Thomas, please read and understand query’s response above. In attempting to dismantle a concept you don’t like, you’ve lost precision. Formalize your questions and concerns rigorously and then see if a seeming contradiction is still there.
pianoforte611
Karma: 1,252
I understand why most historical simulations would be of historically important people, but why would most or even a lot of simulations be historical simulations?
I’m not sure what country you live in, but from a relative of mine who works in a cancer treatment centre, there are a fairly large number of patients who eschew treatment in favor of herbal remedies for instance. They eventually get treatment when said remedies don’t work but the cancer would have gotten worse by then. It’s partly false beliefs, wishful thinking or just avoidance of the issue. Do very many people really believe that a herbal treatment is going to cure cancer and the whole medical community is stupid? No, but for many people it gives them enough to pretend that everything is going to be okay and they don’t have to worry.
hesitate to ask dumb questions, to publicly try skills I was likely to be bad at, or to visibly/loudly put forward my best guesses in areas where others knew more than me.
Something else that is in this category for me—bringing up personal conflicts and trying to resolve them as they happen vs ignoring them and having them eventually blow up. It feels bad to bring up conflict but letting it simmer is so much worse in the long term.
He prefers his Facebook audience. It’s a more constructive environment, and there are people whose opinions he cares more about (I assume, he may have other reasons).
I think the point of notecard logic that someone using it doesn’t care whether the argument was addressed appropriately. And the point of flowsheet logic is that someone using it doesn’t care why an argument was unaddressed. I claim that this is a thing that happens and is very common; and is pretty difficult to confuse with legitimate desire to understand and discuss.
However, I think that fixing notecard logic doesn’t get you that much closer to good epistemology. Even if your refutations are sound, if you miss the overall logical structure then you can refute anything you want. I think this is a frustrating problem here and in other online communities. Basically too many people are stuck in Stage 2.
Well this certainly lives up to the discussion thread title. This is an ill posed question because it selectively carves out a very specific definition of human value for obviously ideological reasons. Why is capital the definitive measure of contributions to the human race? What about the wheel (Mesopotamians), what about fire (Africans—geographically, probably no one knows the taxonomy but certainly not northern Eurasians). What about geometry? Or perhaps something fairly important called numbers. Are those not knowledge?
From your last line, I think its unlikely that unlikely that this is going to be productive. It sounds like you think that epistemology is simply erudite nonsense and philosophers need to just accept probably Bayesianism or the scientific method or something. I think this is quite disappointing, mathematicians could have similarly dismissed attempts to ground calculus in something other than loose arguments of the form “well it works what more do you want” but we would have a much less rich and stable field as a result. But if this is a mischaracterization of your view of epistemology then please let me know.
Do you think that Aumann’s statement can only be interpreted as six 24 hour days?
Of course, one could charge that it’s not intended to do so, and yack on about separate magisteria
This is a very jarring dismissal of a very difficult to resolve problem, despite it being very old. Here are some maps that do not yield testable predictions:
-Other people exist
-Other people are conscious
-I was not created in the last minute with all of my current memories
Epistemology is much more than creating testable predictions.
Okay that’s very fair.
Are all psychology papers garbage? And if only some are, how do you tell which is which if you don’t read past the first line of the abstract? (which FB didn’t, because he was unaware that more than one experiment was conducted).
I’m sorry, I find it very draining to respond to snarky, content light comments. I’ve provided substantial data to back my specific claims and I’m not going to get dragged into a meaningless debate.
The U.S. prohibition was very successful at its goals (whether those goals were correct depends on your values). The minimum drinking age is also quite effective at its goals.
After thinking about it some more, I don’t think the problem is that large. This thread will probably continued to be used as a soapbox for a few edgy contrarian ideas, but most of the comments are interesting ideas that I would have never have thought of.
I am in strong support of unrefined ideas, brainstorming and revision. Thinking about more, its not the undefinedness. There is a certain class of ideas that personally frustrate me—they are ideas that are deliberately edgy and extreme, and usually involve violating some common Western value.
I’d say in this thread, there about half top level comments which are genuinely unrefined uncertain but interesting ideas. The rest, maybe less than half are edgy contrarian ideas. Although looking back to the last Crazy Ideas thread, over 90% seem like genuinely experimental ideas. Maybe I should just wait for a few more iterations.
It usually takes a lot more time to do and a larger inferential distance to bridge. Also the existence of this thread itself encourages and creates positive reinforcement for low quality contrarian ideas.
Edit: Oh are you asking why I criticized a made up idea instead of one in this thread? I didn’t want to get dragged into the object level, and I didn’t want to seem like I was picking on someone, I just wanted to illustrate why it takes longer to respond to an idea than to generate it. The idea I criticized is similar to comments I’ve read here and on the Facebook page.
Sorry for assuming you had easy access to the paper. Given that you don’t, you are of course free to decide whether the pop science report warrants further investigation. However to authoritatively criticize and speculate on the details of a paper you haven’t read, I think lowers the quality of discussion here.
I’m not a Bayesian but nevertheless, I don’t agree that my conclusion is similar to yours. Prima facie, the effect itself seems fairly robust across the five experiments, but their theory as to why (which they did go reasonably far to test), still needs more experiments to be established. This is not a bug, and that does not make it a low quality paper. This is how science works. There may be more subtle problems that I (not being a statistician, or a psychologist) may have missed, but those can’t be known without delving into the details.
Not arbitrary! Those are not small effect sizes. To determine that someone’s neurological development is such that they are not at the same level of risk for alcohol dependence as the general population, requires a test that doesn’t exist. Moreover there is no need for such a test to exist because simple rules work better than complex rules. The drinking age law is simple and effective.
I dislike these threads. They encourage and reward ill thought out contrarian (often straight up crackpot) ideas. Correcting them is a large cost, in part because convincing an audience doesn’t require arguing things that are true, it merely requires arguing things that take more time to refute than to assert. I’d rather not get tangled up in object level for this reason by citing real examples but here is an example of the kind of idea I would expect to see here.
Made up crazy idea (that I expect some people here would endorse):
“Get rid of research ethics boards, they prevent useful research from being done that would benefit society out of an ill founded fear of us becoming the Nazis”
This sort of argument ignores the history behind why research ethics boards exist, and is usually asserted by people who are ignorant of the actual guidelines that research ethics boards abide by. It’s also usually asserted without knowledge of the actual abuses of patient trust that were committed before research ethics guidelines were established), which include withholding known treatments and doing liver toxicity study in children without telling them (quite an extensive one in which biopsies were taken, and upon recovery, liver toxicity was re-induced leading to damage lasting at least a month).
(Of course, it took me much longer to write that response than to make the initial claim)
Isn’t it pretty established that the universe is not infinite?
In any case, I don’t think so. Even in an infinite universe there is the possibility of loops or repetitions. Also you can have an infinite but not comprehensive set of events even if those events are all unique.