Basically, yeah. Intelligence, maturity, realism, various things you’d associate with wisdom.
jferguson
Karma: 288
How do I get my points across to a theist? Well, I don’t. You’ll never change anyone’s mind by “convincing” them unless they’re already a very good rationalist, and even then, it’s not really guaranteed to work.
“Convincing” is more often about signaling, whether to yourself or people besides the one you’re trying to convince. If your goal is to change someone’s mind, try to make them think they already agree with you. I’m not aware of an effective way to do this for theists or “spiritual” people or new-agers or anyone else in that category.
I know 1024 slices of Wonder bread isn’t 1024 times as useful to a regular hungry person as one slice of Wonder bread. The first slice is the one which the util is defined as, then all the additional utils would be like “something else” that gives exactly as much enjoyment, or just that exact amount of enjoyment but 1023 more times.
Well, imagine if a util were like ten years of constant joy. In that case, I’d rather have n = 1. Similarly, if a util is like finding a penny, I really don’t care what n is, but I may as well go with a pretty large one so that if I do “win”, I actually notice it. I chose n = 10 because a 10% chance for 1024 slices of Wonder bread on an empty stomach sounds much better than a sure shot for one slice of Wonder bread when I’m hungry (I’d barely even notice that), and also much better than a tiny chance for some ridiculously high number of utilons (I almost certainly won’t be able to enjoy it). n = 9 and n = 11 would also be okay choices; I didn’t arrive at 10 analytically.
Depends on what a util is. The probability of an event is a pretty well-defined concept, but what a util means to me is free-floating without something to compare it to. If one util is a slice of Wonder bread on an empty stomach for a well-nourished person, then let’s go with n = 10.
Your use of “pointlessness” makes me think of something. Saying that someone’s life has a point (purpose) usually means they have some long-term goal that they work toward, which implies thinking about future possibilities and developing abstractions like “purpose”. Not to say that the animals most people eat can’t think into the future, but if they do live “in the moment” to a much greater extent than humans, doesn’t that greatly reduce the cruelty argument? I think a sufficiently unintelligent human would be happy to sit and eat all day (as some are wont to do already, of their own volition), to say nothing of what a chicken might like. I’m not implying they’re in paradise, but if a chicken’s daily list of desires is “eat stand sit eat groom stand eat sit stand sleep”, it doesn’t sound like they’d even be experiencing a “dull, aching pointlessness”, because that is precisely what they want and would be doing otherwise.
I suppose my question is, do cows, chickens, pigs, etc. have long-term notions of contentment like humans do?
A lot of us probably just call it akrasia and shrug (me included). I don’t know any convincing reason for eating meat that doesn’t make one immoral by usual modern standards.
I have to wonder what a spammer’s motivation is in spamming here. Isn’t LW’s usual readership exactly the people who are unlikely to think “Oh, this looks legitimate, I should buy a Silver Pandora Necklace!”?
Not ironically, there are ancient posts from Elizier and Robin concerning exactly this: “I Don’t Know.” and “You Are Never Entitled to Your Opinion”
I think it’s an important skill in general to be able to estimate things, though I might just think that because I got a 9⁄10 on that test.
Good estimation may not always be useful in the real world if you’re giving someone else an estimate on how long something will take (wide estimates are perceived as bad estimates by most, as many of the comments on that blog show intentionally or unintentionally), but it is fun, and I’ve seen it be personally useful before.
I interpreted it as “the length of the coastline as represented on a high-detail world map”, which got me a good estimate.
Kegels may help. Kegels might help everything, really.
Websites about atheism are a different group of people than websites about rationality. There’s overlap, to be sure, but the people who are “passionate” about being irreligious don’t tend to gravitate here; my view of a typical LWer is that they may go through a phase of thinking lack of religion is worth spending a lot of time discussing, but then they move past it because it’s not a very difficult question. LWers talk about their atheism, but usually only when provoked.
Would they really? I’m not a parent, but I at least like to think I’d spend extra money teaching my kids useful things that are also status signals, like economics or calculus or writing (real writing, not “don’t split infinitives”). Basically anything you could easily get tutoring for is a better use of time and money than grammar education.
The traditional response to this on the FES website is that airplanes aren’t actually flying from one side of the disk to the other. They might go around the periphery to some extent, but outside the disk is probably either a lot of nothing or a very, very large, cold field of ice. So, that would make a trip from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn take much, much longer than a spherical-ish Earth would predict.
That’s why I assign such a low probability to this—that, and the motion of the stars in the Northern and Southern hemispheres working exactly the way they would if the Earth were approximately spherical. If this disk Earth were the case, the stars in the Southern hemisphere would be rotating in the same direction as the stars in the Northern hemisphere, just with a wider radius of rotation, and there would be no axis that the stars rotate about near the south pole; and though I haven’t personally observed this effect, I’m pretty confident that astronomers would have noticed this. (This whole objection got explained away by different “star clouds” in different hemispheres.)
Well, that and the conspiracy.
My initial probability given was probably too low.
I’m not generally one to get over-excited about peoples’ bad reasons for being creationists, but the leap from “Evolution due to natural selection doesn’t provide obvious explanations for every single thing that every living thing ever does or has” to “The King James Version of the Bible as generally remembered and interpreted by Protestants is exactly right” is always staggering when I can tease it out of people explicitly.
As far as non-kinesthetic responses to awful arguments go, I guess I would call it a general feeling of discomfort. Like, “Someone’s brain really just output that series of words, and I’m very upset to live in a universe where that’s the case.” Sort of like the discomfort of watching someone you can’t help who’s in a bad situation.
For many ambitious people, I’d guess that their ambition isn’t because they want to achieve some other goals, but because they actually enjoy “being ambitious”—they want to do everything very well because they feel good about being the best or near the best. Not to label myself “ambitious” and lump myself in with people who work far harder, but as an example, I’m a university student studying engineering. I could have coasted through my various math classes getting Bs and stopped right at the minimum requirements to graduate, but I didn’t. Maybe to a short-sighted economist I’m being irrational, because either way I’ll graduate with the same degree and employers will see me basically the same and I probably won’t seriously increase my future income/status with my extra math knowledge, but I just like being good at math. The reason for that desire is probably complicated, but it’s a real reason.
Doesn’t the anthropic principle already deal with the FTA? Not that it’s wrong to have more than one way to go about an argument, but in my experience, every somewhat-reasonable religious person (i.e. anyone you might be able to get through to) who has the anthropic principle explained to them says “Hmm, I suppose you’re right, that’s not a very good way to prove the existence of the Protestant Christian God exactly as presented in the King James Version of the Bible”.
You could also say that humans have utility functions, but they can change quickly over time because of trivial things. Which, I admit, would be near-indistinguishable from not having utility functions at all (in the long-term), but saying that you have a utility function and a set of preferences at one instant in time seems true enough to allow for decision theory analysis.
Not quite. I’m saying that the purpose of disagreeing and trying to convince people of things, from an evolutionary sense, is usually to signal to others (or yourself) that you are wise. It’s dressing like a winner: smart people actually do sometimes disagree with others because they have some wise, compelling reason to believe otherwise, so openly and aggressively disagreeing is an easy way to signal “I’m smart!”. Smart people themselves often get caught up in this (If you’ve read HP:MoR, Dumbledore represents what I’m saying pretty well).
My point wasn’t to say that, if you argue from your own authority instead of facts, you’ll be more successful (even if a dogmatically religious person may be more receptive to that). My point was that the actual purpose of aggressively trying to convince someone they’re wrong isn’t to convince them they’re wrong, but instead to try to convince everyone else involved that you’re wise, even if you aren’t aware of your underlying motives. Think of it this way: how often does trying to convince a typical person that they’re wrong, using facts and reasoning and observations, actually work? Basically never, in my experience, unless you’re working with a reasonably rational person who’s mutually perceived as a part of your group.