I've seen Jonathan Haidt mentioned on Less Wrong a few times, and so when I saw an article about (in part) Haidt's new book elsewhere, I thought it would be an interesting read. It was, but not for the reasons I expected. Perhaps it is unfair to judge Haidt before...
The MIT Mystery Hunt is a collection of puzzles, solved in teams over a long weekend every year. The prize for winning is that your team gets to write next year's hunt. Mystery Hunt puzzles are generally designed to take a few hours for a few people. A hunt typically...
Unless you were both influenced by Perelandra, in which case the odds are much higher.
I actually think of Chesterton's fence argument as a rhetorical move. I imagine that some hypothetical "Alice" says, "I can't see any reason for this", in order to force their opponent to justify something which was historically justified by values which are considered obsolete -- for instance, "I can't see any reason why same-sex couples should not marry". Well, Alice probably can see reasons, but if Alice gives those reasons, she is doing her opponent's job. If she instead says, "The only reason for this is bigotry," Chesterton will say, "It's mean to call me a bigot." So Alice goes with, "I can't see any reason for this." And Chesterton, cleverly says, "Well, if you can't see the reason for it, it's because you're not thinking."
Note: neither Alice nor Chesterton are arguing in good faith here.
while Democrats could run pretty much the same campaign in the primaries as well as the general election.
Democrats in fact differ between the primary and the general election. Off the top of my head, consider Obama's shift on FISA from 2007 (voted against) to post-primary 2008 (voted for telecom immunity).
I recently came across this, which seems to have some evidence in my favor (and some irrelevant stuff): http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/extraordinary-leader/
+1
Before I tell my suicidal friends to volunteer, I want to make sure that your experimental design is good. What experiment are you proposing?
You mean, have not yet expressed an opinion in a way that you understand.
Anyway, the fact that slaves and ex-slaves did advocate for the rights of slaves indicates that closeness to a problem does not necessarily lead one to ignore it.
That doesn't work for preference utilitarians (it would strongly prefer to remain alive).
Um, what about the actual slaves and ex-slaves?
I've seen Jonathan Haidt mentioned on Less Wrong a few times, and so when I saw an article about (in part) Haidt's new book elsewhere, I thought it would be an interesting read. It was, but not for the reasons I expected. Perhaps it is unfair to judge Haidt before I have read the book, but the quotes in the article reveal some seriously sloppy thinking.
Haidt believes that there are at least six sources of moral values; the first five are harm/caring, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity/disgust. Liberty was recently added to the list, but doesn't seem to have made it into this article. He claims that liberals (in the American sense), care... (read 1639 more words →)
The MIT Mystery Hunt is a collection of puzzles, solved in teams over a long weekend every year. The prize for winning is that your team gets to write next year's hunt. Mystery Hunt puzzles are generally designed to take a few hours for a few people. A hunt typically has around 100 such puzzles, organized into a dozen or so metapuzzles; the metapuzzles can typically be solved with only a subset of the answers from the puzzles for that round, so not every puzzle needs to be solved to win.
My team, Codex, won in 2011 and thus wrote the 2012 hunt, which has just concluded. I wanted to share some thoughts... (read 425 more words →)
No, because it's possible that there genuinely is a possible total ordering, but that nobody knows how to figure out what it is. "No human always knows what's right" is not an argument against moral realism, any more than "No human knows everything about God" is an argument against theism.
(I'm not a moral realist or theist)