I found a website that might be useful: butterfly.com connects tutors to teachers with live online lessons in areas like music and cooking.
OnTheOtherHandle
Because any experience requirement draws an arbitrary line somewhere, and 18 is a useful line because it’s also the arbitrary line society has drawn for a lot of other milestones, like moving out of the house and finishing high school. Voting goes hand-in-hand with the transition out of mandatory formal education and the start of a new “adult life.” I think it makes sense that the voting age should be set to whatever age formal education ends and most people move out, but what age those things should happen at is again debatable.
You’re right, I misunderstood—I thought it was 3^(3^27), or 3^7625597484987, but it’s actually 3^^(3^27), or 3 to the power of itself 7625597484987 times, which is way bigger.
This question bothers me so much that once I get to be a good enough programmer I actually want to build a website that will connect adult beginners with each other so that maximum learning can happen with minimal embarrassment and no interaction with children. A system where you can trade tutoring (“I’ll teach you the violin if you’ll teach me painting”) or simply pay for classes, with some way to rate and view the quality of each person’s teaching would be useful.
As long as there is no larger system like that, I’d suggest that your best bet is to find a friend or acquaintance who is good at whatever you want to learn and offer them something they want but wouldn’t ask for, whether it’s money or a favor. That way, you get to learn things at a personalized pace while building a friendship.
I usually say “three to the three to the three to the three” even though that’s not technically correct unless I pronounce the parentheses in the proper places.
While sliding scales may more accurately represent reality, sharp gradations are the only way we can come up with a consistent policy. Abortion especially is a case where we need a bright line. The fact that we have two different words (abortion and infanticide) for what amounts to a difference of a couple of hours is very significant. We don’t want to let absolutely everyone use their own discretion in difficult situations.
Most policy arguments are about where to draw the bright line, not about whether we should adopt a sliding scale instead, and I think that’s actually a good idea. Admitting that most moral questions fall under a gray area is more likely to give your opponent ammunition to twist your moral views than it is to make your own judgment more accurate.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that pure experience—just raw data in your long-term memory—is a plausible criterion for a good voter. It’s not that intelligence and rationality is unimportant, since rational, intelligent people may well draw more accurate conclusions from a smaller amount of data.
What does matter is that everyone, no matter how intelligent or unintelligent, would be better off if they have a few elections and a few media scandals and a few internet flame wars and a few nationally significant policy debates stored in their long-term memory. Even HJPEV needs something to go on. The argument is not just that 18-year-olds as a group are better voters than 12-year-olds as a group, but that any given 12-year-old would be a better voter in 6 years, even if they’re already pretty good.
- Aug 6, 2013, 2:55 PM; 3 points) 's comment on Arguments Against Speciesism by (
“Maturity” is pretty much a stand-in for “desirable characteristics that adults usually have and children usually don’t,” so it’s almost by definition an argument in favor of adults. But to be fair, characteristics like the willingness to sit through/read boring informational pieces in order to be a more educated voter, the ability to accurately detect deception and false promises, and the ability to use past evidence to determine what is likely to actually happen (as opposed to what people say will happen) are useful traits and are much more common in 18-year-olds than 12-year-olds.
I don’t find arguments against letting children vote very convincing either, except the argument that 18 is a defensible Schelling point and it would become way too vulnerable to abuse if we changed it to a more complicated criterion like “anyone who can give informed consent, as measured by X.” After all, if we accept the argument that 12-17 year olds should vote (and I’m not saying it’s a bad argument), then the simplest and most effective way to enforce that is to draw another arbitrary line based on age, at some lower age. Anything more complex would again be politicized and gamed.
But I think you’re misrepresenting the “influenced by parents” argument. 22-year-olds are influenced by their friends, yes, but they influence their friends to roughly the same degree. Their friends do not have total power over their life, from basic survival to sources of information. A physical/emotional threat from a friend is a lot less credible than a threat from your parents, especially considering most people have more than one circle of friends. The same goes for the 75-year-old—they may be frail and physically dependent on their children, but society doesn’t condone a live-in grandparent being bossed around and controlled the way a live-in child is, so that is not as big a concern.
I have a question about the first logic puzzle here. The condition “Both sane and insane people are always perfectly honest, sane people have 100% true beliefs while insane people have 100% false beliefs” seems to be subtly different from Liar/Truth-teller. The Liar/Truth-teller thing is only activated when someone asks them a direct yes or no question, while in these puzzles the people are volunteering statements on their own.
My question is this: if every belief that an insane person holds is false, then does that also apply to beliefs about their beliefs? For example, an insane person may believe the sky is not blue, because they only believe false things. But does that mean that they believe they believe that the sky is blue, when in fact they believe that it is not blue? So all their meta-beliefs are just the inverse of their object-level beliefs? If all their beliefs are false, then their beliefs about their beliefs must likewise be false, making their meta-beliefs true on the object level, right? And then their beliefs about their meta-beliefs are again false on the object level?
But if that’s true, it seems like the puzzle becomes too easy. Am I missing something or is the answer to that puzzle “Vs lbh jrer gb nfx zr jurgure V nz n fnar cngvrag, V jbhyq fnl lrf”?
Edit: Another thought occurred to me about sane vs. insane—it’s specified that the insane people have 100% false beliefs, but it doesn’t specify that these are exact negations of true beliefs. For example, rather than believing the sky is not-blue, an insane person might believe the sky doesn’t even exist and his experience is a dream. For example, what would happen if you asked an insane patient whether he was a doctor? He might say no, not because he knew he was a patient but because he believed himself to be an ear of corn rather than a doctor.
I just blew through six or seven of Ted Chiang’s short stories, and when I finished “Hell Is the Absence of God” I had to stop. I was physically shaking, my knees went weak and I was reduced to gasping and making inarticulate sounds for the next several minutes. I don’t know if that was a fluke, but I would really like it if someone would point to similarly horrifying stories or books.
I think it might be more for a select group of people. In the LW community, I have gotten the impression that existential risk is higher status than global poverty reduction—that’s definitely the opinion of the high status people in this community. And maybe for the specific kind of nonconformist nerd who reads Less Wrong and is likely to come across this post, transhumanism and existential risk reduction has a “coolness factor” that global poverty reduction doesn’t have.
You’re definitely right about the wider world, but many people might only care about the opinions of the 100 or so members of their in-group.
I’d be curious if women actually did complain more than men do, or if that’s a myth, or if women are more likely to express displeasure in ways that are labeled “complaining” (as opposed to “arguing” or “debating”)? I know that the plausible-sounding and widely believed claim that women talk more than men do but the effect seems to be either very small or nonexistent.
It’d be interesting to see a study on this using a similar soundbite capturing device to find out if women did actually complain more. Even though there’d be issues with defining “complaining,” it could be useful. I’d predict that Hanson is coming up with an explanation for an effect that doesn’t really exist.
I think this is very important for putting questions like “Why aren’t there more women interested in X?” into context. Even restricting it to people who regularly participate in online communities as opposed to using the Internet solely for Wikipedia and Google and funny YouTube videos and Facebook (maybe 15% of the population?), how many people total would be interested in LW? Maybe 0.1% of the men, and maybe 0.05% of the women?
There’s no reason to expect those people to be typical along any given dimension, even gender dynamics.
I’m a young female and like some other women in the comments, I’d like to say that I in general approve of high barriers to entry for a community like Less Wrong. Well, that might be too much of a simplification—I prefer optimal barriers of entry, and in the case of LW, I think it should be pretty high, and if that can be achieved purely psychologically, then that’s great. But I think warmth/fun/kindness (which we’re seeing a lot more of recently and which Eliezer always had to begin with IMO) isn’t going to bring down that barrier enough to justify being cold just to keep up high standards. In short, I don’t think there’s a need to fear that we’re becoming too nice, even though we are becoming way nicer and posts like LW_Women encourage us to be even more nice.
It is a good idea to have a screening process so that only people who would enjoy and contribute to the community eventually join it, and if it’s self-selecting rather than explicit, all the better. And as sad as it might be, it is likely that the set of people who could genuinely help Less Wrong achieve its goals and become more effective is skewed male, and it’s likely that the reasons for this can’t be solved through social campaigns. Probably biology’s a bitch as usual and higher male variance in IQ means that smart people are disproportionately male (it’s a horrible tragedy that mentally impaired people are also disproportionately male).
That doesn’t mean that the set of potential LWers has the same degree of gender skew as the set of actual LWers though—at a guess I’d say the percentage of women in physics, math, and CS, while low, is higher than the percentage of women here at LW. So we could and probably should be doing more not to put off the kind of women who could contribute meaningfully. But the way LW goes about attracting women shouldn’t involve strict taboos on controversial topics or greater inclusiveness in general—it should be more targeted than that. After all, not-quite-as-insane-as-everywhere-else discussions about controversial topics are a big part of why we keep coming back here!
I know that when I first came to LW, I was considered “amusing”, “immature”, and “charming,” which I probably was, since I was 15 at the time. I didn’t comment for years afterward, and rarely comment now, since I rarely have much to contribute. But what put me off of LW for a while was not nastiness—I actually see very little of that, and very often see overt racism and sexism downvoted to oblivion. What put me off was massive walls of text. People digging through academic literature to prove a minor side point in a tangential discussion that spawned from an unrelated topic. People writing comments with corrections longer than the posts themselves. Throwaway jokes that required advanced mathematics to understand (at levels that women are less likely to reach, too). That’s what put me off of LW, and that is probably what puts off most people who think to join, men or women. And I don’t believe that’s a bad thing. People are less likely to litter in a beautiful and pristine neighborhood.
That being said, even though diluting the group too much and reaching out too far is a bad idea, based on what I’ve read from the Overcoming Bias days, this community has improved a whole lot at being less nasty and shutting up about how to manipulate people into sex, and hasn’t suffered nearly as much in terms of how thoughtful and intelligent the regular posters are. I’d buy that the average IQ has dropped since then, probably since the average age has also dropped—but even though we don’t want a community with the same demographics as the general population, ten geniuses is also not much of a community. And if the community does start off being run by geniuses, the high standard of discourse combined with some judicious moderation should be enough to attract and retain only those who can meet that high standard. Being nasty to people on top of that is too much of an impediment and may keep the community too small, too insular, too stagnant.
I’ve heard “deathist” used to describe the opposing side more often than “lifeist” for the supporting side. “Lifeist” just sounds a bit awkward and silly, and “deathist”, while funny, seems too much like typical Dark Arts tarring.
I think it’s kind of the video game concept of “the final boss.” Every other enemy is lesser, you have to build up your strength in order to defeat Death. “The last enemy to be defeated” doesn’t mean “Death is the last thing you should ever fight” or “Death has the lowest priority of all our enemies”, but rather “Death is the ultimate enemy, the worst of all, such that when we defeat it our task is done.”
The first definition of “falsifiable” means that it’s easy to fake—if a Patronus is falsifiable under this definition, you don’t get much information when you see a Patronus, since it could easily be something else and you couldn’t tell the difference.
The second definition of “falsifiable” means that it’s easy to prove that it’s not fake—if a Patronus is falsifiable under this definition, you get a lot of information when you see a Patronus, since it is very difficult for something that looks like a Patronus to actually be a fake.
Because the two defintions are pretty much opposites, between them they cover everything—the ones that are easily fakeable and the ones that are not easily fakeable.
Thanks, I think it’s just the fact that a lot of people who never really got into the canon are reading MOR, so plot points that can pretty much go unstated in regular fanfiction have to be re-introduced here. I know a lot of implications/references are lost on me because I’m reading fanfiction without actually being, well, a fan.
Wow, thank you. I’ll check it out.