prior in the Obama-Bush comparison. These aren't politically correct weasel words; I would have a hard time properly defining intelligence, let alone measuring it in a culturally neutral way, but if I do see good evidence for a racial intelligence gap then I will readily accept it. All of this is beside the point of the dispute between TheAncientGreek and Eugine_Nier, though, for the reasons I gave above.

"It is, however, proper application of Bayesian evidence."

Nonsense.

If the only relevant pieces of information you had were the race of each man, and the average intelligence of each race, then of course it would be rational to estimate that the man from the 'smarter' race were the smarter of the two. But this is very far from the truth. In the Obama-Bush example, there is more than enough evidence on the public record to swamp any racially determined prior.

I think the principle of 'treating people as individuals' exists to combat a couple of things. One is the tendency to form stereotypes on flimsy or non-existent evidence, to over-estimate the generality and force of those stereotypes that are factually based, and to treat prejudice (i.e. group membership-based priors) as a substitute for even very easily-gathered and reliable evidence about the individual. The other is the direct emotional harm done to people by treating them as members of a group first, and individuals second (if at all). It is possible for this harm to outweigh the benefits of otherwise-rational discrimination.

Therefore I shall employ a simple heuristic; I shall assume that the option which does the most good when one person does it is also the option that does the most good when everyone does it.

This assumption seems trivially false to me, and despite being labeled as a mere 'heuristic', it is the crucial step in your argument. Can you explain why I should take it seriously?

I think this is the post you remember reading: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0207/4935.html