I often add “I believe” to sentences to clarify that I am not certain.
“Did you feed the dog?” “Yes”
and
“Did you feed the dog?” “I believe so”
have different meanings to me. I parse the first as “I am highly confident that I fed the dog” and the second as “I am unable to remember for sure whether I fed the dog, but I am >50% confident I did so.”
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This doesn’t quite answer the question. I would be very happy if my place of work were closed and I could do fun things for two weeks. My objection to working isn’t that work is unpleasant; it’s that there’s a high opportunity cost [all the fun people I could hang out with, the great books I could read, etc]. A better question is “imagine you are asked for your employer to take part in an experiment where you instead have your brain turned off. Your body ages by eight hours, but your brain experiences it as “you step into the office, then step out”.
It retains the silliness but solves the opportunity cost problem.
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What might convince me that Modafinil is a bad thing would be if a lot of people actively disliked the time they spent working. I personally assume most people roughly like or are neutral towards their jobs and mainly want to work shorter hours because it gives them more time for things outside of work, but I’m almost certainly generalizing from the example of me. If Yvain had made this argument I would understand more about where he was coming from and why.
Although I’m unsure of the etiquette of posting about personal blogs on other sites, I was also disappointed with the blog post in question. It was the first time that Yvain wrote something I disagreed with after reading his post in full and digesting in. I’ve often disagreed with him before reading it, but he usually persuades me.
This post seemed to rely on the principle that having more spare time is a positional good, with which I disagree strongly. Essentially, giving everyone another four hours of awake, productive time, is the same as extending your life by four hours for each day you are alive [and you do so in good health—extending the human lifespan from 80 to 95 might or might not be a good thing, but adding years to your healthy, productive life, seems a good thing]
Yvain’s claim seems to be that 100% of the extra four hours will be diverted into work, but to me that’s a) almost certainly not true [the figure would be more than 0% and less than 100%], b) not a bad thing.
a) It seems very likely that, given that our day is > 0% work and > 0% leisure, an extra four hours a day will add more than 0 hours of leisure.
b) If all med students get more studying done, it’s far from obvious that the net result is a bad one. I assume that there is some value to med students’ knowledge of medicine [okay, for anatomy courses this might not hold]. If, say, Apple workers work 50% more, then we stand to get better and faster Macs]
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. ”
Philip K Dick.
Does anyone know why there aren’t London LW meetups? I have a hard time reconciling ~8,000,000 Anglophones with no LW meetups. Have we tried them before and did they fail?
For logic this woolly, I agree...
I’d be interested in knowing what percentage of LWers attended a private high school [or equivalent in country of origin].
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How much you think your opinion will turn out to coincide with mine - hard to define. If your respective answers are 10, 40, 90, how much did we agree? I’ll guess that the sum of the three differences between my answers and yours is around sixty percentage points [out of 300 possible].