I felt a certain level of guilt for not donating to public radio, which was alleviated by donating. The level of guilt is somewhere between what I imagine is the guilt for shoplifting and the guilt for not holding a door open for an elderly lady carrying a lot of packages.
beberly37
Karma: 59
I would define right in this instance as what is required by moral/ethical/etiquette standards. However what is rational is the correct thing to do (assuming we are all on the same page that the rational choice is the correct choice).
It is more like a very poorly worded version of the question, “What have I missed?”, that manifested as me attempting to sound wise while in reality sounding foolish.
Sorry for the ethnocentricity of my post. In the US, most radio stations are private/corporate entities funded by advertising, public radio stations are usually not-for-profit and do not have ads. If you believe their numbers between 50 and 90% of the funding comes from “members”, people who donate to the station (the fraction depends on the station). Several times a year they do a pledge drive. For a week or two, they interrupt the usual programming with 5-10 minute pledge breaks, when the radio staff tell you how much they need to raise and what gifts they will give you for donating. Traditionally they have multiple people waiting by phones to take callers who pay over the phone or arrange a monthly payment plan (pledging). Again if you believe their numbers, only 10% of listeners actually pony up and become members. Hope that clears it up.
When what is rational is not what is “right”
I don’t like shaving almost as much as I dislike having a beard. I have a fairly soft, slow growing beard. The result is that I only shave when I absolutely can’t stand it any longer. This is not possible with an electric (at least it hurts too much to bother, so I would have to shave everyday). Thankfully I have no pressure from work or social life to be clean shaven, otherwise I would have to revisit electric. This could be quantified as 2 minutes with an electric everyday (60.8 hr/yr) or 8-10 minutes every 5-7 days (~45hr/yr).
Expected to touch strangers, probably. But it is not uncommon for couples to go dancing and not dance with anyone else (if my wife and I had our way, thats probably what we would do). Though in the application of a lesson, not practicing with other people makes it more difficult to learn, however I have been to lessons where half the room rotates partners and the other half does not. However know that “not comfortable touching strangers” is a good reason to say “no”.
In practice, if you went dancing with a friend (who presumably would not only dance with you) you can always say, “I’m sitting out this song” if asked and if they “say what about the next?”, you can say “I’ve already said I would dance the next one with my friend.”(probably not really a lie if you plan on only dancing with them) The vast majority of the dancers that I know are really nice and understanding, the vast majority of the minor that are not are “superstars”, at least in their mind, and would not ask a newbie in a million songs, so the fraction of people who would ask a newbie to dance that are not nice and understanding is really small.
Besides, if you are new, everyone will know(it is usually pretty obvious) and not expect you to know the taboo. It is more of a taboo of saying “no” because “you are not good enough to dance with me”. And it is definitely not an announced policy, just part of the culture you absorb via osmosis that I have discuss a handful of times with (for lack of a better term) “high-level” members of the scene.
As for smarmy encouragement: smarmy is subjective but there will be coddling in any scene that values new comers, I say soak it up, because when you get good enough to not need it anymore, it goes away.
A solution? Go out dancing, after a short period of time it will all be moot. Either you like dancing enough to touch strangers, they will quickly cease to be strangers, or you will be known as the couple that doesn’t dance with anyone else (those do exist) and no one will ask you anymore. Or I guess you could also find out that you don’t like dancing, in which case it is also moot.
Admittedly, I am biased on the subject of the merits of dancing, but I encourage almost everyone to get into it, I know many people whose lives were changed for the better by dancing and none that I can says whose lives were destroyed by it.
I can see why road maintenance hassle doesn’t outweigh potential benefits, but what about a gene for producing a pesticide. Resistance to herbicide doesn’t present an obvious fitness benefit to a wild hybrid, but not being eaten by bugs certainly does. How would said pesticide affect bee populations if all the wild relatives of a given GMO crop now produced its own pesticide?
Admitting that I am at best a fledgling rationalist, I think its unreasonable to believe that GMOs are safe. Why does one believe that they are? Because researchers paid by or funded by the company that own the products have yet to find that they are unsafe. I’m not suggesting a big conspiracy or anything, but cognitive biases are not trivial to overcome. But the belief that they are inherently safe because all we did was move some genes around is naive considering the current knowledge base of DNA.
How about looking at it this way, P(not eating GMO food is bad for me)=0, P(eating GMO food is bad for me)>=0. GMO offers me (personally) no utility (U=0)so is U
=0 )?
Do I think we should continue GMO research, yes. Do I think we should have vast acres of GMO crops, no. (but you can’t always get what you want) Should we make them illegal, no. Should they be labeled, yes.
I should state that none of this is based on per reviewed research, just personal experience and practices learned from others with more experience than myself, which apparently have merit.
I should also state that some of these may be specific to partner dancing activities (I do Lindy Hop, which is a type of swing dance)
There are, IMO, two incredibly important aspects of a good dance activity: 1) Whoever is teaching the step/lesson/whatever avoids, at all cost, adopting an “I’m a dance teacher” air. How precisely to do this is probably specific to individual personalities. 2) Rule number 1 is to have fun. That has to be the primary and perhaps sole purpose for dancing. In the right crowd I often word it as “If you are not having fun, then you are doing it wrong.” Much more laughs and smiles come from non-catastrophic errors than from business as usual “doing it right”.
Some other practices for making people comfortable dancing:
-If there is an existing core of experienced dancers, have it be part of the culture to engage newcomers (ie ask new, inexperienced people to dance. I’m not sure what this would look like for line type dances) -The converse, build a culture where newcomers will self-engage (ie ask experienced people to dance). This can be done by saying “feel free to ask anyone to dance” as often as possible and by having a culture where saying “no” without good reason is taboo. It is general etiquette in my circle that if you say no to someone, you are either injured, tired, need a drink/breather, or don’t like this song, as such if your favorite partner comes up and asks you to dance right after you said no to someone else, you are still injured, tired, need a drink, etc and should sit out the song. -When giving a lesson or teaching the step, avoid “[Random Learner], you are doing this wrong” instead, say “I am seeing a few people doing this wrong.” Even though I (and others like me) like it when given direct correction, I don’t have issues with feeling comfortable in these situation, but people who get embarrassed easily will be by “Hey you shy girl blushing, you the one blushing even more now, don’t do it that way.” -As with any teaching/learning, everyone is different. Some like to count, some need music, music makes it harder for some, counting confuses some, some don’t need to see the move from multiple angles, some will never get it without seeing it from multiple angles, some will get confused if they see it multiple angles. You have to constantly update your model of the group and encourage feedback.
I hope this is helpful, I’ll update if I think of anything else useful.
From a purely practical side, fostering an environment in which people who are not comfortable dancing will feel comfortable is not an easy thing to do, especially for one who has no experience fostering such an environment.
I base this on eight years of personal experience as an active member in a dance community. It is hard enough to make people who showed up to dance feel comfortable let alone people who showed up to discuss Bayes’ Theorem :)
Though as someone who went social dancing up to 5 times a week and a least once a week for the better part of a decade, I could get behind a LW+dancing event.
“Is the fetus growing in [pregnant woman you both know]‘s uterus a boy or a girl.” There is a tremendous amount of people who think that order of birth, shape of belly, pulse on pinky, etc can be used to predict the baby’s sex [anecdotally these results, combined with peoples’ guesses come to 50⁄50, go figure!] , which if enough of them agreed could arguably be used to marginally move away from the base of 51⁄49. This probability could be updated after an ultrasound, but still not move to 100% as there are well documented error rates associated with sexing a baby via ultrasound. Even more fun, these error rates are result specific, (i can’t remember the numbers, they are buried in a baby book) a “boy” result is wrong less often than a “girl” result, and I seem to remember there is user error involved (some technicians are wrong less often than others). If a blood test is done on a fetus it could be used to further update the probability. The final test, inspection upon birth, which will update the probability again, will not quite get to 100% unless tests were done to rule out a rare abnormality (ie apparently a boy, but has an ovary)
I’m pretty sure that this worry is more about passing herbicide resistance to weeds, for example, canola and mustard are closely related, wild mustard can be viewed as a weed. This was the first result in a google search for “canola mustard hybrid”. If, for example, they handle highway medians by spraying herbicide, and all of the sudden, the wild mustard can thrive in round-up, then they would have to use a more costly method for median maintenance.
My biggest objection to GMO’s and the reason I strongly avoid them, is that I don’t feel there has been enough research into the long term affects of eating them, ie what happens to a human who eats GMO corn three times a day for 50 years and I am not getting paid to participate in the study. If I was starving and GMO corn was the only thing to eat, then yeah I’m down, but I’m not, so I’ll pass.
Hello all, it seems like it is a common enough occurrence that it no longer seem embarrassing, but I too found LW via HPMOR, which was referred to me by a friend; my eyes and neck hurt for at least a week after spending far too much time reading from a laptop. I have a BS and an MS in mechanical engineering, I have spent some time as a researcher, a high school teacher and I am currently being an actual engineer at a biodiesel plant.
Growing up everyone told me I was going to become an engineer (I was one of those kids that took apart my toys to see how they worked or try to make them better). I have been cursed, as I am sure is common at LW, that most things (at least mentally tasking things) I try are pretty easy, so I have learned not to work all that hard at anything: high school, undergrad, grad school, work. One of the best parts about LW is that this is really hard stuff, especial for one who is accustom to not having to put forth much mental effort. Yesterday I failed Wason’s selection task miserably (thank you, LW, for striking me!) and it took me nearly a year of half-hearted, sporatic readings of Bayes’s Theorem to finally be able to say I have moved up on Bloom’s Taxonomy to at least understanding (there was a huge lack of statistics in my curricula).
After a year of lurking I decided to start posting because there are so many questions I have that I think should be asked or ideas about which I would love to hear the input from higher level rationalists and this is the obvious starting place.
The factory radio in my vehicle (which is almost as old as me) does not have the capacity to play a podcast and I do not own an mp3 player. Also, the public radio station plays programming which is produced by National Public Radio during my commute (I’m not listening to Wayne’s World Radio or the like). This programming is, in my experience, fairly neutral news, which varies from super serious, important news to fascinating fluff pieces.
I find that when left to my own devices for news, I have something akin to confirmation bias, where I only pick news that is really important and interesting to me, which tends to be a fairly narrow picture of the world (mostly science and tech news). NPR’s news tends to push my boundaries enough that I get a better picture of what is happening in the world. So if I were to download podcasts of NPR news programming, I would the be getting the same service also without paying. I guess I could contribute directly to NPR instead of local station (which in turn pays NPR for the programming) but if everyone did that, there would be not local stations, which would possibly mean less funding for NPR, which would negatively impact their programming, which I find valuable. It is really the same scenario on a bigger scale.