That doesn't help much. If people were told they were going to be murdered in a painless way (or something not particularly painful - for example, a shot for someone who isn't afraid of needles and has no problem getting vaccinated) most would consider this a threat and would try to avoid it.
I think most people's practical attitude towards death is a bit like Syrio Forel from Game of Thrones - "not today". We learn to accept that we'll die someday, we might even be okay with it, but we prefer to have it happen as far in the future as we can manag...
"Surely they can't have formed a publishing empire, and survived to the point where they could hire assistants, solely by doing what 'the proper God-appointed authorities' told them to do? "
Dunno; I wouldn't underestimate to what extent plain instinct can make one behave in a rational-like manner even though one's beliefs aren't rational. How those instincts are rationalized post-hoc, if they're rationalized at all, isn't that relevant.
"Perhaps we could tell the authors to imagine in detail what they would see if (or when) God shows them how...
I've never worked in a soup kitchen (although I should, because I think I might enjoy it) but I've found that often when I voluntarily engage in a social and purely beneficial activity I enjoy myself enormously. There's a kind of comraderie going on, it's like the pleasure of social interaction is combining with the pleasure of Helping in just the right ways.
I don't expect it would work all the time, or for everyone. And I usually feel differently when I'm forced to do something instead of volunteering. Still, it could be a factor in why some people enjoy that sort of thing.
I have a question. This article suggests that for a given utility function there is one single charity that is best and that's the one one should give money to. That looks a bit problematic to me - for example, if everyone invests in malaria nets because that's the single one that saves most lives, then nobody is investing in any other kind of charity, but shouldn't those things get done too ?
We can get around this by considering that the efficiency function varies with time - for example, once everybody gives their money to buy nets the marginal cost of e...
What happens in that situation is that people continue to invest in malaria nets, so much that the marginal cost of saving another life goes from say, $500 to $700, and for $600 dollars you can dig a well, saving another persons life. In essence, you donate to the most efficient charity until that money has caused the charity to have to pay more to save lives, and therefore stops being the most efficient charity.
Hello all !
I'm a twenty-seven years old student doing a PhD in vegetation dynamics. I've been interested in science since forever, in skepticism and rationality per se for the last few years, and I was linked to LessWrong only a few months ago and was blown away. I'm frankly disconcerted by how every single internet argument I've gotten into since has involved invoking rationality and using various bits of LessWrong vocabulary, I think the last time I absorbed a worldview that fast was from reading "How the Mind Works", lo these many years ago. S...
Hi ! Yep, it's the same me, thanks for the welcome !
I don't know if I'd call integrating knowledge THE root problem of Left Behind, which has many root problems, and a lack of integration strikes me as too high-level and widespread among humans to qualify as [i]root[/i] per se...
But yeah, good illustration of the principle :-)
(and thanks for the welcome link, I'd somehow missed that page)
I can see the objection there however, partly because I sort of have this issue. I've never been attacked, or mugged, or generally made to feel genuinely unsafe - those few incidents that have unsettled me have affected me far less than the social pressure I've felt to feel unsafe - people telling me "are you sure you want to walk home alone ?", or "don't forget to lock the door at all times !".
I fight against that social pressure. I don't WANT the limitations and stress that come with being afraid, and the lower opinion it implies I sh...
When I was a kid I had this book called "Thinking Physics", which was basically a book of multiple choice physics questions (such as "an elephant and a feather are falling, which one experiences more air resistance ?", or "Kepler and Galileo made telescopes around the same time and Kepler's was adopted widely, why ?") aimed to point out where our natural instincts or presuppositions go against how physics actually work, and explaining, well, how physics actually work.
Really, the simple idea that physics are a habit of thought ...
I've been thinking of this question lately, and while I agree with the main thrust of your article, I don't think that giving all possible objections is always possible (it can get really long, and sometimes there are thematic issues). Which is why I think multiple people responding tends to be a good thing.
But more to the point, I don't think I agree that RA is moving the goalposts. Because really, every position has many arguments pro or con where even if just one is demolished the position can survive off the others. I think the arguing technique that r...
This.
I don't know if latent homosexuality in homophobes is the best example, but I've definitely seen it in myself. I will sometimes behave in certain ways, for motives I find perfectly virtuous or justified, and it is only by analysing my behaviour post-hoc that I realize it isn't consistent with the motives I thought I had - but it is consistent with much more selfish motives.
I think the example that most shocked me was back when I played an online RPG, and organised an action in a newly-coded environment. I and others on my team noticed an unexpected co... (read more)