I remember Nassim Nicholas Taleb claiming exactly this in an interview a few years ago. He let his friends function as a kind of news filter, assuming that they would probably mention anything sufficiently important for him to know.
sediment
Karma: 486
I was recently heartened to hear a very good discussion of effective altruism on BBC Radio 4′s statistics programme, More or Less, in response to the “Ice Bucket Challenge”. They speak to Neil Bowerman of the Centre for Effective Altruism and Elie Hassenfeld from GiveWell.
They even briefly raise the possibility that large drives of charitable donations to ineffective causes could be net negative as it’s possible that people have a roughly fixed charity budget, which such drives would deplete. They admit there’s not much hard evidence for such a claim, but to even hear such an unsentimental, rational view raised in the mainstream media is very bracing.
Available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless (click the link to “WS To Ice Or Not To Ice”), or directly here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/moreorless/moreorless_20140908-1200a.mp3
There may be such a thing as first-person laughter (laughing at yourself for having a mistaken expectation), but my point is that it seems like a stretch to say that the examples 9eB1 gave fit that pattern (though perhaps your phone example does).
I’m working on a longer comment in which I’ll explain my points in more detail.
As a heterosexual I’m not your target audience, but I voted this up for being a well-compiled and useful (to its audience) bit of research.
Yes, by analogy with “hedons” and “utilons”, hypothetical units of pleasure and utility respectively.
The first example is first-person laughter, where you laugh at yourself for your own expectations turning out to be so wrong, similar to looking for your phone then realizing you’re on the phone already.
This sounds fishy. In particular, it seems like a very ad hoc way to shoehorn a category of joke that doesn’t quite fit into your theory—which is a failure mode that seems common to theories of humour.
Oh, another thing: I remember thinking that it didn’t make sense to favour either the many worlds interpretation or the copenhagen interpretation, because no empirical fact we could collect could point towards one or the other, being as we are stuck in just one universe and unable to observe any others. Whichever one was true, it couldn’t possibly impact on one’s life in any way, so the question should be discarded as meaningless, even to the extent that it didn’t really make sense to talk about which one is true.
This seems like a basically positivist or postpositivist take on the topic, with shades of Occam’s Razor. I was perhaps around twelve. (For the record, I haven’t read the quantum mechanics sequence and this remains my default position to this day.)
Good one! I think I also figured out a vague sort of compatibilism about that time.
I think I was a de facto utilitarian from a very young age; perhaps eight or so.
You’re right.
I was glad to at least disrupt the de facto consensus. I agree that it’s worth bearing in mind the silent majority of the audience as well as those who actually comment. The former probably outnumber the latter by an order of magnitude (or more?).
I suppose the meta-level point was also worth conveying. Ultimately, I don’t care a great deal about the object-level point (how one should feel about a silly motivational bracelet) but the tacit, meta-level point was perhaps: “There are other ways, perhaps more useful, to evaluate things than the amount of moral indignation one can generate in response.”
This makes some sense. I think part of the reason my contribution was taken so badly was, as I said, that I was arguing in a style that was clearly different to that of the rest of those present, and as such I was (in Villam Bur’s phrasing) pattern-matched as a bad guy. (In other words, I didn’t use the shibboleths.)
Significantly, no-one seemed to take issue with the actual thrust of my point.
Totally right.
Nabokov: “[reality is] one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes”.
If I remember right it would have needed 3 of 3 people in the Russian submarine in the Cuban missle crisis to lunch a nuclear weapon and 2 of them wanted to lunch it.
Two of them got sick of their jobs and decided to just go to lunch. Luckily the third guy stayed at his post and just snacked on a sandwich.
It’s called the Pavlok. It seems to be able to monitor a variety of criteria, some fairly smart.
Only because I had a clear, concise, self-contained point to make and I figured I’d be able to walk away once I was done. I’ll know better next time.
I mentioned beeminder and that I use it. Don’t think anyone picked up on that part, cash evidently being less triggering than electricity.
Can you give a quick example with the blanks filled in? I’m interested, but I’m not sure I follow.
Well, there’s a frustrating sort of ambiguity there: it’s able to pivot between the two in an uncomfortable way which leaves one vulnerable to exploits like the above.
Alternately, it’s no worse than the norm, and yet still isn’t funny.
I find xkcd so horribly bad.