I'm curious about the opening line: It is a general and primary principle of rationality, that we should not ... enforce upon our fellows a law which there is insufficient justification to enforce.
On my ordinary understanding of the sentence, it seems to imply that acting justly is necessarily part of what Eliezer means by "acting rationally". Is this right?
More explicitly: the implication is that refraining from "enforcing insufficiently justified laws" is a "general and primary" principle of rationality. Perhaps what is m...
I appreciated this calculation. Although as you show it's unlikely that solar panels represent a net loss in energy, it's still kind of off-putting that, given my local power rate of 5 cents/kWh, I'd have to wait 16 years to make back my money if I buy solar panels to reduce the power I take from the grid. Of course, this results mainly from the government subsidy of residential power, a bizarre policy completely at odds with the same government's exhortations to be "power smart".
Perhaps you figured this out since April, but the quoted clause makes sense in the context of Mencius' particular use of the terms "universalism" (roughly: what everyone in polite society believes these days in the West) which he categorizes as "antinomian", roughly: opposed to natural law.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. -Vonnegut
Seems apropos to recent posts on honesty, as well.
Yeah PhD/academia is the absolute worst, because the timespan is quite long, and many of the deadlines are soft. Miss a paper deadline? Just submit to the next one, with a slightly greater chance of being scooped. Not done your thesis on time? Just ask for an extension, and waste more months/years of your life. Grad school is truly the snooze button on the alarm clock of life.
In the book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" by Ralph Koster (of possible special interest to a game nerd) he basically defines "fun" as "learning without pressure". Learning, in this context, means improving skills and responding to a challenge where there is no extrinsic consequence for failure.
Your desire for a job you can "take or leave" on a day-to-day basis, and your anxiety about homework, fits well with (but is more extreme than, I think) my own experience. If I were to diagnose myself with something (whic...
Late to the party, I thought I'd just throw in the following observations. I have actually participated in speed dating a few times; I found it fascinating and educational.
The speed dating events I attended allowed about 3 minutes per interview (or "date") before proceeding to the next pairing. Each attendee is provided with a notepad, complete with numbers corresponding to the number on a nametag worn by each participant. (Names are also on the nametags, but there are often duplicates so numbers are required to avoid ambiguity). This way you ...
Sexual Weirdtopia could just be "the internet comes to life"... e.g. everyone gets freaky without shame, but it turns out almost everyone is into something that's of absolutely no interest to you personally.
Or, to follow the public science example, the taboo is revealed to be as fundamental aspect of sexual arousal as the unknown is to the intellectual. The people demand a strict morality police after an era of total acceptance drains all the fun out of it. Everyone is fully expected to both seek out sexual thrills and aid in the swift punishme...
TGGP: with respect to migration, I always thought the idea was to immigrate to a land of "opportunity" -- that is, the attraction is that if you move to America (or wherever) you'll have more social AND economic mobility. I know immigrants (to my own country, Canada) who actually were quite despondent for a while after arriving here because, while their nominal income increased their relative social position took a serious dive (to stereotype, think of an Indian doctor working here as a code monkey).
It seems to me the phenomena Eliezer is descri...
I doubt this is being put forward as a "principle to uphold" since that would be self-contradictory. It is probably aimed at the sorts of cases where someone might say "well I wouldn't have bothered but it was the principle of the thing".