Would you say the origins of other religions become more mysterious if there never were whatever magical beings those religions posit?
Yes, of course.
The least mysterious explanation of Paul Bunyan stories is that there really was a Paul Bunyan. And the closer the real Paul Bunyan hews to the Bunyan of the stories, the smaller the mystery. P(stories about Bunyan | Bunyan) > P(stories about Bunyan | !Bunyan).
But just because a story is simple, doesn't necessarily make it likely. We can't conclude from the above that P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) > P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan).
Neither sufficient nor necessary:
One possible answer is to look at how the then-state-of-the-art models in (say) 1990, 1995, 2000, etc, predicted temperature changes going forwards.
The answer, in point-of-fact, is that they consistently predicted a considerably greater temperature rise than actually took place, although the actual temperature rise is just about within the error bars of most models.
Now, there are two plausible conclusions to this:
Stock markets. I am using them continuously (if passively).
As usual, Nietzsche got there first:
...The heaviest burden: What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment a
I am a big fan of the Ideological Turing Test, and applying it to different domains, and I was happy to participate in this one. However, I wonder whether this is an appropriate domain.
I think the ITT works best when there are coherent and well-defined opposing positions, of roughly equal size and intensity. The abortion debate is a good example - while there are differences in emphasis and gradations of support, it is clear what the two sides are. Other good examples are the minimum wage debate, the global warming debate, and the debate. The ITT works wor...
US prohibition was very successful at its goal of reducing alchohol consumption, and you are right that this is insufficiently appreciated. But it also resulted in massive organised crime. Your linked article is extremely unpersuasive on this point.
Although organized crime flourished under its sway, Prohibition was not responsible for its appearance, as organized crime’s post-Repeal persistence has demonstrated.
Ha! And lest anyone thinks I'm being unfair, that is literally its only discussion of the massive increase in organized crime caused by Prohibi...
Pre-commitment needs to be credible, verifiable and enforceable. If you're playing chicken, pre-commitment means throwing the steering-wheel out of the window, not just saying "I will never ever swerve, pinky-swear."
What is the relevant pre-commitment mechanism here, and how does it operate?
If anything, I would say large dealers are more vulnerable.
With my omnivore hat on:
I don't know what you mean by "suffering." Google defines it as "the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship." But just because you're going through pain and hardship, doesn't mean you'd rather be dead. You can be suffering in some ways, and still have a net-positive life - indeed, this is the normal meaning of suffering. Do you deny that the inhabitants of the Syrian refugee camps are suffering? Do you think they'd be better off not to have been born?
Do factory farmed animals sometimes suffer? Surely. Is their life such a constant torment that non-existence would be preferable? Surely not.
Oh, I thought we were talking about reality. EMH claims to describe reality, doesn't it?
Yeah, but you wanted "a scenario where everything is happening pre-tax, there are no transaction costs, we're operating in risk-adjusted terms and, to make things simple, the risk-free rate is zero. Moreover, the markets are orderly and liquid." That doesn't describe reality, so describing events in your scenario necessitates a toy model.
In the real world, it is trivial to show how you can lose money even if the EMH is true: you have to pay tax, transaction...
The annotated RichardKennaway:
This is a quote from Henry IV part I, when Glendower is showing off to the other rebels, claiming to be a sorceror, and Hotspur is having none of it.
Glendower:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur:
Why, so can I, or so can any man
But will they come when you do call for them?
Second, when you say they are "a poor investment in terms of expected return", do you actually mean expected return? ... A lottery can perfectly well have a positive expected return even if your chance of getting a positive return is very small.
Yes, I mean expected return. If you hold penny stocks, you can expect to lose money, because the occasional big wins will not make up for the small losses. You are right that we can imagine lotteries with positive expected return, but in the real world lotteries have negative expected return, because th...
Consider penny stocks. They are a poor investment in terms of expected return (unless you have secret alpha). But they provide a small chance of very high returns, meaning they operate like lottery tickets. This isn't a mispricing - some people like lottery tickets, and so bid up the price until they become a poor investment in terms of expected return (problem for the CAPM, not for the EMH). So you can systematically lose money by taking the "wrong" side, and buying penny stocks.
Does that count as an example, or does that violate your "risk...
For Omnivores:
America has an obesity crisis, but I don't see any reason to think that meat specifically is a major part of it. I'm far more worried about the sugar consumption. If, as part of a general reduction in calorific intake, the meat consumption fell, that would be a good thing, but I worry more about people too poor to afford steak.
Regarding planetary "health" - the damage seems to me to be caused by a lack of pr...
Birds have a ZZ/ZW system where the male is the homogametic sex.
Yes, birds have testosterone. Mind you, women have testosterone. It's the elevated quantity of testosterone that leads to masculinity.
Woman is the biological default. That's why women have redundancy on the 23rd chromosomal pair, whereas men have a special "Y" chromosome - leading to much higher rates of genetic disorders in men. That's why in infant male humans, the testicles have to descend. And so on. Both from an encoding and from a developmental point of view, a man is a woman altered to be masculine. And testosterone is what does that altering.
Yes, it could have been different. We can imagine a species with a neutral default, which then gets altered to be either masculine or feminine by different sex-encoding hormones. But that's not how humans came about.
A capitalist employer selects an accountant from a pool of 100 applicants. A feudal lord would groom a serf boy who has a knack for horses into the job of the adult stable man.
A capitalist employer grooms a management trainee for a future role, while a feudal lord selects a mercenary from those applying for the job.
My vote is for "false dichotomy." There has been a rise in selection (because the world is freer and more connected) but there is still plenty of grooming too. Note that even in your stable boy example, there was selection.
Cicero wasn't Greek and is most known as a jurist and politician, not as a philosopher.
Would it be fair to summarise your post thus: "aid to the poorest people on earth is an ineffective way to create utils, it is better to invest in western businesses" ?
The first half of your "summary" is a utilitarian framing, and the second half is a recommendation of investment in the West. Neither are anywhere in the post. So no, this is not a fair summary.
My two-sentence summary would be:
...Effective methods rely on a tight feedback loop between action and results, which is best provided by a market. Wealth is a function of produ
The OP suggests that colonization is in fact a proven way to turn poor countries into productive ones.
Nope. Provide a quote or retract.
What I actually said was that nothing short of colonisation is known to work.
So you're doubling down. Ok, whatever.
No, I have nothing to say about the rest of your comment. I think productive discussion normally requires that both participants feel the other is arguing in good faith. I don't feel that.
You also don't provide an argument that Harvard has a high use for marginal dollars.
My argument is precisely the opposite. My argument is that Harvard is so rich that it has very low use for marginal dollars, but at the same time it has a credible commitment to its future state, so large donations to Harvard will serve to swell its endowment. And also that Harvard has demonstrated the ability to manage its endowment well. Therefore funds donated to Harvard are likely to be invested indefinitely - and therefore to provide increasing amounts of economic tools that will benefit mankind, both now and in the future.
Unfortunately, most of the funds invested to finance people like Norman Borlaug turned out not to be financing Norman Borlaug.
Sure, I wasn't suggesting that Borlaug's work was replicable.
Still, if you want to generalize from that example, feel free.
When did I generalize from that example? I was merely refuting the crass claim that giving money to a starving woman and child (note the incidental misandry!) must be better than creating economic tools.
That's true. But conditions in sub-Saharan Africa have improved by a lot less than in other regions that were extremely poor 50 years ago, such as China and South-East Asia. For most of that period, growth in Africa was slower than growth in the West, despite the fact that catch-up growth is much easier. Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall further behind China (growth rate of 4.24% versus 7.7%, both for 2013) despite the fact that catch-up growth should favour Africa.
This is not a success story.
I am astonished by this comment, and even more so that it has been upvoted. I wrote (and it's clear for all to see):
Providing cash transfers to [the people there] mostly merely raises consumption, rather than substantially raising productivity.
This is backed up by the paper, which notes that just 39% of the cash transfers boosted assets (see pg 12 and Table1), meaning that 61% of the transfer had been consumed. The productivity effects were similarly modest. And note that these figures were taken just one year after the transfer, and so likely overesti...
You misquoted me
I didn't quote you at all (aside from the very opening bit, which was verbatim, and a few words later in quotation marks), I paraphrased you. It wasn't my intention to paraphrase inaccurately, and I'm sorry if you consider that I did.
On the substantive question: first of all, there is a difference between what you say ("just 39% of the cash transfers boosted assets") and what the paper actually says (on average, assets were boosted by 39% of the cash transferred), and I think it's an important one. Secondly, we are talking here...
I think you are confused. You say I don't suggest an alternative, but then you correctly identify my suggested alternative in the very next sentence.
To be clear: None of the top recommended charities on GiveWell, including Give Directly, are aimed at famine relief, so if your top concern is starvation, your complaint should be directed at them. But if you want specific examples of such tools, I would certainly say that the funds invested to finance Norman Borlaug 's research were better spent than wasting them on aid, because that investment created the economic tools to prevent future famines, as opposed to temporary relief. See the Maimonides quote at the top.
Unfortunately, most of the funds invested to finance people like Norman Borlaug turned out not to be financing Norman Borlaug.
Still, if you want to generalize from that example, feel free. The conclusion would be that would-be effective altruists should be sending their money to the Mexican government, which is what was paying Norman Borlaug to do the work that led to his discoveries. We could generalize further and suggest supporting government-sponsored research. But I don't think there's any credible way to get from Norman Borlaug to saying that the best way to help the world's poorest people is to invest in the stock market or to send money to elite US universities like Harvard, which were your preferred options.
To expand on what OrphanWilde wrote:
The Just World Hypothesis can be summarised as "you reap what you sow." If you wish to argue that you don't "deserve" to reap what you sow (perhaps because you didn't have access to better seeds), or that it's not "just" to reap what you sow (because everyone should reap in rough equality, regardless of how they sowed), or similar, that's fine, but you aren't arguing against the Just World Hypothesis.
So when we see the fruit, the Just World Hypothesis tells us: that's probably how the person...
Excellent post.
Related: It only takes a small extension of the logic to show that the Just World Hypothesis is a useful heuristic.
You will pay extra, as in you will pay more than the ring is worth. If you buy a diamond ring, turn around and try to sell it back, they'll give you something like 30% for it.
This has always struck me as such a strange argument against buying a diamond ring, because it's true about every retail purchase. If you buy a chair, then turn around and try to sell it back to the store, you'd be lucky to get 30%, but no-one thinks that's an argument for sitting on the floor. You buy a chair because you want to sit on it, not as the start of a complicated chair-r...
Biology may include studying traditions of behaviour, but biology is not itself a tradition of behaviour.
Regarding the question of what ancient Greeks meant by "the good," I'd start with the SEP.
I have no idea about anthropological data from non-Western cultures.
This is a very old argument. Certainly anyone familiar with Nietzsche or Strauss will have seen one version of it rehearsed. But it's not entirely persuasive (there are some excellent counter-arguments already in this thread), and there are reams of literature on it.
The truth is, we do not know for certain what Plato or Aristotle really meant, and these philological arguments don't - can't - settle the matter.
That's possible. It's also possible, as Thiel says, that people shy away from unpopular truths out of conformity bias. Which is the bigger bias?
In Thiel's view, (and mine), the chief problem is not that people are overconfidently proposing answers to that question. The chief problem is that people have no answers at all to that question, and can't think of any ways to generate them. You are right that it's a hard question, because you can be mistaken, and reversed stupidity is not truth, and so on. But it's not an impossible one.
Look, a single quote like this is never going to prove, to the satisfaction of the sceptical, a controversial thesis. But whole sections of the book are dedicated to arguing in favour of what Thiel calls the "determinate" viewpoint (that what matters is vision, planning and execution, and "secrets") and against the "indeterminate" viewpoint (it's all social context, luck, insurance, EMH). See for example this lecture in the series on which the book was based. It's possible Thiel goes too far in some instances, but the point he...
Err... I don't know. Proposing with a fake £10 ring sounds cheesy to me. You can always go shopping together for the wedding bands :-)
I agree it would be cheesy to propose with something fake-looking, but you can buy a really nice-looking ring for that price, that she is unlikely to realise isn't real (unless she's a jeweller). I proposed that way and afterwards when I told my fiancee that we had to buy a real ring, she was surprised that the ring wasn't real. Maybe I shouldn't have told her :)
The problem with non-GIA certificates is that because GIA is...
This is a perfect exemplar of something I really hate about this website. A poster asks for advice about how to buy a diamond, and instead he gets mostly replies saying "don't buy a diamond." I will try and actually be helpful.
My advice would be:
This is a perfect exemplar of something I really hate about this website. A poster asks for advice about how to buy a diamond, and instead he gets mostly replies saying "don't buy a diamond." I will try and actually be helpful.
Being pedantic, the original question was
I would like to propose to my girlfriend in the near future. For this I would like to use a diamond ring.
and your first suggestion was
Propose with a "fake" ring, then go shopping for the "real" ring together.
This seems like a reasonable suggestion. But ...
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Now, hold that thought, and consider that the most likely explanation is that you are wrong.
When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization.
Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
...When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a genera
Captain Cook did fine in Australia. It was Hawaii that got him.
The problem is that most of our modern methods rely on other technology that was also not available in the 13th century. So you need to be aware of disused practices, not modern ones. In your example, sterilisation would be useful, but also very expensive. Washing your hands would typically be counterproductive, because they often did not have access to clean water. Spreading cholera is bad! That is why people drank small beer rather than water.
Useful maps:
My own experience is in London and Cambridge.
I think your intuitions are steering you wrong if you'd expect this kind of thing among the "undereducated" (your word). That might be true in the US, but in Britain most people from those social echelons simply don't attend church, and haven't for generations, as an effect of urbanisation. Of course, there are relatively poor and uneducated people with that relation to religion in the Black Country, but they aren't Christians.
If you want to find devout Christians, you need to find educated, middle cla...
These pockets definitely exist in the UK. There are a fair number of devout Christians here, although they don't shout about it because mainstream society is so hostile to Christianity. They are also easily the nicest people I've met.
[Peer review] rejects far more than implausible/insane/unworthy ideas.
What else does it reject?
I see papers get rejected all the time for methodological disagreements and failure to cite papers the referee thinks important. More broadly, ideas that are perfectly plausible but contrary to current thinking in a field have a much higher threshold to publication than ideas consonant with current thinking.
But more generally, peer review is normally explicitly aimed at rejecting work judged to be non-novel or non-substantial. That boring replication attemp...
The purpose of peer review is just to make sure what's in the paper is plausible and sane, and worth being presented to a wider audience. The purpose is to weed out obvious low-quality material such as perpetual motion machines or people who are duplicating other's work as their own.
Maybe, but this isn't how actual peer review operates. It rejects far more than implausible/insane/unworthy ideas.
Real review of one's work begins after peer review is over and the work is examined by the scientific community at large.
I agree with this, if you'll conced...
Since a tradition of behaviour is not susceptible of the distinction between essence and accident), knowledge of it is unavoidably knowledge of its detail: to know only the gist is to know nothing.
Ah, but it is good to be light-hearted, light as a feather, floating on air, on cloud nine, to have a light touch, make light work or to tread lightly, whereas it is bad to be ponderous, heavy-footed, weighed down, find things heavy going, throw your weight around, make heavy weather, or to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.
There is a great deal of linguistic tension between whether "heavy" or "light" is good, one that exists in many different languages. See also the lengthy discussion on "heavy" versus "light" at the start of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Is your point that property can be trade-like? That it exists not only because either you or the government has enough guns to chase away trespassers, but also because a tit-for-tat trade-like "I won't touch stuff you call yours if you promise the same" social agreement is seen as mutually beneficial, even without much of an enforcement?
Kinda. I would de-emphasise the "mutually beneficial" and "promise" bits and emphasise the notion of self-reinforcing equilibrium. After all, you do have to defend your property, because the...
No, I didn't leave that part out.
Of course magic makes everything else more mysterious i.e. P(magical Jesus) is infinitesimal. But P(non magical Jesus) is not low. We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter.