All of curious's Comments + Replies

curious-10

whether assange qualifies as a journalist is/could be relevant because the first amendment specifically protects the freedom of the press. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"

ergo, if assange is a member of the press, it's constitutionally harder to go after him than if not.

no one is saying that if he's not a journalist, the separately-mentioned freedom of speech doesn't apply to everyone else.

curious10

ak guilty: 0.1

rs guilty: 0.1

rg guilty: 0.9

assessment of my opinion vs poster's opinion: can't guess at your actual probabilities, but probability similar general take identifying guede as vastly more likely to be guilty than the other two.

sources: small number (i estimate <5) of media stories covering the case that i've seen over recent months plus the wikipedia article as it read at a little after 4 pm today.

curious20

sifting information from noise / getting to the heart of a problem: skimming through a lot of material, getting rid of the unnecessary crap, and picking out the things that are really crucial.

i think i've always tended toward that mode of thinking, but the first time i remember consciously focusing on it was in a philosophy course that required turning in three essays per week addressing specific ethical questions in under 300 words.

the caveat on this one is not to overdo it. i really value my ultra-sensitive BS meter, and it pretty much earns me my daily bread, but i have to be very careful about type II errors.

curious20

there's also the possibility of causality in the other direction -- that good governance can raise the IQ of a population (through any number of mechanisms -- better nutrition, better health care, better education, etc).

1Roko
Again, finding correlation between IQ and quality of government constitutes weak evidence for the claim that increased IQ causes better government. Note that the authors of the paper made this claim too.
curious50

tall ships down

subject: the final voyages and sinkings of five large sailing vessels

big lessons: 1) if you have a weakness (personally, in your competence or temperament, or structurally, in your vessel or equipment) and spend enough time in an unpredictable environment, it will eventually be exploited. 2) the fact that an environment is unpredictable does not relieve you from the responsibility of considering risks and working to minimize them. 3) we often have an inkling about our weaknesses, but if we've gotten by so far without major incident, we se... (read more)

curious340

Until a man sees his own argumentativeness as a distinctively male trait, he'll see >women as abnormally passive (departures from the norm) rather than thinking "I am >a male and therefore argumentative" (in the same way that women now identify >various parts of themselves as feminine).

you allude to the dangers that follow from this; i think one issue with making too much of distinctively gendered traits is that it sets up expectations that can be socially and professionally costly to violate. i'm female. i'm argumentative. i'm compet... (read more)

6ayaleaf
Similarly, Most of my friends and I tend to have roughly equal sets of male and female characteristics. The only real difference I see between some of my male friend's argumentativeness and my own passivity is that they have times where they will admit that they are just itching for a fight, whereas I will not argue unless there is an issue, it affects something I care about, and I know how to fix it. Otherwise it's just people shouting at each other, which is rather unproductive and I have better things to do with my time.

I can't stand watching sports. I don't have a problem with that either.

I think if we lived in a world balanced between genders, where men thought of themselves as men and women thought of themselves as women to around the same degree, then women would have no more difficult a time departing from gender average than men do.

curious20
  • handle: curious
  • location: NY
  • age: 27
  • education: BA, biology
  • occupation: journalist

OB reader/lurker. not much of a commenter -- i often don't get around to reading posts thoroughly until they're a bit old (at least in 'blog time') and the discussion has moved on...

am i an "aspiring rationalist"? maybe. i want to be alert to irrational behavior/decisions in my life. i'm not yet ready to commit that i will consistently abandon those behaviors and decisions, but i at least want to acknowledge when they're not rationally defensible.

1Paul Crowley
Enough of us read the comments feed that you can often see new discussions spark in old posts; give it a go.