I suppose the cap limits the pensions provided by the state and you can in principle buy a private life insurance to increase the payoff, right?
Not life in general, but your life, to you.
By "value of life in general" I meant value of one's own life for oneself (the "in general" qualifier was there to mark the absence of "qua man").
...Playing the essentialism card allowed her to smuggle in a boatload of values masquerading as implicit in the choice between life and death. The requirements for your concrete life get subordinated to the standards of Man's life qua Man. And then it's "Man can't live as this, Man can't live as that", no matter how many men have
I had always been under impression that the value of life "qua man" is derived from the value of life in general, because human life which is not "qua man" is actually equivalent to death, as living "qua man", whatever it means, makes one human. Am I mistaken?
I think you are right in your second objection, there is some limited role for observation in Objectivist philosophy.
What is the difference between rationality and objectivism?
I have had few discussions with Objectivists and read few other discussions where Objectivists took part and I haven't seen particularly high level of rationality there. Objectivism as actually practiced is a political ideology with all downsides - fallacious arguments of all kinds, tight connection between beliefs and personal identity, regarding any opposition as a threat to morality by default and so on.
Objectivism as philosophy is a mix of beliefs often mutually incompatible, connected by v...
3 meters underwater is about 30% of atmospheric pressure added, not mere 10%.
Just out of curiosity, what population did you expect Japan to have?
Not OP, but I expected Japan to have about 40-50 million, about on par with California and South Korea. 130 million is huge.
As for the Portugal/Ireland thing, one could easily blame the conically projected maps which conventionally have the 15th (or so) eastern meridian vertical, making Portugal's 5th western meridian slanted and pushing poor Portugal more to the left than the more northern Ireland.
And it is easy to underestimate the east-west dimensions of Italy. We tend to assume that it is hanging freely from below the Alps, right down as a pendulum in equilibrium should, while actually it is tilted almost 45 degrees to the right. The region commonly refered to as "sout...
Most Irishmen at least know a little Gaelic as they have to learn it at school. The map has worse inaccuracies. Occitan and Low German aren't even official and are spoken by tiny minorities, contrary to the impression one could easily get from the map. Ingrian is effectively dead with 500 speakers according to Wikipedia. The Czech-German bilingual area in western Bohemia is completely made up (it even doesn't correspond to the pre-WWII German speaking area). The Hungarian speaking area in Romania should be centered a bit more to the north-west. Breton isn'...
I know very little about schools in your country
Whose country? Viliam_Bur's country is most probably not the same country as the OP author's.
Antarctica excluded?
Although it is not impossible that a topic is such complex and "irreducible" that the understanding of it can only be acquired as a whole and no partial understanding is accessible, I don't find it probable even in case of counterfactual God's existence.
Even if God existed, "read the Bible!" would not convince me about it.
Telling someone to read a thousand page book is a poor advice as answer to a mistake they've just made, even if the book may be well worth reading. Many people react to such advices with a mix of
Babylon, Rome, and the Aztecs had a great deal in common.
Apart from being great empires, what else did they have in common?
Later, around the Renaissance, crossbows, pikes, and guns unseated the knight from military dominance; and the system that best supported that sort of force turned out to be the republic.
As late as 1914, most countries in the Old World were still monarchies. The republics that happened to exist during the Renaissance (Genoa, Venice) were mainly maritime powers, so no crossbows and pikes.
...Later, the Industrial Revolution kicke
Does anyone have any significant examples of the Dark Arts being harmful independent of what they're being used to convince people of?
Dark Arts have externalities. Once you become known as a skilled manipulator fewer people are going to trust you and fewer people you can influence in the long run. Using Dart Arks is a Prisoner's dilemma defection with all associated problems - a world full of Dark Artists is worse than a world full of honest truth sayers, ceteris paribus. Heavy use of Dark Arts may be risky for the performer himself and compromise his o...
Thank you.
I'd be interested in the linked Begg's paper but it's behind a paywall. Can someone please tell what exactly they had done and how did they obtain all those various p-values?
The incidence of the disease may be different for different populations while the test manufacturer may not know where and on which patients the test is going to be used.
Also, serious diseases are often tested multiple times by different tests. What would a Bayes-ignorant doctor do with positives from tests A and B which are accompanied with information: "when test A is positive, the patient has 90% chance of having the syndrome" and "when test B is positive, the patient has 75% chance of having the syndrome"? I'd guess most statistically illiterate doctors would go with the estimate of the test done last.
By "this version" you mean the 2006 version? Does it really feel less wise than the 2009 version? To me it's definitely the opposite, but perhaps it depends on what kind of wisdom signalling one expects. The older version reads more like something a revered writer or theologian may write, the newer is written in a style that associates more with science.
For the record, I prefer the newer version.
Is it just me, or is non-consensual sex obviously a bad thing?
"Obviously bad" isn't a utilitarian justification.
Banning Dalits from going within 96 feet of Namboothiris has much more harm done to Dalits than Namboothiris' feelings of ritual pollution. This isn't the case with non-consensual sex.
To play the Devil's advocate:
my friends were ready to raise $100 so I would carry it out
Are you sure you want to call them "friends"? Willingness to pay to lower someone else's status isn't particularly friendly behaviour, even if the person "doesn't care" about status.
The health hazard would probably be worth less (in absolute value) than the discussed reward of $200. The PR hazard, on the other hand, would justify your bottom line.
I haven't been suggesting using (A or B) as a name for (not ((not A) and (not B))) in constructive logic where they aren't equivalent. Rather, I have been suggesting using classical logic (where the above sentences are equivalent) with a constructivist interpretation, i.e. not making difference between "true" and "theorem". But since it is possible for (A or B) to be a theorem and simultaneously for both A and B to be non-theorems, logical "or" would not have the same interpretation, namely it wouldn't match the common language "or" (for when we say "A or B is true", we mean that indeed one of them must be true).
Wouldn't it be still possible for a constructivist to embrace classical logic and the theoremhood of TND? The constructivist would just have to admit that (A or B) could be true even if neither A nor B is true. (A or B) would still not be meaningless, its truth would imply that there is proof for neither (not A) nor (not B), so this reinterpretation of "or" doesn't seem to be a big deal.
As I understand the responses most people think the main point of Newcomb's problem is that you rationally should cooperate given the 1000000 / 1000 payoff matrix.
I am no expert on Newomb's problem history, but I think it was specifically constructed as a counter-example to the common-sensical decision-theoretic principle that one should treat past events as independent of the decisions being made now. That's as well how it is most commonly interpreted on LW, although the concept of a near-omniscient predictor "Omega" is employed in wide range...
OK, I understand now that your point was that one can in principle avoid being predicted. But to put it as an argument proving irrelevance or incoherence of the Newcomb's problem (not entirely sure that I understand correctly what you meant by "dissolve", though) is very confusing and prone to misinterpretation. Newcomb's problem doesn't rely on existence of predictors who can predict any agent in any situation. It relies on existence of rational agents that can be predicted at least in certain situations including the scenario with boxes.
I still...
Tell that to the hypothetical obscurantist.
Edit: I find it mildly annoying when, answering a comment or post, people point out obvious things whose relevance to the comment / post is dubious without further explanation. If you think that the non-equivalence of the mentioned beliefs somehow inplies the impossibility to extrapolate obscurantist values, please elaborate. If you just thought that I might have commited a sloppy inference and it would be cool to correct me on it, please don't do that. It (1) derails the discussion to issues of uninteresting nitpickery and (2) motivates the commenters to clutter their comments with disclaimers in order to avoid being suspected of sloppy reasoning.
(1) Why would Joe intend to use the random process in his decision? I'd assume that he wants million dollars much more than to prove Omega's fallibility (and that only with 50% chance).
(2) Even if Joe for whatever reason prefers proving Omega's fallibility, you can stipulate that Omega gives the quest only to people without semitransparent mirrors at hand.
(3) How is this
...First of all I want to point out, that I would still one box after seeing Omega predicting 50 or 100 other people correctly, since 50 to 100 bits of evidence are enough to ovecome (nearly
Couldn't this be said about any inductive method, at least in cases when the method works?
There are obscurantists who wear their obscurantism as attire, proudly claiming that it is impossible to know whether God exists. It can be said, perhaps, that such an obscurantist has a preference for not knowing the answer to the question, for never storing a belief of "the God does (not) exist" in his brain. But still all the obscurantist's decisions are the same as if he believed that there is no God - the obscurantist belief bears no influence on other preferences. In such a case, you may well argue that the extrapolated volition of the obsc...
First of all, is the existence of such an agent implausible? Not really, considering there are masochists out there and that, to some individuals, ignorance is bliss.
Why argue for plausibility of something when it clearly exists? I have personally met several people who fit your definition of obscurantist and I don't doubt that you have too.
How much, then, will be left of an obscurantist's identity upon coherently extrapolating their desires? The answers is probably not much, if anything at all.
Is there some argument for the probable answer? I don't find it obvious.
Bad posts often get a strong karma hit initially when the most vigilant readers check them and later return towards zero. It is possible (although not likely) that two months from now the post would stand at +2, your vote contributing to the positive score.
a way of doing induction without trying to solve the problem of induction
Well, this is the thing I have problems to understand. The problem of induction is a "problem" due to the existence of incompatible philosophical approaches; there is no "problem of deduction" to solve because everybody agrees how to do that (mostly). Doing induction without solving the problem would be possible if people agreed how to do it and the disagreement was confined to inconsequential philosophical interpretations of the process. Then it would indeed be...
My understanding of standardised hypothesis tests was that they serve the purposes of
There are practical reasons for both purposes. (1) is useful because the alternative hypothesis is usually more complex than the null and can have lots of parameters, thus calculating probabilities under the alternative may become impossible, especially with limited computing power. As for (2), science is a social institution - journal editor...
I think North Korea is no problem for the quoted sentence. I interpret it as saying that the government doesn't care about the wants of non-citizens, rather than asserting that the government cares about a significant number of citizens.
Nevertheless, even assuming this interpretation it is still not self-evident.
Wedrifid's interpretation is the intended one. I agree that the chosen formulation wasn't particularly clear.
Bayes was a priest, after all. Now divine quote of gay Turing would be a different feat altogether.
Not sure I want to know that.
Hope that wasn't me. My dislike for emoticons has somehow waned during recent years and sometimes I even use them myself when I want to be really sure that my interlocutor doesn't misinterpret me as being serious when I am not, but I am the sort of person that has commenting policies and it's not that improbable that this was one of them.
I still hate "lol" pretty passionately, however.
The discussions on e.g. Flickr often consist solely of comments like "Awesome pic! Great colours, looking forward to your next contribution." or "I like your style, please post more!"... To me, this represents the prototype of internet friendliness - not that I would like it to see it here, not that it couldn't be easily faked, but one just cannot deny that it sounds encouraging. There is even no need to talk about ourselves or to say anyting substantial at all, just signal friendliness the most obvious way, it works.
(It's interesting to note how dramatically Flickr differs from Youtube in the commenter culture.)
If I were Omega (feels good to think about the possibility), I would demand a program written in a specified high-level computer language which prints a string in the form SSSS...S0 (or something equivalent). This would exclude all sophistries from "the number my opponent chose plus one" to "the largest number you, Omega, can calculate [under specific conditions]".
uniquely define it even if you can't calculate it
By calculating it you mean writing the decimal expansion? Or is it enough to write a terminating algorithm that does so? Or something else?
I think it isn't precise to say that they value different things, since the deontologist doesn't decide in terms of values. Speaking of values is practical from the point of view of a consequentialist, who compares different possible states (or histories) of the world; values are then functions defined over the set of world states which the decider tries to maximise. A pure ideal deontologist doesn't do that; his moral decisions are local (i.e. they take into account only the deontologist's own action and perhaps its immediate context) and binary (i.e. the...
I have always subconsciously assumed that you are male, probably based on the overall LW gender distribution. Unfortunately I have no intuitions relating gender to Chinese names.
Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
It may be because lot of LW regulars visibly think of it in terms of identity. LW is described by most participants as a community rather than a discussion forum, and there has been a lot of explicit effort to strengthen the communitarian aspect.
Out of curiosity, how did you make the strikethrough line which extends far to the right outside the comment box?
My female co-worker says that men are always ill and are aggravating minor health problems. She also steadily complains about her own health and has spent more time off-work for health reasons than anybody else in the department last year (no chronic disease, repeated instances of common cold or, at worst, influenza).
Needless to say, I don't trust similar gender-related memes.
If they don't want to. But as an employee, I care about things that influence me directly; if the company is poorly managed to some degree but offers good wages, I still want to work for them, at least until I find something better. Trying to judge the management quality doesn't seem to be a good employee strategy.
This depends partly on the terms of the insurance and partly on the laws. I work as an actuary and at the moment our company's rules are:
- if the price of the insurance depends on your occupation, you are obliged to report if your occupation has changed and your premiums may be reset to new values (higher or lower)
- if the price depends on whether you smoke, you aren't obliged to report when you start, but we reserve the right to ask you and then you must truthfully answer (and then the premiums may change)
- if the price depends on you weight, only your weig
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