In the Robin Hanson tradition, whenever I think that I have figured out a flaw in Kant's reasoning, I halt, recognize that he lived until he was 79 and spent everyday of his life thinking about these sorts of things and taking long walks. It is good to question him, but also to be humble and research any extant rebuttals to one's own argument.
There is a good overview of Kant here: http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/intro/Kant_ethics.html
and more at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Kant had a peculiar obsession with what rational and reasoning actors wou...
I was just a little put off that you used me as an example of pulling Kant in when he doesn't apply: I took some care to keep Kant within Kant's domain and ask for specifics about how EY's OB position differed.
Most of your post is dedicated to refuting Kant's assumptions... that would have answer part of my questions in the other post ... but does it necessarily follow that he is pulled in to make one's opponents into straw men?
The discussion could have used some Kant and I am really do not agree that he does not apply.
In regard to why one shouldn't bring ...
Did anyone say that they believed in Kant?
Actual comment thread (with context intact!): (http://lesswrong.com/lw/6w/degrees_of_radical_honesty/4jn?context=1#4jn)
We were talking about never lying; I copied a quotation from Constant's critique of Kant (they were explicitly discussing a version of the "Tell-the-Murderer" thought experiment) and then summarized Kant's negative response to Constant.
I'm not really sure why one wouldn't bring it up? We had two different conceptions of why you shouldn't lie in the main post. Eliezer's sounded a lot like...
Mysticism and random decision making are both acceptable and highly successful methods of making decisions; most of human history has relied on those two... we still rely on them. If you are a consequentialist, you can ignore the process and just rate the outcome; who cares why nice hair is correlated with success -it just is! Why does democracy work?
What makes rationalism worth the time is probably your regard for the process itself or for its outcomes. If its the outcomes then you might want to consider other options; following your biases and desires almost blindly works out pretty well for most people.
logi:
That's possible and probably partially accurate; if there were more posts taking the form "I believe X because..." on Less Wrong, I might be more open to the idea that people are doing that.
Ciphergoth:
Also, this would be a terrible community to signal truth-seeking in, considering how entrenched the "rationality as win" metaphor is. As I mentioned in the hair example, I think a lot more people here are signaling a burning interest in real-world application than really have one.
I just wanted to get Yvain's opinion about how mu...
"To tell the truth is a duty, but is a duty only with regard to the man who has a right to the truth."
Kant disagrees and seems to warn that the principle of truth telling is universal; you can't go around deciding who has a right to truth and who does not. Furthermore, he suggests that your lie could have terrible unforeseen consequences.
Lie to the Nazis who you feel "don't deserve the truth" and then they end up treating everyone on the rest of the block like liars and sending all sorts of people to the concentration camps or outright ...
If you'll lie when the fate of the world is at stake, and others can guess that fact about you, then, at the moment when the fate of the world is at stake, that's the moment when your words become the whistling of the wind.
Is it correct to interpret this as similar to Pascal's Wager? The possibility of a fate-of-the-world moment is very low but the payout for being an honest fellow in this case is huge?
I would like to see more people who practice rationality and assumption questioning in other disciplices: women's studies, public policy, art and literature. I took a lot of literary philosophy classes back in the day and read quite a few post-modern critiques that mirror what I see on Less Wrong.
Almost every post-modern analysis depends on questioning how someone framed their subject and proceeds to recommend different assumptions; surely people with these backgrounds have examples to offer outside of game theory and psychology.
It would also be good to s...
And you must enjoy the signal value you a little bit! You aren't keeping your Less Wrong postings in your diary under lock and key!
Yvain:
Do you really believe that you engage in Truth-Seeking for utilitarian reasons? I get the impression that you don't really believe that.
Would you be willing to to enter a computer simulation where you got to investigate higher math puzzles (or metaphysics) with no applications? Spend your days in a fantastic and never-ending Truth-Seeking project (we'll throw great sex, food and housing into the holodeck for you as well)?
I liked this better at the beginning when you were prodding people who say that they see rationalism as a means to an end! You seem to be going back to consequentialism!
I don't believe that rationalists WIN because I don't believe that winning WINS
This debate has already played out in attacking and defending Pragmatism.
A lot of the rubrics by which to judge whether or not rationalism wins or whether or not rationalism is an end in itself involve assigning meaning and value on a very abstract level. Eliezer's posts outline a reductionist, materialist standpoint with some strong beliefs about following the links of causality. Rationalism follows, but rationalism isn't going to prove itself true.
Deciding that rationalism is the best answer for your axiomatic belief system requires taking a metaphysical...
That was my point; I was making a dig on the goals of argumentative atheists looking for a support group vs people who might want to advance rationalist goals
In a nutshell, it might be cool to make a website and organization that promotes data collections and debate.
Rationalism requires access to high quality empirical evidence. Holding your hypotheses up to constantly changing data is a major theme of this site.
We can only rationally discuss our hypotheses and beliefs when we have something to test and the quality of datasets floating around on the internet is often low or inaccessible.
A good rationalist project might be to highlight resources for empirical evidence, run "data debates" where experts ...
Yvain is spot on; secular service organization already exist and function. I have occasionally attended some meetings at a Rotary club and it usually involves eating, a list of ongoing activities, community highlights and recognition of visiting members.
What is special about the way a rationalist helps people? Maybe starting a program to fund probability and philosophy of science classes in the community?
Law school sounds like the best option for finding fellow argumentative atheists.
In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.
....or maybe the quotation and by extension the entire comment were meant to suggest that traditionally materialist concerns like sanitation, wealth and longevity are more deserving of the title enlightenment and than our categorizing of enlightenment to only m...
If anyone wants to do some background reading on the test before commenting, this paper addresses some of the common criticisms:
http://www.psy.utexas.edu/psy/FACULTY/Markman/jpsp01.pdf
"How do indirect measures of evaluation work? Evaluating the inference of prejudice in the IAT"
Yes! something like a table of contents?
The Tag Cloud is a good way to start, but once you generate 10 posts a day for too long, the tag cloud is no longer a useful navigation tool
Something like this maybe: http://drupal.org/project/hypergraph
Drupal can also automatically generate "related content" based on whatever criteria you define as important or manually entered links. Adding more and more blocks to the page might not be good for efficiency, but providing more diverse paths to explore the content on these sites would be great.
In the long ru...
Has anyone brought up this study by Bruner and Potter (1964) before? I think it would relate to intertemporal beliefs and how we sometimes perceive them to be more sound than they really are:
http://www.ahs.uwaterloo.ca/~kin356/bpdemo.htm
...In this demonstration, you will see nine different pictures. The pictures will get clearer and clearer. Make a guess as to what is being shown for each of the pictures, and write down your guess. Note the number of the picture where you were first able to recognize what was being shown. Then go backwards - press the "
It may be time for a good Style vs Content Debate; first commenter to scream false dilemma gets a prize
Speaking of themes; I guess one thing that bothered me about this post (many of your other posts are very good) is that this post doesn't seem to serve a point; questioning assumptions is often brought up on OB and LW and asking others to be more precise in describing their assumptions is also very common. Any connection to positivism here seems very tenuous; criticizing positivism has little or no impact on soft-positivism.
I feel that there are many other OB and LW posts that would address this issue more effectively and it might be better to just make th...
This is the first post I've seen that seems to really fit Less Wrong's mission of "refining the art of human rationality"
This post clearly spells out some issues, links them to research and presents possible solutions. I hope that more posts in the future take this form.
This post also nicely outlines the problem of one's ability to really doubt themselves constantly at the appropriate level. I think these two points present a big challenge to the mission of leading a rational life:
...3c. Reframe your past behavior as having occurred in a differen
This post just appeared at Language log and has this to say:
Language Log could devote a thousand posts to the project of underlining and elaborating the ways in which grammar does not protect us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name, and logic does not protect us against what we say having double meaning. Come to think of it, the thousand posts may already have been written: there are over 5,500 old posts searchable here and already over 1,200 new ones on the present server searchable here.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1258
As...
I think your caution is warranted, the fact that you can see the other people in the synagogue who don't stand up could be very hurtful to the nonparticipants. Highlighting individual donors or small groups is a good way to show public support without giving away to much information about your membership's participation as a whole.
If you are interested in more rigorous studies (we did ours in excel), you might want to try Dean Karlan's "Does Price Matter in Charitable Giving? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment " http://karlan.yale.edu/p/MatchingGrant.pdf
I will try to dig up some other papers online
Putting a double space after each line should break it; I had the same problem with poetry.
test
lines
here
I've worked for a number of non profits and in analysis of our direct mailings, we would get a better response from a mailing that included one of two things
This is one of the reasons that some types of nonprofits choose to create levels of giving; my guess is that it is gaming these common level of giving ideas by creating artificial norms of participation. Note You can base your levels on actu...
I think other people have said it, but Slashdot has one of the best commenting structures around.
Different values for different categories (funny, insightful etc....), anonymous posting, reputation, very clear thread structure. All sorts of fun stuff
American Rhetoric is an incredible site and there are some real gems that aspire to rational persuasion with some flair.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html
Malcolm X's "Ballot or the Bullet" navigates the fact that he is black, widely regarded as dangerous and Muslim all at once while urging people to put these things aside and think about his plans and their outcomes. He does a first rate job of tailoring his rhetoric to increase your emotional desire to think and not react.
Milton Friedman is another person to watch live. He ge...
"If You Give a Mouse a Cookie"
A good primer on chaos theory for youth?
"Rendezvous with Rama"
Why have a plot when gradual discovery with expository dialogue will do.
"Contact" -Sagan
More scientific method
"The Diamond Age" -Stephenson
This book even has long discussions of computing
"Sideways Stories from Wayside School"
Anything with jokes is going to be about logic at some point.
"Of Human Bondage" -Maugham
This book has a famous scene where the Phillip goes to Paris to study art; you get the impressio...
Setting up this sort of experiment, especially in regard to poetry or other humanities topics, seems to be the overwhelming barrier.
We can take at face value that "Malley's" poems were created from phrases of a limited length selected at random (whatever that really means in this case) and then arranged in a random manner.
This setup would allow us to say that some modernist critics cannot distinguish a modernist poem written by a single person (although with possible allusions and cribbings) from one constructed with phrases less than a specifie...