Paying a drug addict to get clean isn’t rewarding good behavior so much as rewarding the cessation of bad behavior. This has clear problems. For one thing, it isn’t random like the “follow the speed limit for a chance at a small reward” scheme.
A true equivalent would be rewarding random people for not being on drugs, including the population of former addicts that have since gone clean. Being on drugs would be a garantee of not getting this reward.
Voted down because tangential replies that belong elsewhere really get on my nerves. Please comment on the post about the vitamin study, linked in the OP.
Wow, that was great! I already had a fairly good understanding of the Theorem, but this helped cement it further and helped me compute a bit faster.
It also gave me a good dose of learning-tingles, for which I thank you.
Rational Tropers. QED.
Where I live, ETC stands for Electronic Toll Collection and is posted at the entry ramp of toll-roads equipped appropriately.
What’s wrong with just using “Edit: additional note goes here”
Excellent article, though there is a point I’d like to see adressed on the topic.
One salient feature of these marginal, lifestyle-relaed conditions is the large number of false positives that comes with diagnosis. How many alcoholics, chronic gamblers, and so on, are really incapable of helping themselves, as opposed to just being people who enjoy drinking or gambling and claim to be unable to help themselves to diminish social disapproval? Similarly, how many are diagnosed by their peers (He’s so mopey, he must be depressed) and possibly come to believe it themselves?
The existence of these false positives is probably a big reason for the sympathy/treatment difference these conditions have to more typical diseases.
The diagnosis for cancer is fairly straightforward (you have a cancerous tumor → you have cancer), the diagnosis for gambling addiction is much less so (maybe you are neurologically normal and just really like gambling, maybe there’s something deeply wrong with your neurochemistry.).
The lower lethality also makes it so that a person can not only self-diagnose a marginal condition and also justify never seeking treatment. If you don’t seek treatment for cancer, you die. If you don’t seek treatment for TB, you also put a lot of people at risk. If you don’t seek treatment for obesity… you stay fat. Barring a certain extreme, that isn’t going to kill you nor anyone else. Neither will chronic gambling or any of the other examples, though they might correlate with things that do kill you with a high probability, say alcoholism and drunk driving.
This is pretty much the opposite concern as the one stated in the conclusion of the main post: If a biological fix exists, is there a moral obligation to use it?
Interesting post, but perhaps too much is being compressed into a single expression.
The niceness and weirdness factors of thinking about cryonics do not actually affect the correctness of cryonics itself. The correctness factor depends only on one’s values and the weight of probability.
Not thinking one’s own values through sufficiently enough to make an accurate evaluation is both irrational and a common failure mode. Miscalculating the probabilities is also a mistake, though perhaps more a mathematical error than a rationality error.
When these are the reasons for rejecting cryonics, then that rejection is obviously incorrect.
That said, you are quite correct to point out that differing values are not automatically a rationality failure, and it is definitely good to consider the image problem associated with the niceness issues.
Perhaps the niceness and weirdness ought to not be jumbled together with the correctness evaluation question.
Forgive me if this has been adressed elsewhere, but doesn’t the knowledge that you are -trying- to like them get in the way of success? You will always know that you are liking them on purpose and applying these techniques to make yourself like them, so how do you avoid this knowledge breaking the desired effect?
Let me sum it up more simply: Telling people not to judge is not an accurate reflection of what they actually do.
I tried to explain why non-judgmentalism is a bad value to uphold. I have nothing to say about Garin and Vanessa, only about the value of the advice proffered.
I have a problem here. Filtering implies that some judgement has been made, and the person has been found wanting. It is harmful to advise against filtering, and therefore also harmful to advise against judging.
They decided whether to say “yes” or “no” to a request, and they (allegedly) didn’t enter into some class of cognitive states associated with negative affect or disapproval.
Advising people not to judge others is not the same as what you said. My point is only that this constitues bad advice.
How does one acknowledge and accept everybody without filtering people?
What I have seen of people who hold non-judgmentalism as a aspiration has led me to believe that it is a deeply anti-rational ideal. The net result is repeating the same mistakes over and over, such as associating with people who will will take advantage of the non-judger, or not correcting a critical failure because it’s judgemental to consider it a failure. By critical failure I mean things like dropping out of the workforce out of sheer laziness; it would be judgemental to say that this is wrong so therefore it’s wrong to stop anyone, including yourself, from doing so.
They simply said “no” as warmly as they said “yes”,
So they judged people and their needs or wants, then proceeded to claim they were non-judgemental. Either somebody isn’t thinking through the meaning of “judgement”, or doesn’t care about the actual implications of that advice if it is really followed 100%.
Think of it like being a rationalist aspiration to always tell the truth and never self-decieve: setting that as your aspiration does not mean you always can or will accomplish it, but at the same time, it doesn’t mean your aspiration should be downgraded to “being in the top percentage” of truth-telling and non self-deception!
It also doesn’t mean you get to claim that you always tell the truth and never self decieve.
Having known some people who made “accepting everyone” and “being non-judgemental” a point of honour and seen the results, I find it very hard to believe that is possible to be successful and really live up to those ideals. I also don’t think they’re very good ideals.
So, she said, she and Garin just always acknowledge and accept everyone.
Allow me to express polite but strong skepticism on this point. I would be very much surprised to find that they accept literally EVERYONE. Do they acknowledge panhandlers the same way as attendees to marketing conferences? How about leading politicians from the opposite party as theirs? Religious leaders from a different religion?
It’s easy to say “just genuinely accept everyone” when you don’t even see most of the people around you.
In fact, really acknowledging and accepting -everyone- would probably ruin them in short order as they would find all their time and resources wasted on people that they are quite right to filter. No one has the time and resources to -actually- do what they are advocating.
It’s empty advice.
EDIT: fixed some typos after having a nice, stimulating cup of coffee.
The point was partially made by the fact that water is free, at least everywhere I’ve lived. Thanks, though.
As a non-drinker, I often passed proffered drinks onto my friends, who could make use of them. Obviously I would never ask for a drink, except maybe a glass of water.
Sounds like Cabaret Hostesses in Japan. They have male counterparts, too, but the female variety is a lot more common.
You effectively answered your own comment, but to clarify -
Strategy guides on dead tree have been obsolete for more than a decade. GameFAQs is over a decade old, and it’s the best place to go for strategies, walkthroughs, and message boards full of analysis by armies of deticated fans. People are still finding new and inventive strategies to optimize their first-generation Pokemon games, after all. Games have long passed the point on the complexity axis where the developper’s summary of the point of the game is enough to convey an optimal strategy.
Your last paragraph is gold.
There’s nothing wrong with not wanting what those around have to offer, either.
It’s worth pointing out that all three examples are highly culturally variable.
The “aspie logic” example behaviour is far more common where I live (urban Japan).
In the first, most people lack the facilities to bake, especially young adults in small apartments or dorms. Buying a cake is the obvious thing to do. That or taking the SO to a cake-serving cafe.
In the second, -no one- here holds doors for strangers. I had to train myself out of the habit because it was getting me very strange looks. Similarly, no one says “bless you” or equivalent when strangers sneeze. The rules of courtesy are different.
In the third, it’s normal here to expect repeated invitations for any occasion. One invitation will be for show, so you invite people you don’t expect to make it as well. The key is that people won’t actually make plans to attend until two or more invitations have been received. (This is locally variable; some regions and demographics expect three or four invites. Think of it as a pre-event version of the British quirk where one says “We must do this again sometime” while having no actual desire to repeat the encounter.)
The bottom line is that the other person’s expectations ought to be factored into the logic. Beware generalizing from a sample of one and all that.
Odd as it may sound, it would have to be “structured randomness” so to speak. Picking a slip out of a bowl would probably work—getting a reward only when the parent is in the mood to give one would likely not. The latter is just as random from the child’s perspective, but inconsistent parenting (or animal training, or employee rewarding schemes) is known to be bad at shaping behaviour in the desired fashion.