I thought of Myers as well, particularly since PZ is a biologist and not a huge fan of evolutionary psychology it could lead to some informative debate.
Regardless I would be very interested to see a discussion with a physicist/biologist/chemist as opposed to a philosopher/economist/computer scientist. We seem to get a lot of the latter but not much of the former and I'd like to see their perspective on some of our brand of rationality.
One of the concepts I've been playing with is the idea that the advantage of knowing our innate biases is not so much in overcoming them but in identifying and circumventing them.
Your common scenarios regarding risk assessment and perceptions of loss vs. gain generally assume a basis in evolutionary psychology. If these are in fact built into our brains it strikes me trying to overcome them directly is a skill we can never fully master and trying to do so brings tempts akrasia.
Consider a scenario where you can spend $1000 to have a 50% shot of winning $250...
Just a personal observation that for me there seem to be two classes of akrasia.
1) Inertial akrasia: I should be doing task X, I could do task X well if I just got going, I just can't seem to make myself do task X.
2) Exhaustive akrasia: I want to do task X but I've exhausted my willpower reserve. It's hard to start task X and even when I start I generally drift off-task as I've expunged my willpower reserves.
Type 1) akrasia consists of things like getting out of bed and procrastinating, type 2) is more zoning out midday or being unproductive after getting ...
Why not a top level post noting the lack of women on LW?
Doesn't have to be anything fancy, just note the survey results you don't even have to offer any analysis, just noting the problem in a top level post should be enough to draw some women out of the woodwork in the comments section. It might even inspire a few of them to write their own top level posts.
I should clarify.
I'm specifically thinking of Linus Pauling with his theories about Vitamin C curing cancer and a former Nobel winning physicist (can't remember who) doing a debunking of global warming based on some flaky arguments. Of course Wikipedia claims that Pauling may not have been completely out to lunch (though I don't really trust Wikipedia when it comes to junk science). And I don't really have any hard numbers, just knowledge of a couple cases and some anecdotes from scientists complaining about the tendency of Nobel winners to turn crackpot.
I suppose this could underline the danger I was mentioning about working with limited evidence as I fell victim in my very own example of it!
Awesome work.
One thing that disappointed, but didn't really surprise me, was the lack of diversity in the community
"160 (96.4%) were male, 5 (3%) were female, and one chose not to reveal their gender.
The mean age was 27.16, the median was 25, and the SD was 7.68. The youngest person was 16, and the oldest was 60. Quartiles were 30.
Of the 158 of us who disclosed our race, 148 were white (93.6%), 6 were Asian, 1 was Black, 2 were Hispanic, and one cast a write-in vote for Middle Eastern. Judging by the number who put "Hinduism" as their family...
I suspect that part of the problem is that we regularly work with designed systems that have a master plan that can be derived from a small amount of evidence.
I've been playing alot of portal and half life 2 lately. (first person shooters with heavy puzzle elements) and I wonder about how the level design is affecting my thought process.
I'm often in a room with a prominent exit and it is clear that that is the exit I'm supposed to take. When the way I came in is blocked I know that there is some other way to get out. When my computer controlled squad mate...
I agree about the political views. The problem is any political parties I've come along with a huge amount of baggage in associated ideas and I'm very hesitant to claim membership with a political tribe lest I signal support for the crazy bits.
Of course some people who post can effectively obscure the signal that they care about karma by trying to display an alternate valid reason they posted.
I can see the reasoning though I don't quite agree for two reasons.
1) If the Lancet report is at all accurate that's a lot of deaths for the long-term benefits to make up for.
2) How much more extreme has that made the rest of the middle east? How has it hurt the possibility of peace in Israel.
I was, and still am against the start of the war, though I've been fairly consistent in thinking they should stay since then. (Oddly enough I thought the surge was a good idea when virtually no-one else did, though have since started to think it didn't really do anything now that everyone is moving on board!).
I can't really relate to the religious stories, my parents, though not atheists, are pretty secular so I never had the brush with religious indoctrination. In reality I've probably always been an atheist. I think this gave me an early start on rationality, not so much because atheism taught me rationality, but because I never had to abandon a rational line of thought for fear of challenging my religion.
As for consciously trying to be rational though I don't know of any one defining moment though I can recall a slight watershed. During grade 11 I was selec...
Something that I don't so much believe as assign a higher probability than other people.
There is a limit to how much technology humans can have, how much of the universe we can understand and how complicated of devices we can make. This isn't necessarily a universal IQ limit but more of an asymptotic limit that our evolved brains can't surpass. And this limit is lower, perhaps substantially so, than what we would need to do a lot of the cool stuff like achieve the singularity and start colonizing the universe.
I think it's even possible that some sort of as...
I disagree. I think the real benefit in something like this is to is hear a discussion with a community outsider. A discussion between Elizer and Robin would be interesting but wouldn't offer anything substantially different than existing LW/OB content.