There are certainly people who hold that position but I’m not one of them.
Me either. I wonder if someone’s done a study to see if locus of control (internal vs. external) is a cohort effect due to the culture/spiritual teachings of the ’60s, or simply age-related, so people who were in their 20′s in the 1960′s are now self-possessed and don’t blame others for their feelings, while current 25-year-olds just haven’t had time to learn it (although some may be ahead of the learning curve).
Birth advantages are basically what set you up to be in the right place at the right time. Maybe you get a job because you met somebody in college. But you had to be born such that you could get to college in the first place.
In any case, success has to be a combination of luck and effort. You might luck into that job, but you wouldn’t have been hired if the employer didn’t think you had the skills he was after—skills you probably had to work to build. And, once you have the job, you still can’t slack off, not if you plan on keeping that job.
Some works of sci-fi, especially classic works like Orwell’s 1984, aren’t even in “futures-space” anymore; those exact scenarios are no longer possible. That doesn’t decrease their value at all. Science fiction, to me, is less about sampling from futures-space than about asking “what if?” and then telling a story about it.
Simply put, in Maletopia it would suck to be a woman.
Why?
Women would essentially be second-class citizens—after all, they’d be living in a society designed around men’s needs only.
I’m going to make an exception here from my normal practice and speak specifically as a woman: Those raids sound fun! But I’d probably be excluded from most teams. And as far as partners, my ideal partner would be a Mannfolk-type manly-man, who respects me as an equal—something that DeVliegenteHollander doesn’t seem to think exists. (Perhaps he’s right. If so, that might partially explain my series of pathetic failures at romance.)
A—I can transpose at sight, but not very quickly. Like grouchymusicologist, I do it using the concept of scale degrees.
B—I suppose it is plausible. But I can’t think of any real-life examples. Learning good posture isn’t going to hurt any athletic skill you try to develop. Having studied linguistics is only going to help you when you start to learn .
C—I’ve never heard of such. Natural systems tend to be pretty intuitive.
D—Artists are the people who understand that what’s on the page isn’t music. It’s just instructions on how to play the music. Theorists are the people who develop the notation, and they have a lot in common with scientists. (Many musicians are both.) Yes, some aspects of music notation and theory are counterintuitive. So are some aspects of mathematics. Plenty of people can do both with a high degree of skill.
Other than that, I don’t really know what to tell you—except to use your highly trained mind to come up with ways to practice doing the things that you have problems doing, until you can do them well enough to please yourself.
I have read that blog some, and have tried the cold-showers thing. It’s great—in the summertime. Winter came around and I kind of fell off the wagon.
In other applications, hormesis is probably why I don’t have issues with stage fright anymore.
Anecdote: My mom once tried to invoke the Mozart effect by putting on his music while me and my sister were doing schoolwork, hoping that it would make us more productive. It had just the opposite effect—we sat there and enjoyed the music, rather than doing our math assignments.
Only major problem I know of with terraforming Mars is how to give it a magnetic field. We’d have to somehow re-melt the interior of the planet. Otherwise, we could just put up with constant intense solar radiation, and atmosphere off-gassing into space. Maybe if we built a big fusion reactor in the middle of the planet...?
Outside of mathematics, a statement that is provable is also disprovable. Then it’s called a hypothesis.
I’m reminded of the joke where an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are going to a job interview. The interviewer has rigged a fire to start in the wastepaper basket, to see how they react in a crisis situation. The engineer sees the fire, sees the water cooler, grabs the water cooler and dumps it on the fire. The physicist sees the fire, sees the water cooler, grabs pencil and paper, calculates the exact amount of water needed to extinguish the fire, then pours that amount of water into the basket, exactly extinguishing the fire. The mathematician sees the fire, sees the water cooler, and says, “Ah! A solution exists!”.
I don’t think it does. Scrutinizing your beliefs is a corollary—it naturally follows if you believe that “Truth is good and valuable and its pursuit is worthwhile.” We value truth, we want our maps to match the territory, and so we scrutinize our beliefs. If anything needs to be justified, it’s the value placed on truth and knowledge thereof.
And that’s actually an interesting problem. Although my intuition shouts TRUTH IS GOOD, there’s not much I can say to prove that statement, outside of “It’s useful to be able to make accurate predictions.” It seems like the goodness of truth ought to be provable some way. But maybe it’s just a moral value that our (sub-)culture happens to hold particularly strongly? Perhaps someone better versed than I am in the arts of rationality can give a better answer.
I can’t tell, from your post, what kind of propositions you are trying to convince yourself of. If it’s an attempt to win competitions, then you’re putting your effort in the wrong place. Whether you win any given competition is largely going to be determined by who else shows up to compete. Improving your chances means reducing the number of people who can reliably beat you, and that only happens through research and practice (since murdering competitors is generally seen as bad sportsmanship).
Other than that, it sounds like you’ve discovered the flaw in Pascal’s original wager (well, one of its flaws anyway). You can decide it’s rational to believe something, but actually believing it is a different matter. In religion, actual belief is key, and therefore Pascal’s wager isn’t going to make a lot of true converts, even though it’s a beautiful piece of reasoning.
I am having a similar issue, and am currently dealing with it by developing better acting skills. As long as I do and say things consistent with the belief set I wish I had (and don’t), my ends are achieved regardless of whether I actually hold that belief set. This may or may not be applicable to your situation.
Details: Said friends and family are Christian, of varying degrees of evangelistic fervor. For a long time, I was very definitely not-Christian, which caused them considerable grief on my behalf. Then, I converted, and there was commensurate rejoicing. My family and friends are honest enough to not try to pretend that being Christian fixes all of their problems, but they also hold Christianity to be a real and good truth, and are happy that I have seen the light, in much the same way that a community of rationalists would rejoice when somebody gave up intentionally deceiving themselves.
I don’t believe that being Christian and rationalist are necessarily exclusive, as one of my best friends is both, but I don’t know how he does it. Maybe I just never understood the distinction between faith and self-deception, which he seems to be able to make. So, I fall pretty squarely into the label of “deist”—which is not the same thing as having accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, which I consider, on balance, to be only mildly less ridiculous than the Wiccan phase I went through as a teenager (yeah, that one didn’t go over well with the family...)
Were I to recant, they wouldn’t abandon me. Instead, they would be distressed on my behalf, and lovingly try to guide me back to the light, causing both parties great frustration when it didn’t work. It seems that the best option is to allow everybody to go on assuming I believe as they do, and even tell a few lies to preserve the illusion. This hurts my conscience a bit, but that can be regarded as something I do to care for the people who love me. Or, it could be regarded as weighting truth too lightly and comfort too heavily; that has a name and it’s called being a coward.
I’m 21, in college studying to be a professional musician. Through my teenage years, I would intentionally deceive myself, and act from emotion rather than logic. Luckily for me, I figured out that this was non-optimal before any serious harm was done, and have chosen the path of rationality. It was difficult at first. Although I don’t remember for sure, I think I found this site through a late-night Google search, looking for anything that might help me in my quest to vanquish emotion.
I may be a bit of a misfit here. I’m neither a hard scientist, nor particularly excited about AI or transhumanism; I also believe that death is simply the price you pay for getting to live, rather than something to be feared and avoided. However, as mentioned, I’m very interested in learning to live rationally, and in the pursuit of perfection both as a musician and as a person.
One question that I’m pondering right now is this: What is the relative value of the pursuit of rationality and intellectual honesty, versus protecting the happiness of your family and closest friends? It turns out that, when religion gets involved, this is a real choice individuals may have to make. I can give details if anybody is interested.
Or hang some fabric on the walls to muffle the sound a bit.
All-around second to this comment. Someone with ears that sensitive probably shouldn’t be living in a thin-walled apartment complex.