All of Henry_V's Comments + Replies

@ Wei. Thanks for the response. I will look at the refs but haven't yet done so. I'm skeptical about whether they'll change my mind on the subject, but I'll take a look.

It seems to me that the belief in pure determinism is axiomatic (I'm not even sure what it means to be a Bayesian in a purely deterministic system!), so most of this discussion appears to be pure conjecture. I'm not sure that it has any meaningful application.

@Roko. You mention "maximizing the greater good" as if that is not part of a deontological ethic.

@Zuban. I'm familiar with the contrivances used to force the responder into a binary choice. I just think that the contrivances are where the real questions are. Why am I in that situation? Was my behavior beyond reproach up to that point? Could I have averted this earlier? Is it someone else's evil action that is a threat? I think in most situations, the moral answer is rather clear, because there are always more choices. E.g., ask the fat man to jump. or do nothing and let him make his own choice, as I could only have averted it by committing murder. or ... (read more)

I've always thought the "moral" answer to the question was "I wouldn't push the innocent in front of the train; I'd jump in front of the train myself."

"Easy enough if you're not a Christian, " .

Eliezer, you've really begun to go far afield from your desire to "overcome bias". An atheist can have a neutral reading of the Bible? A Jew? A Muslim?

"Superior literary work" is itself an opinion. How can opinions be separated from bias? It's their very definition. Or, do you think some opinions are "more equal" than others. How do you choose paint colors for your bathroom?

I've lost a great deal of respect for you in this post, because you're expressing your opinions in the guise of rationality.

"Not "might" but would be considered condescending."

By whom?

I considered not using that example but decided to anyway. Whether it would be considered condescending depends on the audience. You feel that way for instance, but I know women who would not consider it so.

How the meeting got started is not particularly relevant (IMHO). Suppose three males were assigned the task, for instance. In any case, I'm willing to go on record by suggesting that there are real differences in the way that women and men approach certain topics, based in p... (read more)

"What I would find patronizing is someone thrusting a painting at me and saying "Say something mathematical!" I think it is equally patronizing to ask an artist to saying something artistic about the Singularity or a poet to say something poetic about math."

It seems to me that the original invitation was for artists to participate in the discussion. To me this isn't absurd at all. No one was asking them (as far as I can tell) to "say something artistic." Rather, there was a recognition that those who self-identify as artists m... (read more)

Tom Breton---very good discussion.

It reminds me of a panel in which I participated. The panel was celebrating diversity of one sort or another at my institution, and one speaker was a contemporary of MLK. He discussed the need to engage "the other side" in one's debates.

A student from the audience asked, "But what if the other side won't listen?"

"Keep talking!" was the response.

Well, here I really felt like I should jump in, but it would have been rude. In any case, everything I've learned about communication I learned from be... (read more)

"I wonder what it would be like to have anyone in the world, even a single person, who you could absolutely trust. Or what it would be like for there to be anyone in the world, even a single person, whom you had to tell all your thoughts, without possibility of concealment."

I think Christians have been wondering the same thing for a couple thousand years. Radical honesty and Crocker's Rules aren't exactly new concepts, are they?

Consider Ephesians 4: Speak the truth, but do so in love considering the feelings of others. There's an obnoxious way t... (read more)

Can some of the anchoring effect can be explained by the use of a kind of implicit confidence interval?

Suppose that I (subconsciously) have an estimate of 20% for the proportion of UN countries that are African. Further suppose that I think a 95% confidence interval ranges from 10% to 30%.

If I start at a high anchor, I will adjust downwards until I'm within the 95% CI, i.e., 30%. If I start at a low anchor, I adjust upwards until I'm within the 95% CI, i.e., 10%. In my head, I may consider 10% and 30% as not statistically different from one another.

I'm not... (read more)

I love this: "studies show we communicate much more ambiguously than we think we do." :D

I also agree with this: "reawaken the delight in a world full of mysteries, which has been sapped by the notion that they are already understood, and therefore, no longer important."

But, I would add that there are mysteries that are understood, and mysteries that are not understood. So, if I'm going to spend my time discovering answers to mysteries, I'm going to choose the less-understood variety, so that I can get published, or the well-understood o... (read more)

I completely disagree with your portrayal of curiosity and curiosity-stoppers. Our curiosity generally has to do with our familiarity (or lack of it!) when encountering a phenomenon.

If I saw you cast a bizarre light that hovered over your book on the train, "Science!" would surely NOT diminish my curiosity, b/c I'd never seen anything like it ever. When I see David Blain (sp?) perform, I am amazed (and curious) about how he does "street magic." Do I think it's magic? Of course not. In fact, I presume that there is a rational scientific ... (read more)

I'm pretty ignorant on this, but I always thought that the phrase related to complex outcomes that result from surprisingly simple systems, so that the complexity is "emergent".

One example is chaos. One can have chaotic non-linear dynamic systems and non-chaotic non-linear dynamic systems.

But, again, I could have misunderstood.