The Wikipedia article listing number of neurons in the cerebral cortex shows humans as significantly higher than whales, even though raw brain size may look better for whales. Wikipedia also describes an encephalization quotient which takes account of the fact that the brain is used for bodily functions, and on which whales don't score as highly as they may seem to from brain size.
Doing everything it takes to achieve some result, rather than just following the rules, creates perverse incentives for other people to slack off because they know that you will do whatever it takes.
It may still be a good idea when the consequences of not getting the result are so bad that even the negative effect of the perverse incentive isn't as bad, but that usually happens only with superheroes and Harry Potter-like characters.
Also, Batman is not so much defined by taking action, but by plot armor.
It can also create unsustainable expectations, which can be just as bad.
I once worked for a company that got bitten badly by this. Just after it left the startup stage, it got slapped with a contract that it realistically couldn't have met on time. Unwilling to accept this, the engineering team chose to do whatever it took to get the product out the door; one senior engineer in particular, a friend of mine, put in hundred-hour weeks to implement key features. And they succeeded. I probably wouldn't have gotten hired if they hadn't -- I came in just aft...
I think there's a difference between "does no harm, because it had a substantial chance of doing harm, but someone got lucky", and "does no harm, and the chance of harm wasn't ever substantial to begin with".
Replacing food with Soylent is weird. Perhaps in your social circle it's a plausible thing to do, but I'm pretty certain that most people would think it's a bizarre thing to do regardless of what certain geek social circles might think.
In fact, that's my impression of lots of LW-style ideas, such as cryonics and SI-style AI research.
Rationality always works when it is done perfectly. But it's incredibly easy to miss something and come to a weird conclusion by pure rationality. And being partly rational can be pretty bad when irrationality has evolved ch...
Is "approved as a food" like those fake star naming companies which claim that that the star names are in the library of Congress?
The FDA approving it as a food doesn't mean the FDA approves of it being consumed in a specific way. I'm pretty sure ketchup is approved as a food too, but that doesn't mean you can drink a bottle of it for lunch each day and stay healthy.
If I remember right Taleb makes somewhere the point that the word believe derives from a word that means trust.
I often see this argument from religions themselves or similar sources, not from those opposed to religion. Not this specific argument, but this type of argument--the idea of using the etymology of a word to prove something about the concept represented by the word. As we know or should know, a word's etymology may not necessarily have much of a connection to what it means or how it is used today. ("malaria" means "bad air&quo...
I'd expect the answer to be similar to an analogous situation involving birth. If everyone had more children than they could afford to raise, society would collapse. We like to think that since the children are not responsible for their situation, we as a society would choose to support them, but this only is possible because the number of people who have children and demand that society support them is limited. At some point the drain on resources would make it impossible to support them as a society, and we would have to let them starve, and/or not pe...
I meant that nobody accuses people awed by airplanes of being arrogant; I didn't mean that nobody is awed by airplanes.
(BTW, I wouldn't be surprised if Edison did say something similar; he was notorious for self-promotion.)
Airplanes may not work on fusion or weigh millions of tons, but still, substituting a few words in I could say similar things about airplanes. Or electrical grids. Or smallpox vaccination. But nobody does.
Hypothesis: he has an emotional reaction to the way nuclear weapons are used--he thinks that is arrogant--and he's letting those emotions bleed into his reaction to nuclear weapons themselves.
I think (it's not my post) that it's supposed to be evidence that numbers are real because the set of all possible minds is vast. Because there are so many possible minds, it's unlikely that a mind chosen randomly from that set would have similar intuitions about numbers to mine. It's even more unlikely that a third mind would also have those intuitions. Yet, for some reason, this vastly unlikely thing happens anyway. This implies that there is some reason which is responsible for all the minds feeling the same way. One such reason would be "the ...
Wouldn't a lot of either standard best practices or cutting edge research fall under what is considered "dark arts" here? So this really becomes "you can use Dark Arts for good purposes". Whether you should do so seems at least questionable, although I can see some arguments for it (such as when you need to use it to get rid of the effect of biases or to oppose someone else's dark arts).
Ooh, I get to comment.
A particular dull explanation is more likely than a particular exciting one. But it is possible that dull explanations, in general, are not more likely than exciting ones, in general, because there might be more of the exciting explanations even though each individual one is less likely.
(This is not typical--if you have cold symptoms, you probably have a cold and not an exotic disease--but it's possible.)
There's no reason to think that there's a teapot-shaped asteroid resembling Russell's teapot either.
And I'm pretty sure we haven't looked for one, either. Yet it would be ludicrous to treat it as if it had a substantial probability of existing.