I need some help convincing the people in my "bubble" that it is now safe. Does anyone have any resources that explain - credibly, with citations to data, something that would convince a smart and skeptical person - why it is okay for fully vaccinated people to interact with potentially infected individuals?
So...I actually happen to have converged upon the same insight, and have actually tried to use this exact phrase in the wild.
Unfortunately (being an immigrant) people understandably often assume I was talking about nation-level differences involving my country of birth, rather than my particular family and the specialized microcosm of friends that I surround myself with. Any ideas for making the wording more precise so as to avoid this?
(I've tried modifications like "in my family" or "the way I grew up" or "how I was raised" but more or less the same problem occurs. "Among my friends and I" sort of works, sometimes? But mostly I've just given up on trying to reference culture in navigating misunderstandings.)
Here's an instrumental rationality problem:
Wisdom teeth - preemptively remove them or not?
(risks of surgery / risks of having wisdom teeth / potential benefits of retaining them?)
Attempting to resuscitate a child, failing, and then going about one's day is neither ruthless nor cruel, but I think I understand what you mean. It can be jarring for some people when doctors are seemingly unaffected by the high intensity situations they experience.
Doing good does sometimes require overriding instincts designed to prevent evil. For instance, a surgeon must overcome certain natural instincts not to hurt when she cuts into a patient's flesh and blood pours out. The instinct says this is cruelty, the rational mind knows it will save the life of the patient.
There are hazards involved in overriding natural instincts, such as in C&P where the protagonist overrides natural instincts against murder because he is convinced that it is in the greater good, because instincts exist for good reason. There are also hazards involved in following natural instincts. Humans have the capacity for both.
Following instincts vs. overriding instincts, both variants are appropriate at different times. Putting correctly proportioned trust in reasoning vs. instinct is important. You need to consider when instincts mislead, but you also need to consider when reasoning misleads.
It would be a mistake to take a relatively clear cut case of the doctor's override of natural sympathetic instinct (for which there is a great deal of training and precedent which establishes that it is a good idea) and turn it into a generalized principle of "trust reason over moral instinct" under uncertainty. There is no uncertainty in the doctors case, the correct path is obvious. Just because doctors are allowed to override instincts like "don't cut into flesh" and "grieve when witnessing death" in a case where it has already been predecided that this is a good idea doesn't mean they get free license to override just willy nilly whenever they've convinced themselves it's for a greater good, they still have to undergo the deliberative process of asking whether they've rationalized themselves into something bad.
That sounds like a meaningful experience. Can you be more specific about the paradigm shift it caused and the questions you have about "upholding rationality"?
Another important thing that romance does is cause love.
Being loved (you know, that thing where you get to inject your utility function into another agents system, such that they now have a desire to fulfill your preferences) has many obvious instrumental uses, in addition to the inherent value of loving another person..
Wait a few months to a year. It usually goes away.
Leaving aside the bloody obvious things (universal basic income or other form of care, global internet access, etc)
Prediction market. They tried but it's dead due to gambling laws. Someone should give it a second try.
So basically it is eternal september, then. It's just that lesswrong's "september" took the form of excessively/inappropriately contrarian people.
Best reference materials for calculating children's risk ratio? (Interested in both risk to children themselves in terms of symptoms, and a measure of risk of children being carriers who spread it such as a positive test)