All of Fetterkey's Comments + Replies

Do you have a link to some well-written material on the subject? You've piqued my curiosity.

You are right. Thank you for pointing that out, you have helped me improve.

The amount of will necessary to close a window is itself trivial, if will can indeed be considered a resource to be spent.

Shouldn't rational individuals be able to avoid such perils?

Why?

Even the typing style of this message makes it sound irrational. Were you joking?

I think it would help.

I declare Crocker's Rules.

My mistake, I was referring to the Edward Tufte stuff. Thank you for correcting me.

I'd say the initial comment probably was worthy of the downvote, but the rest weren't.

I've had drops of 5 or 6 karma at a time as someone goes through and downvotes all my comments in a particular thread, but I think that's the price we have to pay; by and large, the karma system here seems to work very well, and provides a very useful method of gauging posts.

To elaborate on your third point, I think the expected return from cooperating so as to bring back information and continue your work is far greater than the expected return from remaining defiant in order to deny the enemy a propaganda victory.

This is extremely belated, but I know several people who would be willing to eliminate the vast majority of their values in this fashion, at least if they believed that they were truly helping humanity.

This is common not just in sports, but in other fields as well. If the Allies had been thrown back into the sea on D-Day, it would have gone down as a historic blunder; many, perhaps even most, judge decisions not by their expected chance of succeeding but by their results.

I understand this research, view it as important, and know several people who are working in this field at the present time. That said, the work of geneticists is quite different from casual social observations and generalizations. When I speak out against sweeping generalizations based on gender or ethnicity, I do not speak out against the geneticists.

I'm quite surprised that this requires explanation, since this seems like basic-level rationality to me, but here we go:

Generalizations about people of a particular ethnicity, based solely on their ethnicity, are racist. Overt racism is not acceptable in modern civilized society. In the past, overt racism was acceptable, but we have moved beyond that. It is extremely unwise both from a personal belief perspective and from a general signalling perspective to hold or argue for such views.

I strongly agree, and I'd like to add that I definitely see a place for this sort of instrumental rationality here.

I fear I play a poor inquisitor, and you a poor Galileo. The thought that it's all right to make broad generalizations about large groups of people isn't some great new theory that society is trying to suppress-- it's just wrong. Indeed, such an idea is regressive, not revolutionary.

"there's absolutely nothing wrong with men making generalizations about women, nothing wrong with whites making generalizations about blacks or vice versa. allowing overly sensitive members of minority groups to dictate behavior is a waste of time."

Are you serious? Assuming that you are, you are treading on ground that is far from stable, especially in a place such as this...

This may be somewhat tangential, but a bit of graph theory would do wonders, especially theory related to recognizing deceptive or misleading graphs.

Easier != better than.

I find his stance in this regard to be absolutely correct; if you're going to write a book on methods of manipulating people, you may as well call a spade a spade.

I am not female, and I find some of the language and PUA-related content here to be extremely off-putting. If you really want to refine the art of seduction, I would suggest reading Greene; this blog, on the other hand, is for refining the art of rationality.

I think that your efforts would be better spent taming the "sex-crazed maniac" part of your brain, frankly.

Could you explain in what sense you mean "personally responsible?"

Can you clarify your disagreement with the doctrine of an unaccountable judiciary?

Strictly speaking, is the potential for gaming the system even really a problem? Someone who is successful in doing so gains nothing other than the ability to post, and as Kaj posted out, gaming the system is likely to be more difficult the more important the "reward" of posting is considered to be. Further, Eliezer mentioned that the free karma for posting is unintentional but low-priority, implying that people getting free karma isn't exactly a big deal here.

Concur. The most effective people I've known have combined a fair degree of intelligence and knowledge with a distinct integrative facility. Compartmentalization can at times be a useful tool for simplifying a problem, but in other cases, it can blind you to potential unconventional solutions.