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EngineerofScience
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Guessing the Teacher's Password
EngineerofScience8y00

One thing I have noticed relating to this in school is that on tests sometimes I put down an answer on a quiz that I know is wrong because the teacher will give me points if I put that. For example, on a Physical Education quiz the teacher briefly talked about how sugar affects the human body. One of the questions was multiple choice and it said "Sugar is a..." and I selected carbohydrate even though I knew it was wrong because that is what we were taught.

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Hindsight Devalues Science
EngineerofScience9y53

I certainly agree. Most of those I instantly believed, and I had a bit of doubt for the one about southern blacks preferring southern to northern white officers (or maybe that is belief as attire, or hindsight bias) but as you said it is crazy that the opposite of what is true is believable when told it is correct.

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Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
EngineerofScience9y00

So is there ever a time where you can use absence of evidence alone to disprove a theory, or do you always need other evidence as well? Because is some cases absence of evidence clearly does not disprove a theory, such as when quantum physics was first being discovered, there was not a lot of evidence for it, but can the inverse ever be true will lack of evidence alone proves the theory is false?

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The Value of Those in Effective Altruism
EngineerofScience9y00

What is a Fermi Estimate? If you could provide a link to an article talking about that I would be thankful.

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Attention! Financial scam targeting Less Wrong users
EngineerofScience9y00

I agree. It is bad to do what scams say, even if you think that you can trick the scammer. Plus, they will put you on a "vulnerable" list and you will get more scams.

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Why Don't Rationalists Win?
EngineerofScience10y20

I'm not sure how effective this is considering most people who would see this are rationalists and people like to think good of themselves.

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Why Don't Rationalists Win?
EngineerofScience10y00

I am not so sure that rationalists don't win, but rather that "winning"(ie. starting a company, being a celebrity, etc.) is rare enough and that few people are rationalists that people that win tend not to be rationalists because being a rationalist is rare enough that very few people that win are rationalists, even if each rationalist has a better chance of winning.

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Travel Through Time to Increase Your Effectiveness
EngineerofScience10y00

I think this is a really good idea. I have wished I could "blink" and then be in the future but still have been doing work during that time, and this is just the way to do that. I am trying to to this because it is a really great idea.

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Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk?
EngineerofScience10y-40

If all of those asteroids are owned by one company, then they can sell the metal of the asteroids for as much as it was before because they would be the only people with that much metal, having something similar to a monopoly. They would have the choice of lowering the value of the metals, because if they only made $10/ton. of metal and they sold 1 million tons, then they make ten million dollars. However, if a different company with ten tons of metal making $10/ton. of metal would make one hundred dollars, perhaps not be able to pay their workers, and go out of business. That would reduce competition for the company that caught the asteroid. However, if the company sold them for the same prices long-term they could make trillions of dollars.

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Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk?
[+]EngineerofScience10y-50
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