I'm all about epistemology. (my blog is at pancrit.org) But in order to engage in or start a conversation, it's important to take one of the things you place credence in and advocate for it. If you're wishy-washy, in many circumstances, people won't actually engage with your hypothesis, so you won't...(read more)

>To begin with, there are significant risks of medical complications—including infections, electrode >displacement, hemorrhage, and cognitive decline—when implanting electrodes in the brain.

This is all going to change over time. (I don't know how quickly, but there is already work on trans-cran...(read more)

I'm confused by the framing of the Anvil problem. For humans, a lot of learning is learning from observing others, seeing their mistakes and their consequences. We can predict various events that will result in other's deaths based on previous observation of what happened to yet other people. If we'...(read more)

I don't answer survey questions that ask about [race](http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm), but if you met me you'd think of me as white male.

I'm more strongly libertarian (but less party affiliated) than the survey allowed me to express.

I have reasonably strong views about moralit...(read more)

In my group at work, it's relatively common to chat "interruptible?" to someone who's sitting right next to you. You can keep working until they're free to take the interrupt, and they don't need to take the interrupt utill they're ready.

In f2f conversations, it's mostly an interrupt culture, but ...(read more)

I believe that emotions play a big part in thinking clearly, and understanding our emotions would be a helpful step. Would you mind saying more about the time you spend focused on emotions? Are you paying attention to your concrete current or past emotions (i.e. "this is how I'm feeling now", or "th...(read more)

When I've argued with people who called themselves utilitarian, they seemed to want to make trade-offs among immediately visible options. I'm not going to try to argue that I have population statistics, or know what the "proper" definition of a utilitarian is. Do you believe that some other terminol...(read more)