Interesting. Clearly your prison and Macholand examples have a game theoretic structure, where the value of your actions is partly influences by what they signal to the other players about your dispositions. It looks a bit like there is a heuristic that helps people choose the option with advantageous signalling value, but they apply it also in cases that don’t have the iterated game structure that is required for this to make sense, such as, in particular, 2. This is essentially a different way of phrasing what I take you to be saying.
Creutzer
Karma: 986
Seconding this. It seems like a super-important topic, so if you have something to say about it, please do.
The term you will want to use in your Google search is “Bayesian cognitive science”. It’s a huge field. But the short answer is, yes, the people in that field do assume that the brain does something that can be modelled as keeping and updating a probability distribution according to Bayes’ rule. Much of it is computational-level modelling, i.e. rather removed from questions of implementation in the brain. A quick Google search did, however, find some papers on how to implement Bayesian inference in neural networks—though not necessarily linked to the brain. I’m sure some people do the latter sort of thing as well, though.
If by implicit you mean implied by me, that wasn’t intended. But I think other cultures do, to varying degrees, people more towards thinking that a problem is either unsolvable or that trying to solve it isn’t worth the bother. I always feel like “Sometimes, when you’re screwed enough, you’re screwed” counts as a radical realisation in contemporary America.
Here’s my theory: American culture has a presupposition that every problem has a solution—that you can win. Any American rationalist will be able to tell you that their use of “winning” can, strictly speaking, just mean “not failing too hard”, but… there’s a reason why it’s still called “winning”. On a gut level, people from a culture that doesn’t have this presupposition might find the whole thing much less relatable.
That’s true, and these technical developments were crucial for 19th century piano music, but keep in mind that harmonic language and musical form are quite independent from this and are highly relevant domains of innovation and creativity.
In any case, I’m not quite sure what the point is that you’re trying to make.
In my experience, many people hold that when trying to derive the KI in the groundwork, he just managed to confuse himself, and that the examples of its application as motivated reasoning of a rigid Prussian scholar with an empathy deficit.
The crucial failure is not that it is nonsensical to think about such abstract equilibria—it is very much not, as TDT shows. But in TDT terms, Kant’s mistake was this: He thought he could compel you to pretend that everybody else in the world was running TDT. But there is nothing that compels you to assume that, and so you can’t pull a substantial binding ethics out of thin air (or pure rationality), as Kant absurdly believed he could.
Indeed. Kant is a poor example for offensive continental philosophy because while he was a very bad writer, but you can reconstruct sensible ideas he was trying to express, at least when it’s not about ethics. The really offensive philosophy is the one where the obscurity of the writing is not accidental in this way, but essential, and where the whole thing falls apart once you try to remove it.
Analytical philosophers also do not routinely scoff at Kant except for 1) his lack of skill as a writer and 2) his ethics.
To be fair, if there is a mystery at all, then this only pushes it one step further: Schumann wasn’t any more radically innovative than Brahms and yet was extremely influential and is still regarded as a composer of the first rank.
The people just adhere to the rhythmical structure that the piece began with; the pianist is, to them, just doing lots of syncopes. This isn’t meaningfully described in terms of a priming effect, and so it’s not clear that this should affect our view of priming research. (If you ask me, it’s also not really meaningfully described by “people being controlled by what they can’t perceive consciously”. It’s like saying you’re being “controlled by what you can’t perceive consciously” when you listen to somebody speak just because your language parser works subconsciously.) People are not parsing the second part of the piece “primed” by the first part. It’s one piece and they’re just assuming that the pianist isn’t playing a metrically inconsistent structure, so he must be playing syncopes.
Nor is this interesting from a music cognition perspective, although there are interesting questions in its vicinity. Some pieces make you switch to a new metrical parsemetrical parse and if you’re not a musician, you don’t notice it—now that is interesting.
EDIT: To make it perfectly clear, priming would be: You parse piece 1 in a certain way. Piece 1 ends. Then you hear piece 2 and parse it like piece 1 even though a different parse if possible. The example here doesn’t fit into this pattern at all, so I’m not very worried about people confusing things like it for priming.
Uhm, what? Why? Bla bla bla indeed. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) It’s not actually very relevant.
If you don’t believe that logical (or, for that matter, any other sort of) impossibility implies non-existence, then you are understanding either “logical impossibility” or “non-existence” in a way different from just about everybody else. So if there is any point to this discussion, it should be to elucide how you understand them.
Well, the conclusion should read not “more things” but “at least as many”. Things might accidentally not exist.
I feel the fact that you reject premise 1 just means that you don’t really grasp the concept of impossibility, logical or otherwise… Or you have a different concept of existence.
The reason why I used a semi-formal notation was to suggest that if you formalise it all, you can actually prove “P(x doesn’t exist) ≥ P(x is impossible)” as a tautology. (Ignoring the issue that with specifically logical impossibility, you get into a bit of trouble with probability assignments to tautologies.)
How can P(x doesn’t exist) < P(x is logically impossible)? That’s… well, logically impossible.
When someone tells you to be more confident, it’s probably because they believe your perception of yourself is worse than reality.
The cynical alternative hypothesis is that “be more confident” actually means “be higher status”.
The practical problem is, of course, enforcing this prohibition on procreation. Forced sterilisation is difficult to sell and problematic because the subjects might wish to have children with other people. RISUG might be a solution, once it becomes available.
I’m not sure what I think of the fact that everyone is concerned with the genetics of possible offspring in the case of incest, but nobody minds two chronically depressed, highly neurotic people, one of whom has a hereditary autoimmune condition, procreating… (The domain of quantification for the slightly hyperbolic “everyone” and “nobody” here is the general public rather than LW. I suspect that many in this community would, in fact, mind the latter case as well.)
Obligatory cynicism: But then you don’t get social status for being right, so there’s not incentive to do it.
That is very true. Many people also seem to interpret the politeness rule of not talking too much about oneself in such a way that no hint about interesting topics ever gets picked up because giving your opinion on something, or relating experiences, is “talking too much about yourself” unless you were explicitly asked. The only solution I’ve is to simply avoid people who are frustrating like that.
This was my first thought, too. The Singaporean psychology grad student is a member of the same culture as you; the local fashion designer is not.
Moral theories predict feelings
No. This is what theories of moral psychology do. Philosophical ethicists do not consider themselves to be in the same business.
The Russian vaccine, unlike the Chinese one, is not an inactivated virus. It uses an adenovirus vector for delivery of genetic material that makes the body’s cells synthesise antigen material, much like the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine.