BAD: While the venue was a good choice for several reasons (especially for group bonding), one of its downsides was that it was somewhat loud. Conversation was still possible for most of us, but there was a hearing impaired LessWronger in attendance who was unfortunately unable to participate in any group conversations. And while it's not always possible to accommodate everyone, it seems that a quieter venue for future meetings would not only benefit him, but facilitate communication for everyone and increase the maximum conversational group size.
The bathtub was supposed to illustrate the collective property notion, not the status-quo notion.
Well that clears things up then. I realize you never included the word "further", but I had to insert it in order to use your bathtub example to interpret the status quo notion in any meaningful way.
Assuming that had been your intent, the implied reductio was very much part of my point. I didn't think you would want the factory to continue dumping waste, which is why I thought your argument about "status quo" was flawed.
But since you've c...
You're either ignoring "absent human action" or taking it to mean something wildly different from what I had in mind.
I took it to mean "absent further human action", which I thought was the only coherent way to interpret your post. (If that's not what you meant, then please forgive the rant.)
If what you really meant was "absent human action at all" (i.e. just nature), then in your original example about koi, the "natural" status quo would not have been no-koi-in-bathtub, but instead no-bathtub-at-all.
So the only w...
I privilege the status quo
I wholeheartedly disagree with this mentality, and I think it's one of the major hindrances to the righting of social injustice. When people feel like they're entitled to "the way things are", it's difficult for them to notice when the status quo is unfair in a way that benefits them at the expense of others.
In your example about the koi fish in the bathtub, the no-koi-containing state of affairs doesn't win out because it's the status quo, but because the disutility of not being able to shower (where there was a reas...
My response was to Christian's implication that a rationality program isn't necessarily buggy for outputting irrational behaviors because it must account for human emotions. My point was that human emotions are part of the human rationality program (whether we can edit our source code or not) and that if they cause an otherwise bug-free rationality program to output irrational behaviors, then the emotions themselves are the bugs.
In your response, you asked about emotions that produce behaviors advantageous to the agent's goals, which is rational behavior, ...
I suppose you're saying that when a useful heuristic (allowing real-time approximate solutions to computationally hard problems) leads to biases in edge cases, it shouldn't be considered a bug because the trade-off is necessary for survival in a fast-paced world.
I might disagree, but then we'd just be bickering about which labels to use within the analogy, which hardly seems useful. I suppose that instead of using the word "bug" for such situations, we could say that an imprecise algorithm is necessary because of a "hardware limitation"...
An emotion that doesn't correlate with reality is itself a bug. Sure, it may not be easy to fix (or even possible without brain-hacking), but it's a bug in the human source code nonetheless.
To extend the analogy, it's like a bug in the operating system. If that low-level bug causes a higher-level program to malfunction, you can still blame "buggy code" even if the higher-level program itself is bug-free.
To use your analogy. Any person who doesn't provide the expected output is often deemed crazy... It doesn't mean that there is a bug in the person, perhaps sometimes it's a bug in reality.
In the context of my analogy, it's nonsense to say that reality can have bugs.
I suppose you meant that sometimes the majority of people can share the same bug, which causes them to "deem" that someone who lacks the bug (and outputs accordingly) is crazy.
But there's still an actual territory that each program either does or does not map properly, regardless of...
Stupidity is the lack of mental horsepower. A stupid person has a weak or inefficient "cognitive CPU".
Craziness is when the output of the "program" doesn't correlate reliably with reality due to bugs in the "source code". A crazy person has a flawed "cognitive algorithm".
It seems that in humans, source code can be revised to a certain degree, but processing power is difficult (though not impossible) to upgrade.
So calling someone crazy (for the time being) is certainly different from calling someone stupid.
Your utility estimates at any given time should already take into account all of the data available to you at that time, including your previous estimates.
In other words, if you decide you don't want to go to a movie you've already purchased a ticket for, that decision has already been influenced by the knowledge that you did want to go to the movie at some point, so there's no reason to slide your estimate again.
Stop equating skills with intelligence.
I live in San Clemente, but I'd be willing to drive anywhere in Orange County for an occasional meetup.
I chose to believe in the existence of God - deliberately and consciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existence of God.
If you know your belief isn't correlated to reality, how can you still believe it?
To be fair, he didn't say that the actual existence of God has absolutely zero effect on his decision to believe in the existence of God.
His acknowledgement that the map has no effect on the territory is actually a step in the right direction, even though he has many more steps to go.
A banal one is that misinforming takes effort and not informing saves effort.
That's an important distinction. In both scenarios, the Carpenter suffers the same disutility, but the utility for Walrus is higher for "secret" than for "lies" if his utility function values saving effort. Perhaps that's the reason we don't feel morally obligated to walk the streets all day yelling correct information at people even though many of them are uninformed.
However, this rationalization breaks down in a scenario where it takes more effort to keep ...
My hypothesis is that she simply meant, "It makes me happy to pretend that people are nicer than they really are."
I don't understand your objection to anonymous review on the basis of accountability. Doesn't "anonymous review" in this context just mean that the reviewers don't know the authors and affiliations of the papers they're reviewing? In that case, what is there to be accountable for? The reviewers themselves aren't any more anonymous in "anonymous review" than in standard review, are they?
For simplicity, Occam's razor is often cited as "choose the simplest hypothesis" even when it's more appropriate to employ its original definition as the principle that one should favor the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions.
I agree that less_schlong shouldn't be citing Occam's razor as some fundamental law of the universe, but I do think it's obvious that all things being equal, we should attempt to minimize speculative assumptions.
I plan to attend with a guest.