On the other hand, if you think that a contingent fact will get you out of a hard choice, perhaps you will be more likely to find legitimate contingent facts.
Conversely, I can't think of any applications for which tying IQ to race is useful.
If the results of the racial IQ studies are true, then that is very important because it disproves the doctrine of ethnic cognitive equality. Many people, especially in America, have this idea that all ethnic groups must have exactly equal average cognitive ability, and that if one or more ethnic groups perform below average on a test of aptitude, that is taken as strong evidence that the test is invalid and racially biased and thus cannot be used.
For this reason, many ...
I'm confused. Consequentialists do not have access to the actual outcomes when they are making their decisions, so using that as a guideline for making moral decisions is completely unhelpful.
It also seems that your statement that good intentions don't justify the means is false. Consider this counterexample:
I have 2 choices A and B. Option A produces 2 utilons with 50% probability and -1 utilon the rest of the time. Choice B is just 0 utilons with 100% probability.
My expected utility for option A is +0.5 utilons which is greater than the 0 utilons for...
This is an interesting point, but let's try a thought experiment to see if it holds up. Consider the following statements you could make about yourself
Where X is some value that is impressive and/or noteworthy. How strong of a negative reaction do you think each of these would get?
Here's what my intuition says:
I think the behavior we are seeing here may be more a case of loss aversion rather than anything else.
Assuming that red cards must come at some point (true if we are flipping over a limited set of cards with a blue-red ratio of 7 to 3; not sure if that is the setup), the subjects adopt a strategy that gives them the highest likelihood of avoiding failure completely. Predicting blue cards every time requires accepting a certain degree failure right from the outset and is thus unpalatable to the human mind which is loss-averse.
Even if the experiment is desi...
These were my thoughts when I read this.
A better analogy might be buying stock in a technology startup which is making a product completely unlike anything on the market now. It is certainly more risky than the sure thing, with lots of potential for losing your investment, but also has a much much higher potential payoff. This is generally the case in any sort of investing, whether it be investing in a charity or in a business -- the higher the risk, the higher the potential gain. The sure stuff generally has plenty of funding already -- the low hanging...
That link does not talk the effects of estrogen...
I see nothing there that contradicts what I said, but it does seem most of the links are dead.
Aren't numbers a human universal?
No. The Pirahã, for example, have no concept of exact numbers, only of smaller and larger amounts.
Do you have any evidence of this? It seems highly unlikely that the proportion of users of any given programming language that could write a parser would differ by an amount that there are more Scheme users who can write a parser than Java/Python users, given the vastly larger number of users of Java and Python.
For what its worth, python includes its own parser in the standard library, so it would probably be better than scheme in that regard, though I might have to agree with you regarding parsing with Java, though there may very well be a module out there for parsing Java as well.
At best we'd get a lot more people who are excited to participate but loose interest once they realize they have no idea how to write a program to parse the opposing bot.
At worst that is what would happen.
Java and Python are many orders of magnitude more popular than Scheme and if only 10% of the people who get excited about participating actually know how to parse than we would still have much greater numbers.
Same here.
If it were in Java or Python, we could get a whole lot more participants. And more readers who understand the source of the submissions.
I think inherent in the problem is the condition that you fully understand what is going on and you know you aren't part of some weird trick.
It's not realistic, but being realistic isn't the point of the problem.
It could be argued that describing the evidence ought to be a significant focus of the body of a post, if you are trying to persuade someone who might not otherwise be persuaded. It's certainly a useful concept though, particularly when you just want to quickly share an idea that you expect will not require significant persuasive effort to be well received (to avoid people being overconfident in your idea).