“Helping people to open their eyes and see human suffering, raising children to be compassionate, will do far more to get rid of the Hitlers and Castros than logic and writing classes.”
’Cause no one ever thought that Che Guivera or Lenin were acting out of a compassionate desire to end suffering. Nobody EVER claimed that.
Why would a near-total egoist hope to be anonymous? :-)
HA, replied on your blog. Sorry about the confusion.
“persist as subjective conscious entities. What actions that the 4 of us take will maximize our persistence odds? I think every ideal should be subordinated to that.”
I’m not entirely sure I know what that means, but it SOUNDS like “each of us wants to be different—it’s more important than anything else that we be different from each other.”
If my reading is correct, I fail to see why I would want to consider that my overriding priority. Particularly in placing over, say, the truth.
And Eliezer, it just keeps getting better and better. I had to stop reading Marginal Revolution precisely because, brilliant as Tyler is, he really does try to be too clever for his own good. It becomes frustrating to watch.
LOL. Color me for both, Andrew. Perpetual motion using magnetic levitation in a vacuum at 10. Attempting to come up with a simple proof of Fermat’s Theorem at 20 (if there was an easy way to determine n-roots of non-primes, I’d have been SET! :-) )
Eliezer,
I’m wondering about the build up to becoming a Bayesian. Do you think it’s necessary for a person to understand Traditional Rationality as a mode of thinking before they can appreciate Bayes?
Intuitively, I would suspect that an understanding and even appreciation of ol’ fashioned either/or thinking is a necessary foundation for probabilities.
Sorry if this is out of left field. My wife just left for work—she’s a pre-school teacher—and I was thinking of how the lesson might be applied to her students (who are admittedly far too young for this sort of thing just yet.)
Why is it that I suspect Constant didn’t guess the rule properly?
Isn’t it the entire point of the post that confirmation bias is the tendency NOT TO CHECK ASSUMPTIONS?
So are you suggesting that it impossible for someone else to construct an unbiased argument for you?
After all, it’s only a small step to observe that it’s impossible to ever know whether someone else has the motives of the campaign manager in this case.