I discovered OB some months ago (don't remember how) and reads both OB and LW. For now, I am mostly a lurker.
I have been raised as a Catholic Christian and became atheist midwa...
Québec, Qc, Canada.
In conservation biology, flagship species play the role of cute puppies:
These species are chosen for their vulnerability, attractiveness or distinctiveness in order to best engender support and acknowledgment from the public at large. Thus, the concept of a flagship species holds that by giving publicity to a few key species, the support given to those species will successfully leverage conservation of entire ecosystems and all species contained therein.
This is fighting a bias with a bias: people do not care as much as they should about conservation wh...
Scary, voted up.
This can be pushed further: law/moral/ethics are often "holding us back". The use of dissection of human body has been forbidden/allowed many time in history and this affected our knowledge of anatomy and medicine. Many physical and psychological experiments that have been done before cannot be reproduced today, for they were "unethical".
It doesn't have to be Nazis experimentations. Informed consent requires that the person knows that he is under study, which might skew the results.
Some famous experiments were even again...
Related to the Nazi experiments, there are people in the scientific community who argue that they should not be cited, even in case where they provided valuable information:
Although it is difficult morally, one might concede that within the mass of pseudoscientifc Nazi data some shreds can be valuable to researchers, as a small portion of the hypothermia data has proven to be. Of course, such data should be used only in the most exceptional circumstances and only in the absence of ethically derived data.
This seems absurd. The experiments were horrid an...
True, but that "one kind of rationality" might not be what you think it is. Conchis's point holds if you use "rationality" = "everything should always be taken into account, if possible" or something alike.
A "rational" solution to a problem should always take into account those "but in the real word it doesn't work like that...". Those are part of the problem, too.
For example, a political leader acting "rationally" will take into account the opinion of the population (even if they are "wrong&...
Given a finite amount of time in a day, I have to decide how to use it. While I can afford to take a quick look at each comment when there are only few of them, I have no choice but to ignore some when there are pages of them (and other top-level posts to read). One nice thing with the karma system is the "best to worst" comments order: I can read the first ones and stop reading when encountering too many "boring" ones in a row (but maybe not "boring" enough to merit a downvote).
However, if many people use a similar algorithm ... (read more)