The comments are somewhat disappointing: not very charitable readings of the article and no real attempt to speak to the thrust of the argument.
Also, the oft repeated phrase—w/r/t the risks of technology—that we face “losing our humanity” desperately needs to be taboo-ed.
This is really well done. I don’t know the background(s) of your students, but there are some relatively technical terms that you don’t fully define (e.g., signalling, updating) but perhaps you’ll do so in the course of the presentation.
Other than a minor typo on one of the slides (“people’s’”), great visual presentation.
ETA: Just saw that this is for a game theory class, so nevermind about the terms.
I’m disappointed by EY’s response so far in this thread, particularly here. The content of the post above in itself did not significantly dismay me, but upon reading what appeared to be a serious lack of any rigorous updating on the part of EY to—what I and many LWers seemed to have thought were—valid concerns, my motivation to donate to the SI has substantially decreased.
I had originally planned to donate around $100 (starving college student) to the SI by the start of the new year, but this is now in question. (This is not an attempt at some sort of blackmail, just a frank response by someone who reads LW precisely to sift through material largely unencumbered by mainstream non-epistemic factors.) This is not to say that I will not donate at all, just that the warm fuzzies I would have received on donating are now compromised, and that I will have to purchase warm fuzzies elsewhere—instead of utilons and fuzzies all at once through the SI.
Here’s a report by the National Research Council of the National Academies (specifically, the Committee to Improve Research Information and Data on Firearms). It is a rigorous report that extensively discusses the issues with demonstrating a causal connection (or lack thereof)--between level of gun control and innocents killed—and generally refrains from making particular policy prescriptions.
Good point. I think the main similarity derives from a specific understanding/definition of harm that holds that harming another is acting counter to another’s preferences, in some sense. In that way then, it’s similar to (the OP’s trouble in getting his interlocutors to understand) preferences being sustained after one’s death.
This seems isomorphic to the mainstream debate, in academic philosophy, over whether one can be harmed by things happening after one’s death; in other words, precisely how do one’s preferences (for certain states of affairs) after one’s death work?
See: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/
“Third, what is the case for and the case against the harm thesis, the claim that death can harm the individual who dies, and the posthumous harm thesis, according to which events that occur after an individual dies can still harm that individual?”
Live practice, as RomeoStevens mentioned, was definitely on my list of things to do to improve interviewing skills. Your advice about seeking out direct training programs was something I did not even consider, so thank you! That would indeed seem very helpful.
I’m not sure if this is a procedural knowledge gap, but I figure it’s close—and instrumentally important—enough to warrant some mention here. Basically, I’ve never really had to formally interview (whether for a job, or something similar), and I’m sure there are some things I should know that I currently do not. There are plenty of sites that purport to offer this information, but often they are neither as precise/specific nor as extensive as I’d like—given this community’s focus and high standards, I think we can do better.
Any tips to maximize the chances of winning an interview? Anecdotes are welcome, from either end of the interview process.
Upvoted. I do largely agree with you, and the things that I don’t quite agree with you about are things about which I don’t think I can form a persuasive argument.
I fully concede that; that was more what I think it should be about. And if that’s true and philosophers really do want to answer those deep questions, philosophy needs to be reformed to incorporate more modern science—something like what lukeprog proposed.
Hmm, this is a good question. After spending some time thinking about this, I think the problem I have in trying to separate “history of philosophy” from “philosophy” is that such an enterprise almost appears antithetical to the goal(s) of philosophy. Philosophy seems meant not to be useful or practical, but intended to ask the right sorts of questions, think about things one abstraction deeper/more meta, and question things others don’t question. As such, studying the history of philosophy is philosophy—and vice versa—insofar as the goal of philosophy is not to positively answer* the right questions but to think philosophically and ask those questions in the first place. So, learning why Aristotle’s ideas on physics are wrong is simply not the sort of thing with which philosophy would concern itself—for better or for worse.
*Thinking about it some more, I just realized that I may be conceiving of the goal(s) of philosophy as something different than what most of the posters here do. I get the sense that lukeprog (and others here) wants philosophy to provide answers to the deep questions, or at least attempt to do so. The problem is philosophy is not about that; maybe it should be, but then I’d argue that such a field is precisely what science is, with philosophy as almost a check/balance (making sure that the right questions are still being asked, assumptions questioned, etc.).
This post has a number of useful insights, but I’m not so sure about this:
Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, . . . teaches people to revere failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.
As someone who is currently studying philosophy at the undergraduate level—and thus has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to start with Plato and Kant—I don’t quite see where you’re getting the claim that starting with ancient philosophers either (1) in fact teaches students to revere them/their methods, or (2) is at least meant to teach students to revere them/their methods. My own experience, what I’ve heard from fellow students, and the academic papers that we are actually assigned to read all run counter to your claim.
First, one of the primary, if not the main, purposes in starting with ancient philosophers is precisely to discuss how and where they went wrong. The professor does not just tell us whether a certain philosopher is right/wrong, but has the students critically evaluate that philosopher’s claims both in papers and in discussions. Second, there are numerous academic articles written on their claims (just by virtue of the fact that they are ancient philosophers), which in turn means that those articles—and their arguments—combined with the students’ own analyses provide a substantial foundation for ‘critical thinking.’ Third, regardless of the ancient philosophers’ specific claims, the manner in which they argue for their conclusions and critically think themselves is tremendously helpful—both as a model to emulate and to not emulate—for students just starting to learn what constitutes a good argument. A charitable reading, which in particular recognizes the historical context, will show that many of the ancient philosophers do make good arguments, and value precision and rigor in so arguing; of course, many specific empirical claims are wrong, but insofar as those depend on context and not on poor argumentation they are irrelevant.
I do think that there is much wrong with philosophy, but that specific claim you made is a little shaky (and underspecified).
Harvard Prof. Richard Moran touches on this in a humorous manner:
“As to ’experimental philosophy, I can’t claim to be very well versed in it, but it seems to be a research program in its early days. I think that by now, even its practitioners are beginning to realise that simply asking people, outside of any particular context, about their “intuitions” about some concept of philosophical interest is not really going to be informative since without any philosophical background to the question, the respondents themselves can’t really know just what question they are being asked to answer, what their responses are responses to. There are just too many different things that can be meant by a question like, “’Was such-and-such an action intentional or not?”, for example. And without further discussion or further analysis, the experimenters themselves can’t know what answers they are being given by the respondents. It’s not good data. So I can imagine experimental philosophy evolving in a way to account for this, and starting to include some philosophical background to the investigation, perhaps even some philosophical history, to provide the needed context to the particular intuitions that they are trying to expose and test for. At that point, the experimental situation might also become less one-sided, with a researcher examining a respondent, and could allow for the experimental subjects themselves to ask questions of the experimenters, including questions of clarification and disambiguation, and perhaps even challenges to the way the experimenter has framed the questions.
Later it might be found useful to conduct such experiments in small groups rather than individually, with one experimenter and one subject, and instead the respondents could be encouraged to discuss the questions among themselves as well as with the experimenter. People could meet in these groups two or three times a week and perhaps some relevant reading could be assigned, to clarify and expand upon the question, and the respondents would be given time to do the reading, and asked to write something later on about the question in connection with the reading and the discussions they have had. Then the experimenter could provide “comments” on this writing for the experimental subjects themselves. I think grading the results would be optional on such an arrangement, and probably of no experimental interest, but other than that I think something like this could be the future of experimental philosophy. It’s worth trying anyway.”
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/keeping-sartre-and-other-passions/2/
Took it!
I am impressed with Yvain’s thoroughness overall in drafting this survey.
The comment is now gone (“This post has been removed or could not be loaded”). What did it say?
Isn’t it simply the extent to which one is not certain about some (piece of) knowledge? At least that was my intuition when I first read that.
After googling, the closest definition I could find was on Wikipedia under systemic uncertainty—in contrast to statistical uncertainty (aleatoric uncertainty) apparently.
I was very pleasantly surprised to see the AMA announcement on Reddit’s frontpage, given how relatively non-mainstream the S.I. is and how many page views Reddit gets (and gives).
Also, although there is a large inferential distance between Luke and most Redditors (as siodine noted), I thought Luke did a great job trying to bridge the intuition gap—with the usual abundance of links and all.
Agreed. He also suggests that there were obvious controls that should have been used but were not:
Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the Inbar and Lammers paper, however, is the above mentioned lack of the obvious control: they didn’t ask conservatives about their biases (nor, for that matter, did they ask another obvious control group: politically neutral or middle of the road faculty).
Having just discovered Mr. Money Mustache’s blog, I would be interested on discussion concerning early retirement.
I did read your comment that the lifestyle this blogger advocates is unrealistic for many people, but it seems that he has a good counterargument w/r/t hedonic adaptation—i.e., we may think that living frugally will make us unhappier, but in fact, it likely will not, and vice versa—and preferences changing over time.