There is feedback to be gleaned when teaching badly if one knows what to look for. And I think being able to interpret the passive feedback and respond appropriately is a large part of what makes a good teacher.
Many teachers, in my experience, don’t notice when students are confused or bored—or maybe they notice but don’t care—and their teaching method and pace is completely unresponsive to the immediate feedback of how well it is working.
You could just use the decimal part of 2.718… as July 18 (7/18). Or you could interpret the blocks of two (71 and 82) as percentages, and the 71% as a month would be August and 82% as a day of August would be the 25th day (so 8⁄25). Or you could interpret the 7182 as 71.82% and convert that to a moment during the year, which corresponds to 2011-10-27T07:12:00.
EDIT: updated to fix numbers due to mistyping the initial decimals of .718281828 as 712 instead of 718.
This doesn’t make sense to me. The presence or absence of evidence does not determine whether a fact exists or not. Evidence refers to the basis for a belief. There can be evidence for non-facts (e.g., opinions), as well as no evidence for facts (e.g., whether the nth heaviest dinosaur that ever existed was doing something that we expect there to be a 50% chance of it doing when it was exactly 1 year old).
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. —Richard Feynman
The complete quote is “For a successful technology, reality must...”, but I prefer this more general version. It was originally uttered in Feynman’s appendix to the report on the Challenger disaster.
What specifically do you mean by substance dualism being akin to belief in computer science? I can imagine at least two things you might mean, but I still don’t really see the point of the simile.
There is also the issue of legal personality, which applies to corporations and not to governments or religions.
The corporation actually seems to me a great example of a non-biological, non-software optimization process, and I’m surprised at Eliezer’s implicit assertion that there is no significant difference between corporations, governments, and religions with respect to their ability to be unfriendly optimization processes, other than that some people of a certain political bent have a bias to think about corporations differently than other institutions like governments and religions.
And they even all have beautiful names like Zimmerman-Becoming-a-self-regulated-learner.pdf, rather than the 7168761.pdf that you often get when downloading an academic paper.
I wish I could vote this most awesome article up multiple times.
Thanks for the explanation. I was looking more for theoretical justification (if theoretical justification played a part for you in deciding how to choose an ethical theory). What I had in mind was, if you were going to try to convince other people that they should choose an ethical theory for the same reasons that you chose yours and should adopt the same theory you did, what would be the arguments that you would use to persuade them (limited to good-faith arguments that you actually believe rather than rhetorical strategies aimed primarily at convincing)? And there’s a little of that in your answer here. Thanks for your time.
I’m asking why you decided that “choose the theory that best satisfies my intuitive desiderata” was the best method of choosing a theory. What justifies that method of “choosing a theory”, if there is a justification and you did in fact think about it beforehand? If you did think about it, presumably you decided that was the best method of choosing a theory for some reason(s), and I’m asking what those reasons might be.
One alternative, for example, might be for me to critically analyze my intuitions beforehand and be skeptical that all my intuitions are good for me (in the sense that acting on those intuitions best furthers all my interests weighted accordingly), and I might then choose to disgard some of my intuitive desiderata or weight them in some way before proceeding with whatever else I’ve decided on as a method of choosing. I might decide to just accept the theory that is most respected by my parents, or my priest, or the ethics professors that I most admire. I might decide to accept a theory on the basis of anticipating the results that believing in the theory will have on me and choosing the theory with the best anticipated effect. I haven’t given the justifications here, because these are just examples, but if I were to follow one of those strategies, I would almost certainly have reasons for thinking that strategy was better than others I considered. Those reasons are what I was asking you about. Just to head off another potential misunderstanding, I’m not suggesting that you should have considered any of these or that any of these are better strategies. They’re just given as evidence of the fact that your strategy is not the only one.
I’m very curious what was so vague or poorly expressed or confusing in my original post if you (or anybody else) can identify something in particular.
I agree with AndrewHickey that using a text editor is best.
If you are really averse to writing HTML by hand though, there is Amaya, which is a web editor/browser that should generate very clean HTML if you don’t explicitly set style properties. I haven’t used it for years though and can’t easily install it on Linux, but anybody on Mac or Windows should be able to install it fairly easily.
Yes, obviously. The question was in the first paragraph, not the second, which you seem to have gotten hung up on. The question, again, was: what’s the justification for taking your intuitive desiderata as the most (sole?) important factor in deciding on an ethical theory?
I gave examples of some strategies for choosing an ethical theory that some other people might choose only to show that it’s not obviously clear that your strategy is the sole or best strategy. So the question, again, is why do you think that particular strategy is the best one (assuming you considered others and you do believe that’s best)?
What’s the justification for taking your intuitive desiderata as the most (sole?) important factor in deciding on an ethical theory?
As opposed to any of many other strategies, such as finding the theory which if followed would result in the greatest amount of (human?) fun, or find the theory that would be accepted by the greatest number of people who are almost universally (> 99%) regarded as virtuous people, or …
I didn’t know it like that, but I agree that it’s better. The version I first read in the early to mid nineties was much longer than this one though, and his achievements at quick wit retort just went on and on from one unbelievable accomplishment to the next—which of course makes the punch line that much funnier. The version I remember was also quite elegantly written, which made the crudeness of the last line that much funnier.
I thought it was a bit funny, or meta-funny perhaps. It reminds me a little of the following, which is one of my favorite jokes: http://www.miraclesalad.com/blog/archives/2006/09/quick_wit_retor.php
I was going to post that I didn’t find this funny, but I did find it amusing, and I was going to ask if others had a similar reaction.
And then I skipped ahead to about the halfway mark, when it started using more interesting examples like Allen Ginsberg and Village Voice, and it started to become funny rather than amusing.
Did anybody else have a similar reaction?
I think the distinction I have in mind between funny and amusing is that funny invokes a more visceral and physical response, whereas amusing is a more purely intellectual response.
The lesswrong css setting for body font is “Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif” (first match). Pasting from MS Word is a bad idea though, because Word will paste all kinds of weird HTML markup into the post for any but the most trivial of documents.
I don’t see that the scenario is the same. If you one-box everytime in your thought experiment, you are guaranteed to get the million; if you two box everytime, you will certainly not get the million. With Omega, there is a high probability but not certainty.
Also, what you do in the first round causes what happens in the second round, but with Omega, it is debatable whether what you end up doing causes there to be a million dollars or not.
If long-range weather prediction is impossible in general, even assuming determinism and no random elements, then what you’re describing, which would entail solving multiple chaotic dynamical systems, is “doubleplus impossible” in practice.
I interpret your underlying point to be that LW is used by the most prolific contributors not only as a place to discuss and learn about rationality and related topics, but also as a place to socialize with like-minded people who share their unusual interests in topics such as sci-fi that are not of interest to most people—and often the socializing aspect is combined with the rationality-dojo aspect in a single post or comment, when people give fun references to sci-fi or D&D or whatever or just go off on tangents about things of interest to them.
There are clearly advantages and disadvantages to not having a norm of encouraging (mostly) ‘generic rationality’ discussion with no (or minimal) references to things that would be unfamiliar to most (or too many) of the target audience (what is the target audience specifically? how many is too many?).
I don’t have a clear idea of what the advantages and disadvantages are, or what the alternatives, but I’m curious how many people who are strongly interested in rationality are turned away by such things. Do we think that many people are seriously discouraged despite having a strong interest in rationality, or are we talking about people who clicked a random link and left immediately because it was “too weird”?
Doh, thanks. Can’t believe I made that mistake, as I know it’s 18281828.