This one is a rather good example of my original point tbh
All the Scandinavian countries did just this in the 60s and 70s when abortions had become a reasonably safe procedure and all of them ended up with some variant of:
No questions asked in first trimester Medical reasons in second and third trimester Induced birth and adoption if foetus is viable.
And since around 1980, there has been zero controversy on the subject, mostly because just about everyone is happy with things as they are.
Huh.
I did the same thing and came to the exact opposite conclusion and have been commuting by two-wheeler for 15 years now.
What swayed me was:
A huge proportion of the accidents involved really excessive speed.
A similarly huge proportion happened to untrained motorcyclists.
So: If I don't speed (much) and take the time to practice regularly on a track, preferably with an instructor, I have eliminated just about all the serious accidents. In actuality I have had zero accidents outside the track, and the "accidents" on the track has been to deliber...
I have spent quite a lot of my life writing specifications for software. If you actually want sensible results, you need to be able to get across what goal you are trying to accomplish and why, then let the programmers figure out the how. Trying to specify the actual result in detail would mean writing the software outright. The only complete and unambigous specification for a program is its source.
This seems similar somehow.
This may be off topic, but I have never been entirely able to accept that politics is the mind-killer. I suspect that two party politics may be killing the mind while multi-party systems are merely mind-numbing.
Where I live, we currently have 8 parties in parliament, let's call them the infra-reds, reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, indigos and violets. Currently, the blues and violets are in charge, but they need support from either the oranges or the greens and indigos in order to actually pass any laws or regulations. Last year, we had the reds, ...
In my experience, the beneficial effects of nicotine are weak and short-lived. They appeared not to stack with caffeine and I prefer coffee to gum. I didn't experience any dependency effects, but neither have I from other drugs, so that may not be a reliable indicator. My friends look at me strange when I talk about nootropics, so none to compare with
I think you might need both variants because if I were to answer such questions, the response would not necessarily be symmetrical;
(assuming reasonable requests)
Also, pets trigger oxytocin release.
A dog usually also "forces" you to exercise moderately by walking it and exercising while depressed is notoriously difficult to follow through on.
I vaguely remember reading a study that found talking to your dog gave the same result as talking to a therapist, (indicating that talking is more important than having someone listen) but I can't find the link at the moment, maybe I misremember.
Owning a dog is not the only option either, I have fairly regularly lent out some of mine to friends and family going throug...
Anyone care to elaborate on Why a Bayesian is not allowed to look at the residuals?
I got hunches, but don't feel qualified to explain in detail.
A political question:
Our recently elected minister for finance just did something unexpected. She basically went:
“Last autumn during the election campaign, I said we should do X. After four months of looking at the actual numbers, it turns out that X is a terribad idea, so we are going to do NOT X”
(She used more obfuscating terms, she’s a politician after all.)
The evidence points to her actually changing her mind rather than lying during the election.
The question:
Would you prefer a politician sane enough to change her mind when presented with convincing evidence or one that you (mostly) agree with?
Your first point is of course valid. My algorithm for determining value of a life is probably a bit different from yours because I end up with a very different result. I determine the value of a life in the following manner:
Value = Current contribution to making this ball of rock a better place + (Quality of life + Unrealised potential) * Number of remaining years.
If we consider extended life spans, the first element of that equation is dwarfed by the rest so we can consider that to be zero for the purpose of this discussion.
Quality of life involves a ...
You're right. Those numbers weren't just slightly coloured by hindsight bias but thoroughly coated in several layers of metallic paint and polished. They need to be adjusted drastically down. The reasons I originally considered them to be reasonable are:
The field of cancer research seem to be a lot like software in the 80s in that our technical ability to produce new treatments is increasing faster than the actual number of treatments produced. This means that any money thrown at small groups of people with a garage and a good idea is almost certain
The only lies to children should be Lies to Children. Any other lies, including Santa, creationism or any other fiction presented as facts should be considered child abuse.
(My ex tried to bring up our children as YECs after being 'born again' and our courts ruled this to be child abuse which is why I'm a single dad. I may be a bit more than the average fanatical about this particular point.)
I have a view on this that I didn't find by quickly skimming the replies here. Apologies if it's been hashed to death elsewhere.
I simply can't get the numbers to add up when it comes to cryonics.
Let's assume a probability of 1 of cryonics working and the resulting expected lifespan to be until the sun goes out. That would equal a net gain of around 4 billion years or so. Now, investing the same amount of money in life extension research and getting, say a 25% chance of gaining a modest increase in lifespan of 10 years for everyone would equal 70bn/4 = 17...
At roughly double the time investment. I prefer to commute by bicycle whenever possible (I live in a city where about 20% of people bike to work during summer and about 5% during the winter, so I suspect risk is lowered by bikes being more common on the road). The commute by bike takes about 80 minutes (including return), sitting in rush-hour traffic takes about the same, as would "non-dangerous" exercise. Discounting the negative effects of commuting by car, I would still be losing about 400 hours per year by "exercising safely".
So ...
I never had a watershed moment when I ‘discovered' rationalism. For those of you who grew up with religion and take faith as a more or less given part of society, I must have had a rather peculiar childhood; When I was little, I spent quite a lot of time with my grandfather who was an uneducated farmer and had never heard of Bayes’ Theorem. (But loved it when I recently explained the basics to him.) I remember starting sentences with "I believe…" and I never got any further before being interrupted with "If you want to believe, you can go...
I find it interesting to observe that my youngest who is moderately autistic operates exclusively in 'Tell' mode. Either he models everyone else as autistic, or he doesn't model other people at all, it is hard to tell from the outside, but in either case 'Guess' and 'Ask' modes are essentially unavailable to him.
This genuinely threw me because I had no idea there was anything wrong with freedom of speech in Sweden. This because I get consistently less flak when I express controversial views among Swedish friends than when among Americans. My handful of Swedish friends appears not to be representative.
On the other hand, the same is true in Norway, Denmark and Finland and they have quite significantly less issues. Also, I realise 'everyone is happy' was poor wording. A better one would be 'everyone has agreed this is a workable compromise that it's not worth fighting over, for a value of everyone that is approx. 95% of the population'