When someone asks you “Why are you doing X?”, And you don’t remember an answer previously in mind, Do not ask yourself “Why am I doing X?”.
How dangerous is that second step? There’s definitely potential for confabulation when you try to remember if you’d ever actively decided on X.
Trying to get people to mentally commit before they find out how expensive it is?
Bah, that’s nothing. For American healthcare, you have to actually commit before learning the price.
The congressman didn’t say anything about voting.
Boris: There’s a small amount of subtlety in actually doing step 1.
Isn’t it simply impossible? That doesn’t interfere with your claim that such a Turing machine exists, but step 1 claims that it’s computable.
Marcello, I think your list generalizes too much. I see three main types of words on the list. The first type indicates in-group out-group distinction and seems pretty poisonous to me. The second are ad hominem arguments which are dangerous, but do apply sometimes. And then there are a few like “too complicated.” You call those “negative affect words”? Surely it is better to say “that is too complicated to be true” than to say simply “that is not true”?
But if we aren’t to forgive tyrants for their good intentions, shouldn’t we only judge GW by his results?
Yes, when we judge people, we should judge them by the same standard. But this post mentioned the tyrants’ intentions, so it should also mention GW’s.
TGGP: at the very least, it’s well-documented that he defused a couple of coups.
My understanding is that GW decided he’d get more pages in the history books if he declined the crown. George III agreed: “if he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
michael vassar, You’ve quietly slid from engineers to programmers. Other kinds of engineers need a lot more money to make it a hobby. Maybe they make up for it with less variation in ability, but I doubt it. Even if you didn’t mean to talk about other engineers, their situation needs explaining.
How much do you worry about age 40? Is that just based on your father? Conway passed 40 before Marcello was born.
Phil Goetz, could you elaborate on the psychology of mythical creatures? That some creatures are “spiritual” sounds to me like a plausible distinction. I count vampires, but not unicorns. To me, a unicorn is just another chimera. Why do you think they’re more special than mermaids? magic powers? How much of a consensus do you think exists?
Shalizi moved: the Aleph Anti FAQ
Tom Breton (Tehom), That is not how I interpreted it, though without context I cannot argue for either side. I thought him complaining that someone said “what Balfour really meant...”
flip a coin, see how you feel about the result, and act on that feeling
It’s more amusing if you get the outside input from other people. (but it’s biased)
If you haven’t seen a brain, “Nothing is easier than to familiarize one’s self with the mammalian brain. Get a sheep’s head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps...”
Lara Foster, what do you put as the odds that our knowledge is complete, but no one has tried to make something directly copying C elegans?
...and I go on to learn that people in political science departments cite Derida.
Political science is the department where it would be most interesting to know what’s going on because it has methodological pluralism while seeming to have a single topic, while, say, English departments seem to have gotten methodological variety out of crisis of topic.
michael vassar, Maybe that’s a good description of new departments (eg x-studies), but you sound like you think the post-colonial rhetoric is coming out of political science departments rather than English departments.
I think this post contains too little context about why we should care. Is the behaviorist doctrine sillier than other scientists’ descriptions of their methodologies? Did it damage their research? I imagine that it played a bigger role in status games than most descriptions of methodology, but a lot of inappropriate things play such roles. Maybe this one had more collateral damage than usual, but I see no reason to conclude that.
If you push most scientists, they will start reciting Popper, but this recitation has very little to do with what they actually do. I think it would be better if they could verbally describe what they’re doing and verbally reason about it, but I think most discussions (eg, this post) of what scientists do and should do are too trusting of the verbalizations. What they need is more behaviorism.
Richard Kennaway, the denial of visualization predates behaviorism, FWIW. see, eg, the pro-visualization F Galton, Statistics of mental imagery, Mind 5 (1880) 301-18, jstor
athmwiji, yes, numbers are not necessary for anchoring. I think that they make the anchoring worse, but it would be very bad to avoid numbers just because they make it easy to see anchoring.
our social structure and business rests on the tenets of what we believe
That sounds like propaganda, like the claim that atheists can’t be moral. Don’t let anyone tell you what to believe, especially don’t let them tell you that if you disagree one one point, you must disagree on others. Work out for yourself what is possible.