Yes. (It was intended as humour, but apparently that wasn’t clear)
TGM
Karma: 163
But even if we grant that falsehood, she still does not have adequate reason to withdraw her consent for organ donation, as long as she can present proof to evil consequentialist doctors that she’s worth more alive than dead.
From what she said “she’d heard that doctors don’t try as hard to save donors in hopes of using their organs to save other lives.”, it isn’t that they actually kill her if she has an organ donor card, just that they don’t put in as much effort. Which implies the following beliefs:
Doctors don’t try so hard to save those with organ donor cards
Doctors do try harder to save those with blood donor cards
The conclusion she should draw is that she should carry just a blood donor card, to demonstrate that she is really useful alive, and not at all useful dead, so they should try really, really hard to save her.
To add a data point, I found myself, to put it strongly, literally losing the will to live recently: I’m 20 and female and I’m kind of at the emotional maturity stage. I think my brain stopped saying “live! Stay alive!” and started saying “Make babies! Protect babies!”, because I started finding the idea of cryopreserving myself as less attractive and more repulsive, with no change in opinion for preserving my OH, and an increase in how often I thought about doing the right thing for my future kids. To the extent that I now get orders of magnitude more panicked about anything happening to my reproductive system than dying after future children reach adulthood.
As the aforementioned OH, I’m wondering if “quizzical” counts as a normal reaction to reading this.
I can believe that. The World Factbook has different figures, but they are in the same direction. I don’t know where they get their data from, though.
In most countries, there are more women than men, because women live longer. (Some evidence: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UKDemographics-Age.svg )
Possible additional hypotheses: the reason there are more men born than women is because of selective abortions. If the selection pressure for having males is stronger in rural areas/ among the poor (where economics factors make it substantially better to have sons than daughters), and the poor have a higher mortality rate, then you would expect to see an evening-out. (It may be difficult to find good data on this, but I haven’t tried)
You may also find that men are more likely to emigrate, and if China has net emigration, then that would reduce the number of men overall. (There are other possibilities that rely on emigration, obviously. This seems possibly the most likely. Some research would probably be able to verify this)
By this much, in case anyone else is interested in checking.
Alcor list a UK based agent on their website, which might be a better bet if Rudi doesn’t work out.
If you have a selection of ‘magic’ sugar pills, and you want to test them for being magic vs placebo effect, you do a study comparing their efficacy to that of ‘non-magic’ sugar pills.
If they are magic, then you aren’t comparing identical things, because only some of them have the ‘magic’ property
Isn’t this precisely the marketplace situation that was explicitly omitted?
Many buyers and many sellers produce a marketplace, but this is complicated and we’ll stick to bargains and auctions for now.
A medical example of this is the lack of evidence for the efficacy of antihistamine against anaphylaxis. When I asked my sister (currently going through clinical school) about why, she said “because if you do a study, people in the control group will die if these things work, and we have good reason to believe they do”
EDIT: I got beaten to posting this by the only other person I told about it
I think it is very easy to believe that “death” and “life isn’t usually as wonderful as it could be” are as important as existential risk if you weight heavily in favour of the well-being of you, people you know and people in other senses “close” to you.
Caring more about that is also very natural. If I were to tell a typical person that was going to die tomorrow, their reaction would be stronger than is going to die under the same circumstances etc.
Of course, shut up and multiply, but only if you actually care about all of the events equally.
There appears to be two “Welcome to Less wrong!” blog posts. I initially posted this in the other, older one:
I’m 20, male and a maths undergrad at Cambridge University. I was linked to LW a little over a year ago, and despite having initial misgivings for philosophy-type stuff on the internet (and off, for that matter), I hung around long enough to realise that LW was actually different from most of what I had read. In particular, I found a mix of ideas that I’ve always thought (and been alone amongst my peers in doing so), such as making beliefs pay rent; and new ones that were compelling, such as the conservation of expected evidence post.
I’ve always identified as a rationalist, and was fortunate enough to be raised to a sound understanding of what might be considered ‘traditional’ rationality. I’ve changed the way I think since starting to read LW, and have dropped some of the unhelpful attitudes that were promoted by status-warfare at a high achieving all-boys school (you must always be right, you must always have an answer, you must never back down…)
I’m here because the LW community seems to have lots of straight-thinking people with a vast cumulative knowledge. I want to be a part of and learn from that kind of community, for no better reason than I think I would enjoy life more for it.
Certainly in the circles I’m from in the UK, less/fewer is very much used as a signal. I don’t think I could use the ‘wrong’ one without getting corrected if the audience is sufficiently large.
Question: In casual conversation, does the proportion of the time I am corrected increase with the number of people as if they each corrected as iid Bernoulli random variables? (i.e. if I get corrected 1⁄2 of the time with one other person, then it’s 3⁄4 of the time with 2, 7/8ths of the time with 3 etc.)
I suspect that I would be corrected more often than that model predicts in larger groups, because there are more people to signal status to.
I’m 20, male and a maths undergrad at Cambridge University. I was linked to LW a little over a year ago, and despite having initial misgivings for philosophy-type stuff on the internet (and off, for that matter), I hung around long enough to realise that LW was actually different from most of what I had read. In particular, I found a mix of ideas that I’ve always thought (and been alone amongst my peers in doing so), such as making beliefs pay rent; and new ones that were compelling, such as the conservation of expected evidence post.
I’ve always identified as a rationalist, and was fortunate enough to be raised to a sound understanding of what might be considered ‘traditional’ rationality. I’ve changed the way I think since starting to read LW, and have dropped some of the unhelpful attitudes that were promoted by status-warfare at a high achieving all-boys school (you must always be right, you must always have an answer, you must never back down…)
I’m here because the LW community seems to have lots of straight-thinking people with a vast cumulative knowledge. I want to be a part of and learn from that kind of community, for no better reason than I think I would enjoy life more for it.
More generally, it is worth noting that a very tempting class of bad arguments is those which are slightly true, such as this.