I was making a silly foolish joke and didn’t even think about how obviously I would be opening myself up to charges (by myself if not others) of implicit sexism. Sigh. I’m so busted.
k3nt
Karma: 95
I very much appreciated reading this article.
As a general comment, I think that this forum falls a bit too much into groupthink. Certain things are assumed to be correct that have not been well argued. A presumption that utilitarianism of some sort or another is the only even vaguely rational ethical stance is definitely one of them.
Not that groupthink is unusual on the internet, or worse here than elsewhere! Au contraire. But it’s always great to see less of it, and to see it challenged where it shows up.
Thanks again for this, Mr. Corn.
tl;dr to me indicates something you say about somebody else’s post (which you didn’t bother to read because you found it too long). Used w/r/t one’s own post it’s very confusing.
I use “Shorter me:”
for what that’s worth.
Thanks for the link. I live in Madison and had no idea that this interesting stuff was being done here.
Agree 100%. I just played a flash game last night and then again this morning, because I “just wanted to finish it.” The challenge was gone, I had it all figured out, and there was nothing left but the mopping up … which took three hours of my life. At the end of it, I told myself, “Well, that was a waste of time.” But I was also glad to have completed the task.
It’s probably a very good thing that I’ve never tried any drug stronger than alcohol.
Do you extend this distrust of statements made about people who disagree with you on politics, to the field of religion as well? Do you expect creationist Christians to be as rational as scientific atheists who accept evolution?
Coulter is not only “conservative,” she’s also a creationist.
My problem with Coulter is not that she’s conservative. It’s that she doesn’t think about issues independent of her ideology. There are those on the left who are similar.
Of course. It’s an exceedingly limited heuristic and valuable only in rare circumstances.
Actually, I want to thank you (and Dan, below) for making me think a little more carefully about this.
I now think that the constant wrongness of Ann Coulter isn’t an accident. She is an almost perfect example of a pure anti-rationalist: someone who will always and only believe things that accord with her ideology. You can predict what she will say about many issues via a simple process.
For instance, take the sentence “Muslims are bad,” and apply it simplemindedly to any issue involving Muslims, and you will be able to predict her beliefs. She insists that Muslims had nothing to do with the advance of knowledge; that Islam has never been a religion of peace or tolerance; that Sirhan Sirhan was a Muslim (he wasn’t). She writes: “Muslims ought to start claiming the Quran also prohibits indoor plumbing, to explain their lack of it.” And on, and on.
Similarly with “liberals are bad.” She believes that liberals are always wrong. Among the conclusions she draws: liberals believe in evolution, therefore evolution is false.
I don’t know, it’s a pretty impressive record she’s got going. She will, no doubt, be right about things on occasion, by accident. But I’m starting to feel better about the reliability of my “shortcut to truth.” :)
Agreed. All that I have is a highly unscientific impression based on my own personal experiences with her. So far she’s batting pretty close to 1.000 though.
The fact that the consensus of this community is contrary to Coulter’s conclusion I’m counting as one more data point.
Oh jeez you’re asking a lot. Too many to count. Google her if you feel up to it.
And honestly, I don’t really believe this is a serious guide to truth and falsehood. Every time I test it, it comes out right. But I can’t run enough tests to know for certain.
No prior familiarity; thus I started with no information and no particular beliefs about their guilt or innocence either way.
The first thing I saw was that Ann Coulter is convinced that Amanda and Raffaele are guilty. I immediately moved my belief in their guilt way down. When Ann Coulter takes a strong position on a controversial issue, she is almost always wrong.
From there it was mostly downhill for the prosecution, as far as I could tell.
“Later, when a airtight alibi forced the authorities to release Lumumba, they substituted Guede as the third participant in the alleged sex game, even though he had no known connection to either Amanda or Raffaele.” That’s just stupid. I don’t trust the Italian police, or any police, when it comes to high-profile cases. The political pressure to get a guilty verdict is strong. Then, clear evidence that their original theory of the case was wrong came in, and they didn’t significantly revise the theory. Not good.
The pro-guilt side keeps promising links to the “evidence,” but I’m not finding it. Very irritating.
I don’t care at all that their statements were confused. “She was kept up all night, claims to have been hit, and was denied a lawyer and professional translator”—or so says the pro-innocence site. Sounds like standard operating procedure when you want to get someone convicted, regardless of the truth.
The physical evidence is confusing. I would need to know a lot more about DNA and luminol and so on to evaluate the claims and counter-claims here.
Total time spent, 45 minutes. My conclusion is maybe 10% guilty for these two, but it’s a very tentative conclusion and I know that much of it is based on my belief in Ann Coulter’s wrongness … which is the sort of appeal that shouldn’t be reliable—although based on experience it appears to be.
I’m not sure I embody one! I’m not sure that I don’t just do whatever seems like the next thing to do at the time, based on a bunch of old habits and tendencies that I’ve rarely or never examined carefully.
I get up in the morning. I go to work. I come home. I spend more time reading the internets (both at work and at home) than I probably should—on occasion I spend most of the day reading the internets, one way or another, and while I’m doing so have a vague but very real thought that I would prefer to be doing something else, and yet I continue reading the internets.
I eat more or less the same breakfast and the same lunch most days, just out of habit. Do I enjoy these meals more than other options? Almost certainly not. It’s just habit, it’s easy, I do it without thinking. Does this mean that I have a utility function that values what’s easy and habitual over what would be enjoyable? Or does it mean that I’m not living in accord with my utility function?
In other words, is the sentence “I embody a utility function” intended to be tautological, in that by definition, any person’s way of living reveals/embodies their utility function (a la “revealed preferences” in economics), or is it supposed to be something more than that, something to aspire to that many people fail at embodying?
If “I embody a utility function” is aspirational rather than tautological—something one can fail at—how many people reading this believe they have succeeded or are succeeding in embodying their utility function?
For those of us who are relatively newcomers to the site, please provide a link to your blog. Thanks.