All of austhinker's Comments + Replies

And some people still believe that people choose to be homosexual.

If that were so, why would teenagers commit suicide instead of choosing to be heterosexual.

To me, a gay man is just less competition, and since lots of women are not interested in me anyway, what difference does it make if some of them are gay?

0anon895
Inherent flaws of moral codes based on non-deterministic ideas of free will aside, I don't think I've ever seen a version of that argument where the two sides admitted that they were using different definitions of "be homosexual".

"If a man heareth me and believeth not, I shall not judge him." or words to that effect.

I think it's somewhere around John 12, or is that Luke 12?, quoting Jesus.

Sorry, it's been a while since I last checked.

2wnoise
John 12: 47 And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. 48 He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.

Also, "what we don't know that we don't know"

9sketerpot
You realize, I hope, that the following are true? 1. The fission reaction was stopped long before things got dodgy. The problem was the decay heat of fission products still left in the fuel. 2. Containment is still in place. The worst radiation releases have been some very short-lived isotopes in steam, at low concentrations. 3. Radiation exposure to the workers is well within safe limits, as measured by their dosimeters, and they're the ones closest to the reactors. 4. Japan has been hit by a huge earthquake, with a death toll of more than a thousand people. To fixate on a (nuclear, and therefore scary) power plant accident that hasn't endangered the public , when there are so many worse things to be worrying about, is exactly the kind of irrational double standard that Less Wrong readers should endeavor to recognize and avoid. If you want to improve safety, focus on the things that are actually dangerous.
1Manfred
And succeed, if the worst that's released is irradiated steam. Failing non-catastrophically is also a part of control.

Some people practice "Radical Honesty" which seems much like that. Seems to me you'd need to start young, before you've got too many skeletons in the closet, before you've got too much to lose, and whilst you have time to recover. Probably also need an honesty-proof career.

As for sounding crazy, I'm already crazy and readily admit it.

2TheOtherDave
Well, even if you don't have those things (a skeleton-less life, an honesty-proof career, etc.) you might still find that the you value the costs of honesty, however substantial they might be, less than the costs of continued deception. Of course, I agree with you that the costs are lower when you have less invested in deception.

Who are you quoting?

I seem to recall having read/heard this before.

Mind you, it depends on the reliability of it working. If something has a (real) 90% chance of making the problem twice as bad, but just happens to fix it, then it's still stupid.

I think the potential usefulness is to shock some people out of their mental ataxia and into prioritizing their wishes in order to focus their will.

It might be more accurate to substitute "rules" for "procedures".

Unfortunately in Medicine at least, there seems to be a substantial degree of sloppiness in applying the rules, particularly in the use of metastudies.

Define "effectiveness as a person" - in many cases the bias leading to the pre-written conclusion has some form of survival value (e.g. social survival). Due partly to childhood issues resulting in a period of complete? rejection of the value of emotions, I have an unusually high resistance to intellectual bias, yet on a number of measures of "effectiveness as a person" I do not seem to be measuring up well yet (on some others I seem to be doing okay).

Also, as I mentioned in my reply to the first comment, real world algorithms are often... (read more)

3cousin_it
I think bias is irrelevant here. My point was that, whatever your definition of "effectiveness as a person", your actions are determined by the algorithm that caused them, not by the algorithm that you profess to follow.

"What would count as evidence about whether the author wrote the conclusion down first or at the end of his analysis?":

Past history of accuracy/trustworthiness;

Evidence of a lack of incentive for bias;

Spot check results for sampling bias.

The last may be unreliable if a) you're the author, or b) your spot check evidence source may be biased, e.g. by a generally accepted biased paradigm.

In the real world this is complicated by the fact that the bottom line may have only been "pencilled in", biased the argument, then been adjusted... (read more)

Just remember, 2011 will be 20 years ago in 2031! ;-)

0Manfred
It's as it is said: we learn new things all the time, so everything we know now is wrong.

Right or Wrong (by who's definition) is more in how you base your decisions, not in whether you make the decisions.

If you can only save one person, and all other things being equal, is it wrong to save the more attractive person because they are more attractive. If so, should you NOT save the more attractive person, just in case their attractiveness may be biasing your decision?

What if $4000 is spent on equipment to save one premature infant per year, who will probably be permanently impaired anyway, when the same money could have saved two or more adults per year?

0NancyLebovitz
The larger context is that if that sort of decision is common (and note that "attractive" is shaped by who you've been trained to like, it isn't an absolute), people will put substantial resources into being attractive and/or will be irrationally excluded from opportunities to contribute for being unattractive.

ciphergoth's friend's experience is not typical of my experiences in Australian Mensa, where anyone who attended a Mensa meeting was welcome and treated as an equal, although some members did mention that they had encountered some snobbishness at some overseas meetings.

In Australia when I was a member there were about 400 eligible non-members for every member, so most members recognized that a non-member might well have a higher IQ than many members. Also, a fair proportion recognized that whilst what is imperfectly measured by IQ tests is a useful trait and a differentiating factor, it is NOT the measure of a person's worth or even of their conversational potential.

0Paul Crowley
Good to hear - thanks!

Yeah, I know this thread is even older than when corndog found it, but I only just found it.

Re membership for CV purposes - I tend to agree with Asthana on this, although situations alter cases. If the prospective employer wants a quality that they may associate with relatively high IQ and you have no other evidence, then membership of or eligibility for Mensa may be useful. The trick is not to be seen to be boasting so much as giving evidence of having sufficient smarts for the job.

As for social membership, if you qualify and are a bit of a social misfit ... (read more)