I'm sorry if this post doesn't seem that high quality, but I do feel this might be the best place to ask. The point of this post is to inspire discussion, hopefully discussion that might be useful for answering certain questions I had. On another board, I gathered evidence of...
Recently, Tyler Cowen, on his blog, reported a story of a German court case where Demitrius Soupolos sued Frank Maus for "breach of contract". Demitrius paid Maus to do a certain service, which Maus then was unable to deliever. Maus argued that he was only paid to make a good...
>"The heart of the problem is not how we vote for officials - it's that we vote for officials, instead of getting to vote on issues. >Americans are proud of being "governed by the people", yet a citizen has no effective way to have any influence on any particular issue!...
"His arguments only undermine the conception of free will as ultimate origination, but have nothing to say about (the more defensible) conception of free will as choosing on the basis of one's desires."
That is not "more defensible", that's inane. What's the point of "freely choosing" what you want to do based on your desires...if you are not in control of your desires? It's a pedantic technicality that ignores what laymen generally assume when they say "free will"...that they are in control of their own actions, as well as their own desires that act as motivation for their own actions.
If I develop a mind control device that implants "desires" in the mind of... (read more)
I don't see that as a net negative. There may be a lot of people who are "rational", and possibly those who are already "winning". Knowing how to communicate with them is indeed a net plus, since this gives you an exclusive network other people won't have (letting you "win" as well).
My main goal at the moment is to utilize "rationality" as a way to map how individuals comes to a decision/belief (what to do, what to say, what to believe, etc.). I am not assuming that these individuals ARE rational, but it's a useful (and quickie) tool for me to retrospectively "map out" the thought process of an individual. Like all tools though, they will be limitations.
Maybe this individual is saying, "I know I'm biased" as a sort of disclosure of where their views are coming from. If they did not say that they are biased, and it is later revealed that they are biased, then people would likely accuse said individual of misrepresenting his positions and claiming "objectivity" when he had no right to possess it. For example, had that person you quoted said, "IPhone was the best!" without me knowing that he had a bias in that belief, I might have sincerely believed him, and this could lead to terrible consequences, like me buying an IPhone instead of a potentially better version.
It's clear that this... (read more)
If it is true that officially, the karma limit is raised to 50, but effectively, the actual programming behind this "blog" allows for anyone to post at 20, then it suggests a real inconsistency between stated policy and actual policy.
Inconsistency is certainly not good if people want to actually follow policy. Either the official karma limit lowers to 20, or the real karma limit goes to 50. I lean towards the latter, because the existence of the Discussion section obsoletes the existence of the main LessWrong section, but the fact that this stated policy was formally established in 2009 suggests that there might have been policy problems detected by the staff that prevented it from becoming actual policy by this time (maybe the inability of most people to reach that high total of 50 that forced the staff to not implement this policy before).
I understand the example. Thanks. Helps me to understand why you object to it.
"But it is an empirical question. With math, plus with some reasonable assumptions, you can prove that you can unambiguously determine the correct mapping even from the outside. In a world where you can tell someone to think of a square, and then use functional magnetic resonance imaging and find a pattern of neurons lit up in a square on his visual cortex, it is difficult to agree with Quine that the word "square" has no meaning."
Of course the word "square" has meaning, but that meaning may be different from our meaning. In a world where society told this individual all the time that an "square" is really a triangle with an X in it, and then you do that experiment, you'll see what that individual thinks a square is...and he'd be right, going off the definitions and meanings that society have told him about a square. Doesn't help the researcher who is trying desperately convince said research subject what a square is "supposed" to be.
While I am more interested in the latter, the former is likely the one more suited for the main goal of this "community blog".
I'm sorry if this post doesn't seem that high quality, but I do feel this might be the best place to ask. The point of this post is to inspire discussion, hopefully discussion that might be useful for answering certain questions I had.
On another board, I gathered evidence of the existence of "mainstream" conspiracy theories with the goal of figuring out why those conspiracy theories are, well, mainstream. Part of the problem is that, because they're mainstream, many people here may believe in them and may even contest the idea that they are even conspiracy theories. I don't really want to get into arguments over if a conspiracy theory is true or... (read 318 more words →)
It does explain a lot! Thanks! I knew it was good to be tentative in my judgement on the issue if this is a hoax or not. At least now there is a plausible reason why no other sources of this exist.
Recently, Tyler Cowen, on his blog, reported a story of a German court case where Demitrius Soupolos sued Frank Maus for "breach of contract". Demitrius paid Maus to do a certain service, which Maus then was unable to deliever. Maus argued that he was only paid to make a good effort on said service but was prevented from doing so (due to an "act of god", as one American legal scholar supposedly claimed). This got me curious: who would win that court case? So I began doing a Google search for more information about this case...only to see that this case has been repeated over and over. Tyler Cowen's blog post links to an article on... (read 437 more words →)
>"The heart of the problem is not how we vote for officials - it's that we vote for officials, instead of getting to vote on issues.
>Americans are proud of being "governed by the people", yet a citizen has no effective way to have any influence on any particular issue! If it's very important to me to promote gay rights or environmental responsibility, I'm supposed to vote for a Democrat? How effective is that?
>We need to ditch representative democracy if we want democracy. (The next question is whether we want democracy.)"---PhilGoetz
The main problem with direct democracy is that we are reliant on "the people", who may be ill-informed and not make correct choices... (read 241 more words →)
Knowing what you're doing (which is really all that certification "signals") seems to be higher status than being one of the few people that were lucky enough to receive enough start-up funding to establish a business and are skilled enough to hire people...who know what they're doing.