Links Archive
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- Glass invented meta-analysis to prove someone wrong [Nan]: " Meta-analysis is about taking in all of the studies regardless of their flaws and then doing statistics on all the results to adjust for each flaw and get an overall result in a more accurate way than merely "vote counting" the studies individually." ('19 Apr 21Added Sun 2019-Apr-21 11 p.m. CDTin metascience | a)
- LivingSocial Offers a Cautionary Tale to Today's Unicorns [Nan]: " What it looks like when your start-up is rapidly declining instead of rapidly growing, and the danger of the VC-first multimillion-investments-before-any-profits company philosophy." ('19 Apr 20Added Sat 2019-Apr-20 11 p.m. CDTin entrepreneurship | a)
- What I've learned from sitting next to a pro salesman [Nan]: " Someone who doesn't answer email will answer a phone, so call your prospects. Use small-talk and know your prospects, using their names and asking about their children (assuming you have a pre-existing relationship). Use intonation correctly and always end the conversation with something concrete." ('19 Apr 19Added Fri 2019-Apr-19 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Leave work unassigned and see who steps forward [Nan]: " One way to get people to step up to leadership positions is to make it clear that some work is valuable and give people the space to do that work, but not explicitly assign it to anyone, and see who steps forward." ('19 Apr 18Added Thu 2019-Apr-18 11 p.m. CDTin management | a)
- The UX of UP: Urinals and Usability [Nan]: " Learning good UX techniques through good urinal design: keep interactive elements apart, give each tappable ample hit area, design with everyone in mind, and keep it simple." ('19 Apr 17Added Wed 2019-Apr-17 11 p.m. CDTin entrepreneurship | a)
- Distribution vs. Innovation [Nan]: The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation. ('19 Apr 16Added Tue 2019-Apr-16 11 p.m. CDTin entrepreneurship | a)
- The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce [Nan]: " Musk is (allegedly) able to do what he is able to do (create multiple successful companies simultaneously) because he starts by identifying what would be valuable and what it takes to get him there and then goes for it in a creative manner without taking cues from common wisdom. I like the overview, but I find it lacking and naïve in a few areas." ('19 Apr 15Added Mon 2019-Apr-15 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- The 666 Roadmap [Nan]: " A good potential planning method is to make a six-year plan, a six-month plan, and a six-week plan, at differing levels of depth." ('19 Apr 14Added Sun 2019-Apr-14 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- How to email Jim Wales (or any important person) and get a response [Nan]: " (1) say what you are doing without buzzwords or fluff, (2) say how important person can help, (3) say how it benefits important person, (4) say nothing else." ('19 Apr 13Added Sat 2019-Apr-13 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Five Mistakes SaaS Startups Often Make with Pricing [Nan]: " (1) using a complex and unintuitive pricing model, (2) not using annual prepayment, (3) not increasing prices over time with increased demand, (4) not structuring proposals correclty, and (5) using incorrect price discovery questions (e.g., you should ask people about relative price not how much they would buy)" ('19 Apr 12Added Fri 2019-Apr-12 11 p.m. CDTin entrepreneurship | a)
- The Microservices Cargo Cult [Nan]: " Microservices have many benefits, such as better scalability, cleaner architecture, independent deployments, and smaller codebases. But they're also complex, and have a lot of overhead in deployment and data storage. A well-crafted monolith with semin-independent libraries and clearly-defined interfaces can be the best of both worlds." ('19 Apr 11Added Thu 2019-Apr-11 11 p.m. CDTin technology | a)
- The Lack of Controversy over Well-Targeted Aid [Nan]: " While there are a lot of aid critics out there (William Easterly, Angus Deaton, Dambisa Moyo), none of them are critical of the kind of well-targeted individual-to-individual developing world giving emphasized by GiveWell top charities." ('19 Apr 10Added Wed 2019-Apr-10 11 p.m. CDTin development | a)
- Figuring Things Out [Nan]: " The skill about how to figure things out seems very important for success in life. You can potentially improve at figuring things out by trying more things, cultivating patience, and avoiding environments where trying things is discouraged." ('19 Apr 09Added Tue 2019-Apr-09 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- "#DisruptTechInterviews using psych methods, maybe!" [Nan]: We can get to better tech interviews through psychology by figuring out what we want in our hires and figuring out reliable and valid ways of testing for those qualities. And we can find those ways through psychology research methods by developing tests and testing against known positive and negative cases. ('19 Apr 08Added Mon 2019-Apr-08 11 p.m. CDTin management | a)
- What it's like to be on the data science job market [Nan]: " A guide to data science interviews and how they can be kinda terrible by not knowing what they want in a hire and asking dumb questions that don't really test for good hires. A useful reflection not just for aspiring data scientists, but any programmer going through interviews and any hirer running interviews." ('19 Apr 07Added Sun 2019-Apr-07 11 p.m. CDTin career | a)
- Setting the default [Nan]: " What is considered reasonable is what is considered default by our culture, and this can make problems hard to resolve." ('19 Apr 06Added Sat 2019-Apr-06 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- The startup framework to validate your idea before you spend $1 [Nan]: " Validate your idea by writing down the problem (and not the solution); figure out who might typically buy your product; come up with a list of 50 prospects; send them all messages asking to chat; chat with them about the problem (not the solution) and see if it is in their top three problems, how they solve the problem already, and whether they'd pay for a solution; design the solution with their feedback." ('19 Apr 05Added Fri 2019-Apr-05 11 p.m. CDTin entrepreneurship | a)
- How to avoid the biggest mistake you can make as a new software engineer [Nan]: " The biggest mistake is not prioritizing learning. You can learn on the job by specifically taking a job at a high-growth company; asking for help; seeking out code reviews; writing many small commits; picking tasks that teach you new skills; learning from failure; and reading textbooks, articles, blogs, etc." ('19 Apr 04Added Thu 2019-Apr-04 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- How to be awesome at programming (and get an awesome job) [Nan]: "If you have an awesome job, you can do awesome things. If you do awesome things, you can tell people about how awesome you are. And if you can tell people how awesome you are, you can get an awesome job. This is great, but how can you break into this cycle? If you're in a crappy job, you'll just perpetuate a cycle of crappiness. Instead, you can try to do something awesome on the side or quit and build something awesome yourself." ('19 Apr 03Added Wed 2019-Apr-03 11 p.m. CDTin career | a)
- The Beggar CEO and Sucker Culture [Nan]: Would your CEO give you a 33% raise just because you asked for one? No? Then why do you give your CEO 33% more time (moving from a 40hr week to a 60hr week) for free just because that's the culture? Don't give into the sucker culture that celebrates busyiness without actually getting yourself anywhere. ('19 Apr 02Added Tue 2019-Apr-02 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Preventing burnout for programmers [Nan]: " Burnout happens because of repetitive physical and mental stress. Some suggestions for combatting burnout is to eat well, sleep well, exercise, have a routine, avoid overworking (working only eight pomodoros a day, five days a week), dedicate 20% of time for goofing around with technology, going to programming meetups, invest in using and attaining mastery with the best programming tools, indulge in non-programming projects, and consider switching jobs/projects." ('19 Apr 01Added Mon 2019-Apr-01 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Why GitHub is not your CV [Nan]: " GitHub is not valuable as a resume because (a) it lacks customization by the user, (b) it lacks important context, (c) it is not primarily intended as a coding portfolio, and (d) open source requires time even the best people don't have and shouldn't have to make, which plays into a dangerous workaholic culture." ('19 Mar 31Added Sun 2019-Mar-31 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Let 1000 Flowers Bloom. Then Rip 999 of Them Out By the Roots. [Nan]: " At a certain threshold, around ~100 engineers using the same tool, it's worth it to allocate full-time engineers to improving productivity with that tool for everyone else rather than work directly on the job at hand. This also implies that in the beginning it is good to let each team do things their own way, but when teams scale, this can get in the way of high-impact opportunities to maximize productivity by standardizing around one awesome tool." ('19 Mar 30Added Sat 2019-Mar-30 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Stop the Robot Apocalypse [Nan]: " Amia Srinivasan does a better job than anyone else I've seen at critiquing effective altruism, focusing on whether EA is offering any new moral insight, whether EA is too conservative and neglects the potential for radical change, and whether it's too closely related to objectionable utilitarianism. I don't think any of these critiques undermine EA, but they're good to keep in mind." ('19 Mar 29Added Fri 2019-Mar-29 11 p.m. CDTin effectivealtruism | a)
- Millionaires Don't Use To-Do Lists [Nan]: " The calendar is a better place to manage tasks than a to-do list, because you can specifically allocate time to complete tasks and ensure everything will be completed on time." ('19 Mar 28Added Thu 2019-Mar-28 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Lessons Learned from Reading Postmortems [Nan]: " Most large failures in software companies, as measured by reading publicly-available postmortems, are related to (1) insufficient error handling, (2) not properly handling configuration changes, (3) hardware failures such as lack of power, (4) people being in the position where they can ruin something by accident, and (5) insufficient monitoring." ('19 Mar 27Added Wed 2019-Mar-27 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- A Way to Detect Bias [Nan]: " If you have a random sample of job applicants with roughly equal abilities and if you can objectively measure the applicants' performance once hired, you can measure hiring bias by seeing if certain groups of applicants outperform others - indicating that exceptional ability is needed to outweigh the bias against that group in hiring. This example can be generalized to detect all sorts of bias." ('19 Mar 26Added Tue 2019-Mar-26 11 p.m. CDTin management | a)
- The GOP Primary Party Rules Might Doom Carson and Cruz [Nan]: " Surprisingly, moderate GOP candidates have a structural edge over more conservative candidates, because more moderate Republican primary voters are heavily advantaged in the way that the GOP primary works because of the geography of where moderate Republican primary voters live and how Republican primary delegates are distributed." ('19 Mar 25Added Mon 2019-Mar-25 11 p.m. CDTin politicalscience | a)
- What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing? [Nan]: " Developmental psychology emphasizes the development of a "theory of mind" - knowing that your mind is different than others. Just because you like something doesn't mean that other people will like that same thing, because they have different minds. A lot of people have grasped this, but have you grasped additional implications, such as why people have different political beliefs?" ('19 Mar 24Added Sun 2019-Mar-24 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Negative News [Nan]: Stories that are bad for some people but good for others are easily spun into stories that are solely negative by focusing on the bad stories. This can make the world seem worse than it really is. ('19 Mar 23Added Sat 2019-Mar-23 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- "Redistribute wealth? No, redistribute respect" [Nan]: " An interesting perspective - rather than solely focusing on redistributing wealth to make society more equal from a monetary standpoint, we should be careful to recognize that money is not the sole determinant of a healthy society. While it's important to make sure everyone has a living wage, it's important to still have respect for those earning much less." ('19 Mar 22Added Fri 2019-Mar-22 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- What is the link between reducing mortality and increasing the world population? [Nan]: " While the evidence connecting mortality to fertility (including "overpopulation") is complex, this review suggests that population growth is rarely above 1:1. That is, every one life saved will approximately be offset by one less birth due to reducing fertility rates. Though the reason for this is far more complex than women having less children due to there being less childhood deaths - instead it also includes effects of greater nutrition, economic empowerment, education, and easier access to family planning and contraceptives." ('19 Mar 21Added Thu 2019-Mar-21 11 p.m. CDTin development | a)
- The best and worst ways to detect a liar [Nan]: " Detecting a liar by body language - even using much acclaimed "microexpressions" - seems harder to do than it sounds, and most people do only barely better than chance. What does seem to work is to use open questions and lure the liar into creating a web of deceit, and doing things like asking them to report an event backwards in time to make it harder to maintain the facade. You can then focus on changes in confidence and in the details they are giving. This technique, as opposed to monitoring body language, was 20 times more likely to detect lies, with an overall 70% success rate." ('19 Mar 20Added Wed 2019-Mar-20 11 p.m. CDTin random | a)
- Teaching is selling [Nan]: " Have you ever tried to teach someone something, only to have them forget most of it? This is because, consciously or subconciously, they don't think the issue is important. A key solution is to frame your teaching as a solution to a specific problem, just like I did with this description." ('19 Mar 19Added Tue 2019-Mar-19 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- What are your altruistic motivations? [Nan]: " A lot of people are suffering and it is easy to help them with just a few thousand dollars. Do we have a moral obligation to do this? Should we feel that this is an exciting opportunity? Nate Soares argues neither - there is no objective morality and guilt is a bad motivator, but there's also nothing exciting about lots of suffering. Instead, it's a solemn goal we can take on to make the world the way we want it to be." ('19 Mar 18Added Mon 2019-Mar-18 11 p.m. CDTin effectivealtruism | a)
- How do you onboard new software engineers? [Nan]: " This article argues that onboarding is important and underrated. Rather than having the most senior engineer focus on mentoring new people, it should be the person who learned it most recently. Junior engineers should teach other engineers. It's also important to have a standardized environment (e.g., Boxen) and get people contributing to production early. Lastly, people overemphasize learning programming languages when it's equally important to work on learning internal tools and focus on personal development (e.g., confidence, debugging skills, learning how to learn, etc.)" ('19 Mar 17Added Sun 2019-Mar-17 11 p.m. CDTin management | a)
- The Startup Naming Field Guide [Nan]: " A quick guide for naming your start-up. They suggest starting by laying a foundation - determining what your brand should be, who your users are, what they're like (psychographics), and what people are currently using instead of your product (direct and indirect competition). They then suggest generating names (but not looking at domain names yet), and then evaluating a final list by (a) looking at it against your brand, (b) seeing if it's easy to say, and © asking other people about it." ('19 Mar 16Added Sat 2019-Mar-16 11 p.m. CDTin entrepreneurship | a)
- The Book of Graham [Nan]: " "I could picture Eric at our east coast Christmas dinner in his startup T-Shirt, his sunglasses still on his head. 'Every day we wake up and tell ourselves we have to just fail faster,' he'd say. My father would have a stroke. In six generations, our family had not failed once. Many Y-Combinator founders pay themselves less than $60k a year, about half of what you make your first year in finance […] I had put together my own presentation for him. I called it: 'Science.' I slid my iPad in place of his and began my pitch. Slides 1-5 were dedicated to the complete failure of venture capital as an asset class over its entire history. I had charts and quotes from the world's most famous economists. Slides 6-10 listed all the defunct Y-Combinator companies, laid out in three columns in size 6 font. Next to them, the handful of wins looked insignificant." ('19 Mar 15Added Fri 2019-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDTin entrepreneurship | a)
- A cautionary tale of learning how to code [Nan]: " "Without further ado, here the big mistakes I see new coders make all the time: (a) Switching languages or frameworks frequently, or deluding themselves into thinking they can become proficient in all of them. (b) Personalizing their development environment with exotic tools, rather than more conventional tools that can be reliably used while collaborating with others. (c) Trying to learn tools like Docker and Famo.us because they're new and exciting, even though they haven't yet mastered more fundamental technologies." ('19 Mar 14Added Thu 2019-Mar-14 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Why content goes viral [Nan]: " It's correlation and not causation. More viral content is typically longer (>3k words); has at least one image with proper Facebook/Twitter previews; invokes awe, laughter, or amusement; is a list (e.g., "Top X reasons to Y", with the magic X being 10) or an infographic; looks trustworthy; is promoted by at least one well-followed person; is re-promoted many times by you (might not go viral the first time); and is posted on a Tuesday." ('19 Mar 13Added Wed 2019-Mar-13 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Distrust your data [Nan]: " A tale of why red states may not actually consume more porn than blue states. Five ways data can easily go wrong: (a) sloppy proxies, (b) needlessly dichotomizing, (c) correlation does not equal causation, (d) bad ecological inferences, and (e) data naivete." ('19 Mar 12Added Tue 2019-Mar-12 11 p.m. CDTin metascience | a)
- How to Scale a Development Team [Nan]: " Teams of less than five can get things done independently, but with the fifth person, there's a tipping point where two problems occur: (1) too much communication because it takes too much time to keep tabs on 6+ people and (2) too little communication because people, unaware of the others, end up duplicating work. This is solved with adding a bit of planning, like Pivotal Tracker and standing meetings. No more tools are needed. However, on the ninth person there is another tipping point where stand-ups become too long and Pivotal Tracker becomes too crowded and things begin again to break down. At this point, the team needs to be split into 2+ smaller teams with (a) clear spheres of authority and (b) clear interfaces to other teams. But be careful, as "[d]raw the fences in the wrong place, and you'll create coordination problems that make things even worse[, though f]ind the right places to divide and you'll see a massive increase in focus, happiness, and productivity." ('19 Mar 11Added Mon 2019-Mar-11 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Completion-centric planning [Nan]: "Make sure you (1) know all your projects, (2) what it would look like for those projects to be completed, and (3) strive to get projects to completion so you no longer have to work on them. Maybe spend an hour a day on the project most close to completion, regardless of priority?" ('19 Mar 10Added Sun 2019-Mar-10 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- The Copywriting Checklist [Nan]: " "Good headlines are 'End Result Customer Wants + Specific Period Of Time + Address The Objections.' (e.g., 'Your home sold in 90 days or I'll buy it', 'Hot fresh pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or its free'). Pitch: concisely state the user's problem as a question, precisely state your solution. It's important to borrow credibility by talking about what Fortune 500 companies use your software, or use solutions similar to your software, or just include a quote from someone famous. Also, have 2-4 testimonials (no more, no less) scattered throughout the page. Have a very clear call to action (e.g., a 'buy' button) Need to reverse the risk (e.g., a money back guarantee). Helps if that reversal is outlandish (e.g., 110% refund). Anchor the price to something (e.g., 'For the price of a Frappuccino, you can learn every step I use to write profit-pulling copy'). Have an FAQ below the buy button." ('19 Mar 09Added Sat 2019-Mar-09 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Why We Can't Solve Big Problems [Nan]: " Back in the 60s-70s, we did crazy bigthings like go to the moon. But now we don't have the Cold War to motivate us, and instead we're back to focusing on hard problems that are less sexy, like poverty. What's the point of mining asteroids when there's plenty of mining left to do in Texas? What's the point of colonizing the Moon when we have plenty of empty space in Kansas? This article provides a brilliant retrospective of where we've fallen short and where we haven't.-" ('19 Mar 08Added Fri 2019-Mar-08 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted to Know [Nan]: " (a) Good research is hard, (b) It's more likely than people expect that when you have a bunch of different behavioral interventions, they all end up being about equally effective (or equally ineffective), (c) "brief opportunistic intervention", which is merely a doctor asking a patient to consider quitting alcohol, can be surprisingly effective." ('19 Mar 07Added Thu 2019-Mar-07 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- How rich governments use compassion as an excuse to let thousands of migrants die [Nan]: " "[A]ll three governments say they're acting out of compassion. They claim that they're trying to save migrants from deadly border crossings by deterring them from making the journey to begin with. But their compassion is empty. There's a reason migrants make those journeys: the places they're leaving are more dangerous than the border journey itself. And by refusing to make the journeys any easier - or making them even more dangerous - the rich governments of the world are putting thousands of migrants in even more danger, both on the journey and at home." ('19 Mar 06Added Wed 2019-Mar-06 11 p.m. CSTin immigration | a)
- This Philosopher Wants to Change How You Think About Doing Good [Nan]: " "Imagine you're walking down the street and see a building on fire[. …] You run in […] and save a young child. That would be a pretty amazing day in your life[. …] But the most effective charities can save a life for $4,0, so many of us are lucky enough that we can save a life every year through our donations. When you're able to achieve so much at such low cost to yourself…why wouldn't you do that? The only reason not to is that you're stuck in the status quo, where giving away so much of your income seems a little bit odd." ('19 Mar 05Added Tue 2019-Mar-05 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- "Vote on Values, Outsource Beliefs" [SlateStarCodex]: " "Today I learned about social impact bonds. […] The basic idea is: government could save a lot of money if some problem got fixed. For example, if people stopped committing crime, they could spend less money on prisons. So they make a deal with a corporation. The corporation agrees to spend a certain amount of money to prevent crime for five years. And if crime goes down and the government saves on prisons, the corporation gets half the savings (or a third, or whatever). Zero taxpayer money gets risked. It is entirely up to the corporation to fund the problem-solving effort. If they fail, then it's their own loss. If they succeed, then the government pays them money, but less than the government made, so the taxpayers still get a profit. […] This is looking impressively close to prediction markets. Futarchy says 'vote on values, bet on beliefs'. Asking a corporation to invest money in crime-solving is a form of betting on belief - they are betting on what anti-crime programs will decrease crime most and win them the most reward. You still have the elected government deciding what bonds to place - voting on values - but you're outsourcing your beliefs to the corporation involved and giving them an incentive to get it right." ('19 Mar 04Added Mon 2019-Mar-04 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Five economic reforms millenials should be fighting for [Rollingstone]: " the job guarantee, universal basic income, the land-value tax, a US sovereign wealth fund, and public banking." ('19 Mar 03Added Sun 2019-Mar-03 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- "Why we should fire the entire "financial advice" industry" [Mrmoneymustache]: " The real life-changing idea is early retirement (or extreme frugality) - you can live a really great life on $10K a year or so, and thus, with stocks, you can retire on $250K. With an after-tax income of $50K, you'll have what you need to retire after just six years of work (savings rate of 80%)." ('19 Mar 02Added Sat 2019-Mar-02 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "Psychiatric hospitals are less "Cukoo's Nest" and more "Catch-22" [Squid314.livejournal]: " "When it gets cold or rainy, the hospital fills up with homeless people. Word has spread on the streets that if you go to the emergency room and tell the nurse that evil spirits are telling you to kill everyone, you will get a nice bed and three warm meals a day (the hospital meals, in contrast to all conventional wisdom, are really good). It can be hard to turn these people away, since bloodthirsty lawyers are circling the hospital waiting for you to make a Type II error ("So, Dr. Alexander, you're saying this homeless man walked right into your hospital and explicitly told you evil spirits were telling him to kill everyone, and you refused to even admit him to the hospital long enough to evaluate him more carefully? And this happened just before his shooting rampage at City Hall?"). Besides, many of the people with genuine mental illnesses are homeless, so you can't conclude much either way until you've done a proper evaluation which means letting them in for a few days at least." ('19 Mar 01Added Fri 2019-Mar-01 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- The moral case for giving doesn't rely on questionable quantitative estimates [Blog.givewell]: " "To us, the strongest form of the challenge is not 'How much should I give when $X saves a life?' but 'How much should I give, knowing that I have massive wealth compared to the global poor?'" ('19 Feb 28Added Thu 2019-Feb-28 11 p.m. CSTin costeffectiveness | a)
- Do Unpaid Internships Lead to Jobs? Not for College Students [Atlantic]: " "The common defense of the unpaid internship is that, even if the role doesn't exactly pay, it will pay off eventually in the form of a job. Turns out, the data suggests that defense is wrong, at least when it comes to college students." ('19 Feb 27Added Wed 2019-Feb-27 11 p.m. CSTin career | a)
- Systematic Lucky Breaks [LessWrong]: "Many people can point to significant events that improved their lives in a positive way. They often refer to these as 'lucky breaks', and take it for granted that such events are rare. But most of the time 'lucky breaks' don't need to be uncommon-you can often reverse engineer the reasons behind them and cause them to happen more frequently. So when a one-off event ends up contributing a lot of value, you should systematically make it part of your life." ('19 Feb 26Added Tue 2019-Feb-26 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Cognitive Democracy: Condorcet with Competence [Marginalrevolution]: " "We usually think of democracy as a way of aggregating diverse preferences but we can also imagine that we share similar preferences and that what we disagree about is the best way to achieve those preferences. From this perspective, democracy can be thought of as a tool for information aggregation. Using simple probability theory, Condorcet showed in 1785 that even when each individual voter has only a slightly better than chance probability of choosing the bettier of two options the probability that majority rule chooses the better outcome quickly goes to 1 as the number of voters increases (the wisdom of the crowds)." ('19 Feb 25Added Mon 2019-Feb-25 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- The Single Most Effective Method for Influencing People Fast [Spring.uk]: " "Influence techniques vary considerably in how effective, ethical and easy to perform they are. At the easy, more ethical end of the spectrum, is affirming someone's right to choose. This is a benign strategy which happens to have the handy side-effect of increasing persuasion. But what if you are looking to use a little more effort to get a lot more persuasion-power? Then perhaps the disrupt-then-reframe (DTR) technique is for you. A word of warning, though: the DTR technique is more of a cheap (but very effective) trick which some might find morally questionable. OK, with the health warning over, here's what they did in the original study which kicked off this whole line of research." ('19 Feb 24Added Sun 2019-Feb-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- The Reason So Many People are Unemployed [Aaronsw]: " "A good way to wrap your head around this is to think about a much smaller case: instead of the whole economy, let's think about a now-famous babysitting co-op on Capitol Hill. Instead of dollars, the co-op used its own scrip that was worth an hour of babysitting time. When you wanted to go out, you'd pay a couple hours to someone else to watch your kids; then when they wanted to go out, they'd pay you or someone else to do the same for them. It all worked great for a while, until one day they found they had too few pieces of scrip. Every couple had only a couple hours left and, having so little, they didn't want to waste it. So they all decided to save it for a very special occasion. This was kind of an incredible situation - even though there were people who wanted someone to babysit their kids, and people who were willing to do just that, the deal didn't happen, simply because the co-op hadn't printed enough colored pieces of paper. Eventually the co-op learned their mistake, printed some more scrip and handed it out, and everybody went back to babysitting like before and were much happier for it." ('19 Feb 23Added Sat 2019-Feb-23 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- Charity Cost-Effectiveness in an Uncertain World [Utilitarian-essays]: " "Evaluating the effectiveness of our actions, or even just whether they're positive or negative by our values, is very difficult. One approach is to focus on clear, quantifiable metrics and assume that the larger, indirect considerations just kind of work out. Another way to deal with uncertainty is to focus on actions that seem likely to have generally positive effects across many scenarios, and often this approach amounts to meta-level activities like encouraging positive-sum institutions, philosophical inquiry, and effective altruism in general. When we consider flow-through effects of our actions, the seemingly vast gaps in cost-effectiveness among charities are humbled to more modest differences, and we begin to find more worth in the diversity of activities that different people are pursuing. Those who have abnormal values may be more wary of a general "promote wisdom" approach to shaping the future, but it seems plausible that all value systems will ultimately benefit in expectation from a more cooperative and reflective future populace." ('19 Feb 22Added Fri 2019-Feb-22 11 p.m. CSTin costeffectiveness | a)
- The Virtue of Silence [SlateStarCodex]: " "Leah Libresco writes a couple of essays on an ethical dilemma reported in the New York Times. In the course of a confidential medical history, a doctor hears her patient is suffering from stress-related complaints after having sent an innocent man to prison. The doctor wants to know whether it is ethical to report the matter to the police. The Times' columnist says yes - it would save the poor prisoner. Leah says no - violating medical confidentiality creates an expectation that medical confidentiality will be violated in the future, thus dooming patients who are too afraid to talk about drug use or gay sex or other potentially embarrassing but important medical risk factors. But both sides are ignoring the much bigger dilemma lurking one meta-level up: is it ethical to debate this dilemma in the New York Times?" ('19 Feb 21Added Thu 2019-Feb-21 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- How to Not Die [Paulgraham]: " Weekly meetings encourage a powerful norm of weekly progress, which moves things forward: "You've probably noticed that having dinners every Tuesday with us and the other founders causes you to get more done than you would otherwise[. …] Every dinner is […] a deadline. […T]he mere constraint of staying in regular contact with us will push you to make things happen, because otherwise you'll be embarrassed to tell us that you haven't done anything new since the last time we talked." ('19 Feb 20Added Wed 2019-Feb-20 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "Anatomy of a Hack: How Crackers Ransack Passwords Like 'qeadzcwrsfxv1331" [Arstechnica]: " Ars Technica gave three experts a 16,000-entry encrypted password file, and asked them to break them. The winner got 90% of them in a few hours. And this includes passwords like "momof3gr8kds" and "correcthorsebatterystaple". " ('19 Feb 19Added Tue 2019-Feb-19 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Social Justice for the Highly Demanding of Rigor [SlateStarCodex]: " Some people claim "that social justice advocates irresponsibly take some undesirable outcome in minority groups, like poverty, and then assume it is the result of racism or sexism without considering other possible explanations. […] My counterargument is that although the first argument is true a depressingly large amount of the time, some people do more rigorous work and get the same result - that poor outcomes for minority groups are caused in large part by racism and sexism." ('19 Feb 18Added Mon 2019-Feb-18 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Three Ways to Advance Science [80000hours]: "There are three ways to contribute to scientific progress. The direct way is to conduct a good scientific study and publish the results. The indirect way is to help others make a direct contribution. Journal editors, university administrators and philanthropists who fund research contribute to scientific progress in this second way. A third approach is to marry the first two and make a scientific advance that itself expedites scientific advances. The full significance of this third way is commonly overlooked." ('19 Feb 17Added Sun 2019-Feb-17 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- On Intellectual Triage and Not Writing People Off [The Americanconservative]: "Terry Eagleton's bludgeoning review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion famously begins, 'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.' I share Eagleton's frustration. But what doesn't bother me - or Eagleton either, I'm pretty sure - is Dawkins's rejection of religious belief in general or Christianity in particular. Suppose Dawkins were to say something like this: 'I don't really know that much about Christianity, but from what I do know I haven't seen anything that would cause me to take it seriously or to investigate it further.' I would have absolute respect for that position - because, after all, that's the position I'm in in relation to all sorts of beliefs: in Zoroastrianism, say, or telekinesis, or alien spacecraft in Roswell, New Mexico." ('19 Feb 16Added Sat 2019-Feb-16 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- What it Feels Like to Be Bad at Math [Mathwithbaddrawings]: "As I procrastinated, spending more time at dinner complaining about topology than in the library doing topology, I realized that procrastination isn't just about laziness. It's about anxiety. To work on something you don't understand means facing your doubts and confusions head-on. Procrastination pushes back that painful confrontation." ('19 Feb 15Added Fri 2019-Feb-15 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "God, Christianity, and Meat" [Huffingtonpost]: "an interesting religious perspective on vegetarianism: "I was delighted to learn about this rich tradition of incorporating vegetarian diets into spiritual practice, but I admit that it first surprised me. It certainly is not something most Christians in America know about. If you do some searching like I did, though - even simply by searching "Christianity and vegetarianism" on the Internet - it's easy to see just how important the idea of peace between all creatures has been in the Christian moral imagination." ('19 Feb 14Added Thu 2019-Feb-14 11 p.m. CSTin animals | a)
- Ethics as What's Worth Caring About [Philosophyetc.net]: "The utilitarian can simply say, 'I care about people! I want everyone to be as well-off as possible.' And that seems a pretty attractive goal! There seems no doubt that people's welfare (and, more broadly, the welfare of sentient beings) is worth caring about. Is anything else comparably important, or worth caring about? Take promises. People sometimes criticize utilitarianism on the grounds that it affords no intrinsic significance to promise-keeping, so utilitarians may be expected to break promises (at least when it's sufficiently clear that it really would be for the best). But does it really make sense to care about promises more than people? That sounds terribly perverse! Promises can be a useful tool for coordination, and hence serving our collective interests. But when promise-keeping and human welfare diverge, surely it's the latter that really matters." ('19 Feb 12Added Tue 2019-Feb-12 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Six Psych Tips for Creating the Ideal Workspace [Spring.uk]: " (1) avoid open-plan; (2) both messy and untidy desks have their place, depending on the type of outcome you are looking for; (3) prefer curvy environments over straight edges, (4) have a room with a view or a picture of a view, (5) include lots of plants, and (6) decorate." ('19 Feb 11Added Mon 2019-Feb-11 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Google has eight simple rules for being a better manager [Govexec]: "(1) be a good coach, (2) empower your team and don't micromanage, (3) express interest in team members' success and personal well-being, (4) be productive and results-oriented, (5) be a good communicator, (6) help employees with career development, (7) have a clear vision and strategy, and (8) have key technical skills so you can be an advisor." ('19 Feb 10Added Sun 2019-Feb-10 11 p.m. CSTin management | a)
- Five Ways to Instantly Become More Productive [Nerdfitness]: "(1) Don't multi-task; (2a) track how you spend your time; (2b) consider using apps like RescueTime, Self-Control, or Chrome Nanny; (2c) understand and be comfortable with struggling for the first couple of weeks, knowing it will make you better in the long-run; (3) only use online chat if you absolutely have to; (4a) turn off automatic email notifications; (4b) don't check your email first thing; (4c) split your email into two folders, "Action" and "Non-essential" and automatically sort each email you get as you get it, coming back to the "Action" folder later; (4d) unsubscribe from as many things in your email as you can; (5a) declutter as much as you can; (5b) turn off as many notifications as you can; and (6) start slow." ('19 Feb 08Added Fri 2019-Feb-08 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- The paradox of deontology [Academia.edu]: " If a certain thing is bad according to deontology, why is it not ok to do that bad thing in order to cause even more cases of that bad thing from happening?" ('19 Feb 07Added Thu 2019-Feb-07 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- There's Something You Need to Know About the Rules [Mrmoneymustache]: " "This suggestion seemed to bring him great unease. The instructions were telling him to write his story in the notebook, and he had clearly written his on the paper instead. He was in violation of The Rules, and this was scaring him. I suddenly realized I had some teaching to do. It was time to share a deeper explanation of what The Rules really are, and I thought you might want to join in for the session as well. Because if you look around carefully, you will see that most of the problems of our society are based upon an incorrect understanding of these rules." ('19 Feb 06Added Wed 2019-Feb-06 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Variable Pricing [Jefftk]: " "Mary puts up three signs on the side of the truck: $2, $3, and $5. As people come for pizza she asks them to make three lines, one for each sign, based on how much they want to pay. […] The $2 line is long[. …] Some people would rather have pizza sooner than money and wait in the $3 line. […] Mary makes more money, the people who can afford to pay less get cheaper pizza, and the people in a hurry now have an option to trade off time and money." ('19 Feb 04Added Mon 2019-Feb-04 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- "If you pay them money, partisans will tell you the truth" [Washingtonpost]: "There has been a surprising finding that political partisans don't just disagree on the issues, but also basic facts like the level of unemployment. However, this theory suggests that they don't actually disagree, they're just essentially lying to show support for their preferred side. If you offer them money to give a correct answer, this partisan effect disappears. …At least in one study." ('19 Feb 03Added Sun 2019-Feb-03 11 p.m. CSTin politicalscience | a)
- 10 Stubborn Exercise Myths That Won't Die [Lifehacker]: "Turns out things like "No Pain, No Gain" is false, soreness after exercise isn't caused by lactic acid building up in muscles, exercise doesn't have to take long hours and isn't worthless if you don't do it regularly, you don't need a sports drink or supplements, you actually shouldn't stretch, you will lose weight but you won't lose weight quickly. Furthermore, exercising when you're old is still fine even if you didn't do it when young, and working out in your home isn't better or worse than working out at the gym." ('19 Feb 02Added Sat 2019-Feb-02 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Five Myths about the Minimum Wage [Washingtonpost]: "The minimum wage actually (1) doesn't cover everyone, (2) doesn't stay the same unless Congress changes it, (3) obviously increase unemployment when raised, (4) or help the working poor when raised. It also (5) isn't a partisan issue." ('19 Feb 01Added Fri 2019-Feb-01 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Five Myths About Taxes [Washingtonpost]: "(1) Taxes aren't some democrat big government scheme, (2) the income tax doesn't dampen entrepreneurship, (3) the Bush and Reagan tax cuts did not make taxes less progressive, (4) the US corporate tax doesn't make the US less competitive, and (5) it's not true that 47% of the US pays no taxes." ('19 Jan 30Added Wed 2019-Jan-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- The costs of crime are higher than people think [Aaronsw]: " "Even if a burglar only causes $400 worth of damage, I'd pay far more than $400 to prevent a burglary - the loss of privacy, the sense of violation, the disruption of my normal order, the distraction of having to deal with police and repairmen and insurance agents, etc. […And] we also have to count the harm to the criminals! Going through lengthy court proceedings, spending years in abusive prisons, having to deal with officious parole officers and the loss of liberty they cause are all serious costs and we can't wave them away just because they happen to the bad guys." Plus, the link includes discussion of game theory of crime prevention." ('19 Jan 29Added Tue 2019-Jan-29 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Focus on chickens to knock down the most animal suffering [Studentsforanimalrights.blogspot]: " "Imagine you're standing in a dining room before a massive table set with 100 plates. Spread among the plates is all the beef, chicken, and pork an average American consumes in one year. Since Americans eat so much meat, the plates are piled high with animal flesh. If you tally up the plates, you'll find that 44 plates contain chicken, 30 contain beef, and 26 contain pork, since Americans eat slightly more chicken than beef or pork. [But i]n place of the table, picture all the actual, live animals who were farmed and slaughtered to produce the meat you visualized on the plates. Looking upon this crowd of animals, you notice something strange: there's a sea of chickens and . . . that's it." ('19 Jan 28Added Mon 2019-Jan-28 11 p.m. CSTin animals | a)
- Morality As Though It Really Mattered [Overcomingbias]: "If moral realism is true, it seems like the most important thing to do is to spend a significant amount of time studying moral realism to make sure you're doing the right thing." ('19 Jan 27Added Sun 2019-Jan-27 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- How to Avoid Dying in a Car Crash [LessWrong]: "This is important, because it's one of the highest causes of death for developed-world people aged 15-24, like me. The tips? (1) Don't be overconfident; (2) don't be distracted by phones, scenery, fatigue, or other passengers; (3) don't speed; (4) avoid driving at night, during snow, or during rain; and the obvious stuff like (5) don't drink alcohol and (6) wear your seatbelt." ('19 Jan 24Added Thu 2019-Jan-24 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Further Adventures in Being Biased and Bad with Money [Squid314.livejournal]: " Scott Alexander explains a bias he noticed where he'd rather pay $200 for a flight with free internet and food than $150 for a flight where you have to pay $10 each for internet and food. It's a bias that sounds really weird when I say it, but that I totally fall for in real life and would be worth exploring further. I think it's a matter of how people construct "mental buckets" for spending, and $200 is totally reasonable for your "flight" bucket the same way $150 is, but $10 is not reasonable for your "food" bucket. Same reason why people will travel several miles to save $10 on gasoline, but not travel several miles to save $10 on a car." ('19 Jan 23Added Wed 2019-Jan-23 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- What The 2012 Election Would Have Looked Like Without Universal Suffrage [Buzzfeed]: "President Barack Obama has been elected twice by a coalition that reflects the diversity of America. Republicans have struggled to win with ever-higher percentages of the shrinking share of the population that is white men - 'a Mad Men party in a Modern Family world,' in the words of one strategist.But at America's founding, only white men could vote, and the franchise has only slowly expanded to include people of color, women, and - during the Vietnam War - people under 21. These maps show how American politics would have looked in that undemocratic past." ('19 Jan 22Added Tue 2019-Jan-22 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- "Book Review: The Swerve, Part 1" [Squid314.livejournal]: "But Epicurus didn't stop just because he had invented atoms, molecules, relativity, and quantum indeterminacy three centuries before Christ. He went on to say that the universe was made mostly of void, that within the void were millions of worlds, that many of these worlds had life on them, and that the Earth held no special place in the Universe. Since he mentioned life, he proposed that the first life-forms had come about as random arrangements of atoms, and that other more complicated life-forms evolved from these first forms by natural selection. Humans were merely another life-form that had evolved in this way, albeit the most advanced and rational. They originated as primitive hunter-gatherers, but formed more complicated societies when they realized the advantages of the rule of law, eventually creating the complicated city-states and empires of his own day." ('19 Jan 21Added Mon 2019-Jan-21 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Deontology is a Bug [Studiolo.cortediurbino]: "There are two possibilities: (1) Objects and events have physical properties, which we indicate when we speak of morally 'good' and 'bad' actions [or] (2) Type-2 shouldness is a bug. Those who favour explanation #1 face a serious problem. If the physical act of murder has a little physical tag attached to it, made of atoms, which says 'bad', then the Universe's complexity is vastly increased. Occam's razor, or Solomonoff induction, strongly prefers simple theories, which don't propose the existence of these little tags littering the world. In addition, putative moral properties are suspiciously anthropomorphic. Why should features of the external environment, independent of human brains, be such a good fit for our contingent, evolved intuitions?" ('19 Jan 20Added Sun 2019-Jan-20 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- "Bill Gates Reviews "The Better Angels of Our Nature" [The Gatesnotes]: "People often ask me what is the best book I've read in the last year. Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined stands out as one of the most important books I've read - not just this year, but ever. The book is about violence, but paints a remarkable picture that shows the world has evolved over time to be a far less violent place than before. It offers a really fresh perspective on how to achieve positive outcomes in the world. Pinker presents a tremendous amount of evidence that humans have gradually become much less violent and much more humane. The trend started thousands of years ago and has continued to this day. As I'm someone who's fairly optimistic in general, the book struck a chord with me and got me to thinking about some of our foundation's strategies." ('19 Jan 19Added Sat 2019-Jan-19 11 p.m. CSTin development | a)
- Study Shows Gender Bias in Science is Real. Here's Why it Matters. [Blogs.scientificamerican]: "Half the scientists were given the application with a male name attached, and half were given the exact same application with a female name attached. Results found that the 'female' applicants were rated significantly lower than the "males" in competence, hireability, and whether the scientist would be willing to mentor the student. [...] The scientists also offered lower starting salaries to the "female" applicants: $26,507.94 compared to $30,238.10." ('19 Jan 17Added Thu 2019-Jan-17 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- The Cobra Effect [Freakonomics]: "Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast is called "The Cobra Effect." The gist: when you want to get rid of a nasty pest, one obvious solution comes to mind: just offer a cash reward. But be careful - because nothing backfires quite like a bounty. This is a story-filled episode that looks at the unintended consequences of trying to control everything from traffic to rodent populations to dangerous gases." ('19 Jan 16Added Wed 2019-Jan-16 11 p.m. CSTin economics | a)
- Read History of Philosophy Backwards [SlateStarCodex]: "Back when I was in college, my chief complaint about my philosophy course was that it spent all its time teaching things that Aristotle or Plato or Descartes thought that were just obviously wrong. [...] None of these classes were billed as "history of philosophy", but as "philosophy" itself. [...] Today I was discussing Sartre with a friend, and a lot of the discussion centered around why people care about Sartre. Sartre's main point - that no one else can tell you who you are, and you choose what your own values are - seems so cliched, so much like what an uncreative graduation speaker might say - that it hardly seems worth elevating him to the Canon Of Philosophical Greatness. My hypothesis - and I don't know if it's true - is that this is only cliched now because Sartre won. The point of studying Sartre is not to learn that you choose your own identity, but to read him backward - to start with this idea that choosing your own identity is obvious, and then read Sartre to learn exactly how controversial it was at the time and what sorts of arguments Sartre had to go through to get people to accept it, and eventually understand the position that the original reader of Sartre was supposed to have started with." ('19 Jan 15Added Tue 2019-Jan-15 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Value Receptacles [Dl.dropboxusercontent]: "Utilitarianism is often rejected on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons, instead treating people as mere 'receptacles of value'. I develop several different versions of this objection, and argue that, despite their prima facie plausibility, they are all mistaken. Although there are crude forms of utilitarianism that run afoul of these objections, I advance a new form of the view 'token-pluralistic utilitarianism' that does not." ('19 Jan 14Added Mon 2019-Jan-14 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Professional Philanthropy vs. Professional Influencing [80000hours]: "To discuss cost-effectiveness, we will use a point of comparison. Let's put ourselves into the shoes of Jane. Jane is a professional donor, someone who earns money and donates it as cost-effectively as possible. If Jane earns a typical American income for forty years and donates 10%, she can expect to save 44,000 years worth of healthy life. One day, however, Jane makes a change. She cuts down her hours at her relatively well-paid job so that she can no longer afford to donate in order to spend more time persuading other people to donate professionally. As a philanthropic influencer, will she save more years of life or less?" ('19 Jan 13Added Sun 2019-Jan-13 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- Why Local Food is Not Effective Altruism [Robertwiblin]: "I'm going to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on 'local food' and then later 'fair trade' to explain why I don't think they are worth putting much effort into. I hope it will inspire you to do the same for whatever approaches you currently use to make the world a better place." ('19 Jan 12Added Sat 2019-Jan-12 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- "Encourage Discussion, Not Defensiveness" [80000hours]: "Getting more people behind a cause you care about can be a great way to really multiply your impact. To do this you need to be able to communicate your ideas in a way that allows people to engage with them fully. But this isn't always easy. Rather than encouraging constructive discussion, presenting new ideas - especially about moral issues - can often spark confrontation." ('19 Jan 11Added Fri 2019-Jan-11 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How Paul Krugman Found Politics [Newyorker]: "When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot-she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. But he's much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier." ('19 Jan 10Added Thu 2019-Jan-10 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Longest Word in English [En.wikipedia]: "The identity of the longest word in English depends upon the definition of what constitutes a word in the English language, as well as how length should be compared." ('19 Jan 08Added Tue 2019-Jan-08 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet [Wired]: "What the inspectors didn't know was that the answer they were seeking was hidden all around them, buried in the disk space and memory of Natanz's computers. Months earlier, in June 2009, someone had silently unleashed a sophisticated and destructive digital worm that had been slithering its way through computers in Iran with just one aim - to sabotage the country's uranium enrichment program and prevent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from building a nuclear weapon." ('19 Jan 07Added Mon 2019-Jan-07 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Efficient Charity is Do Unto Others [LessWrong]: "The Roman historian Sallust said of Cato "He preferred to be good, rather than to seem so". The lawyer who quits a high-powered law firm to work at a nonprofit organization certainly seems like a good person. But if we define "good" as helping people, then the lawyer who stays at his law firm but donates the profit to charity is taking Cato's path of maximizing how much good he does, rather than how good he looks." ('19 Jan 06Added Sun 2019-Jan-06 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- There Will be Two Internets [Techland.time]: "Social media isn't really something Google saw as a priority until Facebook locked them out. Facebook activity - user information, shares, Likes - can't be indexed, archived, or even sold against by Google. The Internet as seen through Google is now only a piece of the greater web story - and the company is scared." ('19 Jan 05Added Sat 2019-Jan-05 11 p.m. CSTin technology | a)
- Searching for the Meaning of Life in the Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy [3quarksdaily]: "the very similar 'What is the meaning of life?' question, seem to be committing a basic category error: life isn't the kind of thing to which the word 'meaning' or 'answer' applies." ('19 Jan 04Added Fri 2019-Jan-04 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Ideological Turing Test Contest [Unequally-yoked]: "Caplan challenged partisans to see if they could explain and the positions of their opponents well enough to pass as one of their ideological enemies. [...] Here, Christians will sham amidst a group on genuine atheists and vice versa. The plausibility of their counterfeits will be determined by open voting." ('19 Jan 03Added Thu 2019-Jan-03 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Symphony of Science [Symphonyofscience]: "The Symphony of Science is a musical project headed by John Boswell, designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form." Actually even more amazing than it sounds." ('19 Jan 01Added Tue 2019-Jan-01 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- Lab Yeast Make Evolutionary Leap [Newscientist]: "IN JUST a few weeks single-celled yeast have evolved into a multicellular organism, complete with division of labour between cells." ('18 Dec 31Added Mon 2018-Dec-31 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory [LessWrong]: "Game theory. You've studied the posts, you've laughed at the comics, you've heard the music. But the best way to make it Truly Part Of You is to play a genuine game, and I have yet to find any more effective than Diplomacy." ('18 Dec 28Added Fri 2018-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Just what is Manhattanhenge? [Bbc.co.uk]: "New Yorkers have witnessed an urban solar phenomenon, with the Sun setting in alignment with the city's skyscrapers and giving an effect fans say is reminiscent of Wiltshire's Stonehenge. Welcome to Manhattanhenge." ('18 Dec 24Added Mon 2018-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- The Pattern Behind Self-Deception [TED Talk] [Ted]: "Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things - from alien abductions to dowsing rods - boils down to two of the brain's most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble." ('18 Dec 22Added Sat 2018-Dec-22 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- "Mosquitos, Malaria and Education [TED Talk]" [Ted]: "Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world's biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them." ('18 Dec 21Added Fri 2018-Dec-21 11 p.m. CSTin development | a)
- Our Consciousness [TED Talk] [Ted]: "Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us." ('18 Dec 20Added Thu 2018-Dec-20 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Our Buggy Moral Code [TED Talk] [Ted]: "Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational - and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp." ('18 Dec 19Added Wed 2018-Dec-19 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives [TED Talk] [Ted]: "Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most." ('18 Dec 18Added Tue 2018-Dec-18 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Science Can Answer Moral Questions [TED Talk] [Ted]: "Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can - and should - be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life." ('18 Dec 17Added Mon 2018-Dec-17 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- The Surprising Science of Motivation [TED Talk] [Ted]: "Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories - and maybe, a way forward." ('18 Dec 16Added Sun 2018-Dec-16 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- On Being Wrong [TED Talk] [Ted]: "Most of us will do anything to avoid being wrong. But what if we're wrong about that? 'Wrongologist' Kathryn Schulz makes a compelling case for not just admitting but embracing our fallibility." ('18 Dec 15Added Sat 2018-Dec-15 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- The 50 Most Interesting Articles on Wikipedia [Copybot.wordpress]: "Deep in the bowels of the internet, I came across an exhaustive list of interesting Wikipedia articles by Ray Cadaster. It's brilliant reading when you're bored, so I got his permission to post the top 50 here." Rather than have fifty links to Wikipedia, I'll just pass this along." ('18 Dec 14Added Fri 2018-Dec-14 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- The Sunk Cost Fallacy [Youarenotsosmart]: "Your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it." An analysis of the Sunk Cost fallacy, especially as it pertains to Farmville." ('18 Dec 13Added Thu 2018-Dec-13 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- The Apologist and the Revolutionary [LessWrong]: "Rationalists complain that most people are too willing to make excuses for their positions, and too unwilling to abandon those positions for ones that better fit the evidence. And most people really are pretty bad at this. But certain stroke victims called anosognosiacs are much, much worse." ('18 Dec 12Added Wed 2018-Dec-12 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Optimal Philanthropy for Human Beings [LessWrong]: "Giving to optimal charities instead of average charities can multiply one person's impact 10, 100, or maybe 1000 times. Now multiply that change in impact by a hundred, thousand, or million people who have been persuaded by the simple math and equipped with the psychology of giving. That's a big impact." ('18 Dec 11Added Tue 2018-Dec-11 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- Is it Cold in Here? - Feminism at CERN [Blogs.scientificamerican]: "It doesn't have to be this way; as Sandler discovered, this is changeable behavior. That's why I'm offering a Manifesto for Change, and I challenge those in the skeptic/atheist community to implement its principles." ('18 Dec 10Added Mon 2018-Dec-10 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans [Atlantic]: "If we are truly a democracy-if voters get to size up candidates for a public office and choose the one they want-why don't the elections seem to change anything? Because we elect our leaders, and they then govern, in a system that makes cooperation almost impossible and incivility nearly inevitable, a system in which the campaign season never ends and the struggle for party advantage trumps all other considerations." ('18 Dec 09Added Sun 2018-Dec-09 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Rule Breaker - The Biology of Ethics [Foreignpolicy]: "For people familiar with Churchland's work over the past four decades, her desire to bring the brain into the discussion [of Ethics] will come as no surprise: She has long made the case that philosophers must take account of neuroscience in their investigations." ('18 Dec 08Added Sat 2018-Dec-08 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Protected from Myself [LessWrong]: "Because, when I look over my history, I find that my ethics have, above all, protected me from myself. They weren't inconveniences. They were safety rails on cliffs I didn't see." ('18 Dec 07Added Fri 2018-Dec-07 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Cosmic Collisions Galore [Hubblesite]: Pictures of colliding galaxies as taken by the Hubble Telescope. ('18 Dec 06Added Thu 2018-Dec-06 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Equation: How GPS Bends Time [Wired]: "According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, a clock that's traveling fast will appear to run slowly from the perspective of someone standing still. Satellites move at about 9,000 mph-enough to make their onboard clocks slow down by 8 microseconds per day from the perspective of a GPS gadget and totally screw up the location data." ('18 Dec 05Added Wed 2018-Dec-05 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Einstein Cross [En.wikipedia]: "Four images of the same distant quasar appear around a foreground galaxy due to strong gravitational lensing." ('18 Dec 04Added Tue 2018-Dec-04 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Congress Continues Debate Over Whether Or Not Nation Should Be Economically Ruined [The Onion]: "Members of the U.S. Congress reported Wednesday they were continuing to carefully debate the issue of whether or not they should allow the country to descend into a roiling economic meltdown of historically dire proportions." ('18 Dec 03Added Mon 2018-Dec-03 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- The Dangers of Being Wrong on Keynes [Washingtonpost]: "The central irony of financial crises is that they're caused by too much borrowing, too much confidence and too much spending, and they're solved by more confidence, more borrowing and more spending"." ('18 Dec 01Added Sat 2018-Dec-01 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Toy Stories - Combination of luck and skill that gave birth to some of our favourite games [Telegraph.co.uk]: "The toys we love most are often labours of love, desperation, skulduggery and sometimes pure fluke. And sometimes the story behind its creation is as entertaining as the toy itself…" ('18 Nov 30Added Fri 2018-Nov-30 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- "Lawyers, Coins, and Money" [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: Krugman discusses three odd loopholes that might allow the country to circumvent the debt ceiling. ('18 Nov 27Added Tue 2018-Nov-27 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- What's With All the Bernanke Bashing? [NYTimes]: "Mr. Bernanke has worked tirelessly to shepherd the economy through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and yet, for all his efforts, seems vastly underappreciated." ('18 Nov 26Added Mon 2018-Nov-26 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Curious About Astronomy - Can Moons Have Moons? [Curious.astro.cornell.edu]: "Yes, in theory, moons can have moons. The region of space around a satellite there a sub-satellite can exist is called the Hill sphere. Outside the Hill sphere, a sub-satellite would be lost from its orbit about the satellite." ('18 Nov 25Added Sun 2018-Nov-25 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Politicians In Costume [The Dailybeast]: A collection of fifteen pictures and stories regarding famous politicians in various costumes. ('18 Nov 24Added Sat 2018-Nov-24 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- Faking (Then Making) It - Reddit's First Year [Bigthink]: "In Reddit's early days, the site's co-founders submitted content under a variety of fake identities in order to make it look like there were more users than there actually were." ('18 Nov 23Added Fri 2018-Nov-23 11 p.m. CSTin entrepreneurship | a)
- Dungeons and Discourse - A Philosophy RPG [Raikoth.net]: "Like the game in the comic, Dungeons and Discourse is intended to be a role-playing game based on science and philosophy. Most spells, items, and game events will be based on philosophical ideas, and if played right, the game will provoke and reward interesting philosophical discussions." ('18 Nov 22Added Thu 2018-Nov-22 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- List of Pixar Film References [En.wikipedia]: "The following is a list of all documented self-referential nods contained within Pixar films and shorts that the various filmmakers have incorporated into their movies." ('18 Nov 21Added Wed 2018-Nov-21 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- The Ways of Silencing [Opinionator.blogs.nytimes]: "Suppose that President Obama really was a secret Islamist agent, or born in Kenya. In that case, he would be grossly insincere. We would have no reason to believe what he said in any situation. The function of disseminating such claims about the president is not to object to his specific arguments or agenda. It is to undermine the public's trust in him, so that nothing he says can be taken at face value." ('18 Nov 20Added Tue 2018-Nov-20 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- "Moody's Blues, Poor Standards, and the Debt" [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "The invaluable Mike Konczal tells us the truth about the rating agencies and public-sector debt: not only do they constantly make mistakes, they do so in a consistent direction. Namely, they hold public-sector borrowers to vastly higher standards than they hold private borrowers." ('18 Nov 19Added Mon 2018-Nov-19 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Some of the Greatest Unsolved Mysteries [Reddit]: A Reddit discussion that shares some of history and science's greatest mystery. Lots of additional links to go to here. ('18 Nov 18Added Sun 2018-Nov-18 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- Spending in Disguise [Nationalaffairs]: "Because tax cuts often sound more appealing to policymakers and voters than spending increases - especially in today's political climate - the temptation to spend through the tax code is enormous. And the confusion surrounding such spending allows politicians to claim they are saving taxpayers' money when, in fact, they are really spending it." ('18 Nov 17Added Sat 2018-Nov-17 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- If the Earth Stood Still [Esri]: "What would happen if the earth stopped spinning? ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations and generate maps that visualize these results." ('18 Nov 16Added Fri 2018-Nov-16 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Divided Government [Newyorker]: "In fact, few voters ever "choose" divided government, and those voters are never a majority. The majority always wants united government. Some voters want it united under Republican auspices, some want it under Democratic auspices. Almost no one wants divided government" ('18 Nov 15Added Thu 2018-Nov-15 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Pokemon's Ten Most Disturbing Pokedex Entries [Comicsalliance]: "ComicsAlliance is wandering through the tall grass to bring you the Ten Most Disturbing (and Completely Official) Entries in the Pokedex!" ('18 Nov 14Added Wed 2018-Nov-14 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- How to use dice to stop people from lying on surveys [Io9]: "A toss of the dice allows people to confess things on surveys that they otherwise wouldn't." ('18 Nov 13Added Tue 2018-Nov-13 11 p.m. CSTin politicalscience | a)
- The Early Prediction Rant [Politics-by-the -numbers.blogspot]: " DON'T EVEN TRY TO PREDICT THE 2012 ELECTION WITH CURRENT (July, 2011) UNEMPLOYMENT DATA! (Sorry for shouting). There is hardly any relationship (r-squared=.07), and slight pattern that does exist is nonsensical, indicating that Obama's best strategy would be to increase unemployment as much as possible." ('18 Nov 11Added Sun 2018-Nov-11 11 p.m. CSTin politicalscience | a)
- Truly Part of You [LessWrong]: "The same experiences that lead us to formulate a belief, connect that belief to other knowledge and sensory input and motor output. If you see a beaver chewing a log, then you know what this thing-that-chews-through-logs looks like, and you will be able to recognize it on future occasions whether it is called a 'beaver' or not. But if you acquire your beliefs about beavers by someone else telling you facts about 'beaver'", you may not be able to recognize a beaver when you see one." ('18 Nov 10Added Sat 2018-Nov-10 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- How to Respond to Rick Perry's Response [NYTimes]: "To hold that elected officials can't publicly invoke their religion won't help a country of believers, agnostics and atheists reach any kind of consensus. It will only impoverish the conversation, depriving many citizens of the ability to make, and judge, arguments that reflect their most cherished views." ('18 Nov 09Added Fri 2018-Nov-09 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island [News.nationalgeographic]: "Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows." ('18 Nov 08Added Thu 2018-Nov-08 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- "Two moons above Earth may have collided to create one, study says" [Latimes]: "Scientists say such a collision could explain why the moon is lopsided and why its far side is covered with mountains." ('18 Nov 07Added Wed 2018-Nov-07 11 p.m. CSTin science | a)
- Standard & Poor's has been wrong before. But they're right now. [Washingtonpost]: "After Republicans in Congress spent three months weighing whether or not to default on our debt and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that paying our bills would never again be a foregone conclusion, can anyone really argue with that?" ('18 Nov 06Added Tue 2018-Nov-06 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Why S.&P.'s Ratings Are Substandard and Porous [538.blogs.nytimes]: "A more cynical view is that S.&P. is playing the role of the schoolmarm, looking for excuses to reward or punish countries based on good behavior - and that this is getting in the way of their objectivity." ('18 Nov 05Added Mon 2018-Nov-05 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- "Sam, Janet, and Debt" [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "One of the common arguments against fiscal policy in the current situation - one that sounds sensible - is that debt is the problem, so how can debt be the solution? Households borrowed too much; now you want the government to borrow even more?" ('18 Nov 04Added Sun 2018-Nov-04 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Win Together or Lose Together [NYTimes]: "We mistakenly treated the end of the cold war as a victory that allowed us to put our feet up - when it was actually the onset of one of the greatest challenges we've ever faced. We helped to unleash two billion people just like us - in China, India and Eastern Europe. For us to effectively compete and collaborate with them - to maintain the American dream - required studying harder, investing wiser, innovating faster, upgrading our infrastructure quicker and working smarter." ('18 Nov 03Added Sat 2018-Nov-03 11 p.m. CDTin nationalsecurity | a)
- "MMT, Again" [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "But I do get the premise that modern governments able to issue fiat money can't go bankrupt, never mind whether investors are willing to buy their bonds. And it sounds right if you look at it from a certain angle. But it isn't." ('18 Nov 02Added Fri 2018-Nov-02 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Stop Coddling the Super-Rich [NYTimes]: "Our leaders have asked for "shared sacrifice." But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched." ('18 Nov 01Added Thu 2018-Nov-01 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- How to Write Faster [Slate]: "It's no secret that writing is hard … but why can't I be one of those special few for whom it comes easily? What am I doing wrong? Why haven't I gotten any faster?" ('18 Oct 31Added Wed 2018-Oct-31 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Oh! What a Lovely War! [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "World War II is the great natural experiment in the effects of large increases in government spending, and as such has always served as an important positive example for those of us who favor an activist approach to a depressed economy." ('18 Oct 28Added Sun 2018-Oct-28 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Remind Physicalists They're Physicalists [LessWrong]: "In another study, McCabe & Castel (2008) showed subjects fictional articles summarizing scientific results and including either no image, a brain scan image, or a bar graph. Subjects were asked to rate the soundness of scientific reasoning in the article, and they gave the highest ratings when the article included a brain scan image. But why should this be?" ('18 Oct 27Added Sat 2018-Oct-27 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Support That Sounds Like Dissent [LessWrong]: "If we agree, we want to help the author make it stronger, so we treat it as though we were revising our own draft, point out the sections which are weak, and explain why. If we disagree, we want to change the author's mind, so we point out the sections which caused us to disagree, and explain why. These two cases are hard to distinguish, and we usually forget to say which we're doing." ('18 Oct 26Added Fri 2018-Oct-26 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Crisis Economics [Economics.harvard.edu]: "To understand the challenge government economists have faced over the past year and a half, it is useful to imagine the case ofa physician trying to treat an ill patient." ('18 Oct 25Added Thu 2018-Oct-25 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Let Them Debate College Students [LessWrong]: "Ah, but who says that prestigious scientistsare required to debate creationists?" ('18 Oct 24Added Wed 2018-Oct-24 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Zombie Tax Lies [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "The claim that only rich people pay taxes is a zombie lie - something that keeps coming back no matter how many times it's killed by evidence. So, let's try another shot to the head." ('18 Oct 23Added Tue 2018-Oct-23 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- How to Win When You're Unpopular: What Obama Can Learn From Truman [Tnr]: "Barack Obama's bid for reelection next year will, by all indications, be a tough, maybe even uphill fight. But daunting as the campaign may seem, the president can at least take some solace in a precedent from 64 years ago: Harry Truman's campaign for reelection in 1948-successful, despite a poor economic climate, and a polarized electorate-offers a promising path for Obama's reelection." ('18 Oct 22Added Mon 2018-Oct-22 11 p.m. CDTin politicalscience | a)
- Vanilla and Chocolate and Preference Judgements [LessWrong]: "It's hard to say that both of them are right, if each is hurting the other's feelings. Again, though, their argument isn't about anything factual. They both agree that there are papers on the desk and clothes on the floor, and that Albert is the one responsible. Where they diverge is the preference they place on this world-state." ('18 Oct 21Added Sun 2018-Oct-21 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Can We Please Take a Break From Blaming the Internet? [Techland.time]: "So for the sake of the discourse itself, I feel as though we should take a break for a bit from blaming the internet for all the things wrong with our culture. They're questions fully worth considering, but for the time being they're all blurred together as tired rehashings, causing very valid points to get lost." ('18 Oct 20Added Sat 2018-Oct-20 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- Crashing the Tea Party [NYTimes]: "But in fact the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic. To embrace the Tea Party carries great political risk for Republicans, but perhaps not for the reason you might think." ('18 Oct 18Added Thu 2018-Oct-18 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Terrorism - An Era in Ideas [Chronicle]: "The discrepancy between the panic generated by terrorism and the deaths generated by terrorism is no accident. Panic is the whole point of terrorism, as the root of the word makes clear: "Terror" refers to a psychological state, not an enemy or an event." ('18 Oct 17Added Wed 2018-Oct-17 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Do You Care Whether the Religious Ideas You Believe in Are True or Not? [Alternet]: "Here's what I'd like to say to people who are less interested in what's really true about the universe than they are about their personal interpretation of it." ('18 Oct 16Added Tue 2018-Oct-16 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- "U.S. Needs More Inflation to Speed Recovery, Say Mankiw, Rogoff" [Bloomberg]: "They argue that a looser rein on inflation would make it easier for debt-strapped consumers and governments to meet their obligations. It might also help the economy by encouraging Americans to spend now rather than later when prices go up." ('18 Oct 15Added Mon 2018-Oct-15 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Smart Taxes: An Open Invitation to Join the Pigou Club [Economics.harvard.edu]: "Many economists favor higher taxes on energy-related products such as gasoline, while the general public is more skeptical. This essay discusses various aspects of this policy debate. It focuses, in particular, on the use of these taxes to correct for various externalities-an idea advocated long ago by British economist Arthur Pigou." ('18 Oct 14Added Sun 2018-Oct-14 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Stupid for President [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "The point of the article is that intelligence should be considered a qualification for being President, and knowledge of evolution is a good litmus test for intelligence. On that test, certain candidates for office clearly come out as unqualified. They are the types of candidates for a position as important as President that should not even be on the list - let alone the short list - of possibilities." ('18 Oct 13Added Sat 2018-Oct-13 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Snake Oil Supplements Visualization [Informationisbeautiful.net]: "This image is a "balloon race". The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble." ('18 Oct 12Added Fri 2018-Oct-12 11 p.m. CDTin science | a)
- De Finetti's Game - How to Quantify Belief [Measureofdoubt]: "In the experiment, you show your friend a bag with 95 red and 5 blue marbles. You then offer him a choice: he can either pick a marble at random and, if it’s red, win $1 million. Or he can go back and verify that the door is locked and, if it is, get $1 million. If your friend would choose to draw a marble from the bag, he preferred the 95% chance to win. His real confidence of locking the door must be somewhere below that. So you play another round – this time with 80 red and 20 blue marbles. If he would rather check the door this time, his confidence is higher than 80% and perhaps you try a 87/13 split next round. And so on. You keep offering different deals in order to hone in on the level where he feels equally comfortable selecting a random marble and checking the door. That’s his real level of confidence." ('18 Oct 11Added Thu 2018-Oct-11 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Climate Change - The Tub Analogy [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "A reader has posted a claim about climate change that I have responded to in the past, but would like to respond to again. It is a type of argument that, I hold, no rational person truly concerned with reaching a reasonable conclusion about climate change would offer." ('18 Oct 10Added Wed 2018-Oct-10 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- That's So Mysto - What Makes Slang Stick [Slate]: "There's no grand unified theory for why some slang terms live and others die. In fact, it's even worse than that: The very definition of slang is tenuous and clunky." ('18 Oct 09Added Tue 2018-Oct-09 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence [LessWrong]: "If Stalin is evil, then everything he says should be false. You wouldn't want to agree with Stalin, would you? Stalin also believed that 2 + 2 = 4. Yet if you defend any statement made by Stalin, even "2 + 2 = 4″, people will see only that you are 'agreeing with Stalin'; you must be on his side." ('18 Oct 08Added Mon 2018-Oct-08 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) [Blog.givewell]: "While some people feel that GiveWell puts too much emphasis on the measurable and quantifiable, there are others who go further than we do in quantification, and justify their giving (or other) decisions based on fully explicit expected-value formulas. The latter group tends to critique us - or at least disagree with us - based on our preference for strong evidence over high apparent "expected value," and based on the heavy role of non-formalized intuition in our decisionmaking." ('18 Oct 07Added Sun 2018-Oct-07 11 p.m. CDTin costeffectiveness | a)
- The Crackpot Offer [LessWrong]: "Whenever you are tempted to hold on to a thought you would never have thought if you had been wiser, you are being offered the opportunity to become a crackpot - even if you never write any angry letters in green ink. If no one bothers to argue with you, or if you never tell anyone your idea, you may still be a crackpot. It's the clinging that defines it." ('18 Oct 06Added Sat 2018-Oct-06 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- "To students, it's all about the (boring) content" [Washingtonpost]: "For students, the problem is not that teachers are ineffective, that schools aren't accountable or that the textbook is an inefficient technology for delivering content. Their problem is the content itself. Students are disengaged because they're bored, and they're bored because the material is often irrelevant and meaningless." ('18 Oct 05Added Fri 2018-Oct-05 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Businessmen and Macroeconomics [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "Matt Yglesias is mildly upset over a report that Obama is turning to Warren Buffet and Alan Mulally for economic advice. It's not clear how much to make of the report. But it's always good to remember that businessmen - even great businessmen - don't necessarily know much about how to make the macroeconomy work." ('18 Oct 04Added Thu 2018-Oct-04 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Generalizing From One Example [LessWrong]: "Dr. Berman dubbed this the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's." ('18 Oct 03Added Wed 2018-Oct-03 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Fallacy of Gray [LessWrong]: "Everything is shades of gray, but there are shades of gray so light as to be very nearly white, and shades of gray so dark as to be very nearly black. Or even if not, we can still compare shades, and say 'it is darker' or 'it is lighter'." ('18 Oct 02Added Tue 2018-Oct-02 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Ten Limerick Principles of Economics [Limericksecon]: "A generation of undergraduates has mastered the Ten Principles of Economics through the agency of Prof. Mankiw's famous textbooks and courses. Now, in the interest of the general public, Dr. Goose shines a light on these Principles to reveal their provocative yet oddly rational sexual subtext." ('18 Oct 01Added Mon 2018-Oct-01 11 p.m. CDTin economics | a)
- Diplomacy and Accomodationism Are Not The Same Thing [Freethoughtblogs]: "Our problem is not with being civil and friendly to believers, or with trying to make alliances with them. Our problem is with bowing to religion. Our problem is with accepting religion's assessment of itself as a special case, an idea that ought to be above criticism." ('18 Sep 29Added Sat 2018-Sep-29 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- On the Inadequacy of the Stimulus [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "Hmm. I don't think I've ever put up a simple explanation of why the stimulus was so clearly inadequate to the task. By the way, my point here is not what Obama shoulda-coulda done; I just want to look at the straight economics." ('18 Sep 28Added Fri 2018-Sep-28 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- "Academic Debate, Real Consequences" [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "With all eyes on Jackson Hole, it may be worth talking a bit about the intellectual history that lies behind some of the policy debate." ('18 Sep 27Added Thu 2018-Sep-27 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Rational Home Buying [LessWrong]: "A new house is one of the most important purchases most people will make. Because of the sums involved, the usual pitfalls of decision-making gain new importance, and it becomes especially important to make sure you're thinking rationally. Research in a couple of fields, most importantly positive psychology, offers some potentially helpful tips." ('18 Sep 25Added Tue 2018-Sep-25 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Bastet - Bastard Tetris [Blahg.res0l.net]: "Have you ever thought Tetris(R) was evil because it wouldn't send you that straight 'I' brick you needed in order to clear four rows at the same time? Well Tetris(R) probably isn't evil, but Bastet certainly is. >:-) [...] Unlike normal Tetris(R), however, Bastet does not choose your next brick at random. Instead, Bastet uses a special algorithm designed to choose the worst brick possible. As you can imagine, playing Bastet can be a very frustrating experience!" ('18 Sep 24Added Mon 2018-Sep-24 11 p.m. CDTin random | a)
- Regulations and Job Creation [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "This describes what has happened with respect to smoking and climate change. Corporate executives see a regulation as hindering their profits and turn a blind eye to the fact that the regulation aims to prevent them from profiting by killing and maiming other people and destroying their property." ('18 Sep 23Added Sun 2018-Sep-23 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Why I Am Not a Compatibilist [Wordsideasandthings.blogspot]: "Suppose I want a certain woman to love me and, luckily, have the alchemy skills to concoct a perfect love potion. All I have to do is put a drop of the potion in her drink and her mind will be permanently altered in such a way that she will love me more than anyone else. [...] Loving me is what she herself wants to do and, since she has the freedom to act accordingly, she will. On the compatibilist view, she would have all the freedom 'worth wanting.' She is free to pursue the will that I gave her. But is this freedom or the perfect form of slavery?" ('18 Sep 22Added Sat 2018-Sep-22 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- The Social Psychology of Burning Man [Blogs.scientificamerican]: "Burning Man is also a large-scale social experiment. The 50,000 people who converge on the desert each year create a temporary but legitimate city - roughly the size of Santa Cruz, CA or Flagstaff, AZ - with its own street grid, laws, and social mores. In the process, they attempt to do away with several of the most fundamental institutions underlying modern civilization." ('18 Sep 21Added Fri 2018-Sep-21 11 p.m. CDTin economics | a)
- "Make Evidence Charts, Not Review Papers" [Alexholcombe.wordpress]: "Conventional articles can be nice, but science needs new forms of communication. Here I've focused on the omission problem in articles. [...] Hal Pashler and I have created, together with Chris Simon of the Scotney Group who did the actual programming, a tool that addresses these problems. It allows one to create systematic reviews of a topic, without having to write many thousands of words, and without having to weave all the studies together with a narrative unified by a single theory." ('18 Sep 20Added Thu 2018-Sep-20 11 p.m. CDTin metascience | a)
- "Treasuries, TIPS, and Gold" [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "Well, I've been thinking about it - and the answer surprised me: soaring gold prices may be quite consistent with a deflationista story about the economy." ('18 Sep 19Added Wed 2018-Sep-19 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Recessions Under the Gold Standard [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "Anyway, one alleged fact I keep hearing is that recessions were short and shallow under the gold standard. I don't know where that's coming from, but it just ain't so. [...] Gold is no panacea." ('18 Sep 18Added Tue 2018-Sep-18 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- How to Create (Not Find) the Meaning of Your Life [Daylightathe Ism]: "People should spend more time thinking about the meaning of their own lives, than the meaning of life in general." ('18 Sep 17Added Mon 2018-Sep-17 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- The Two-Bucket Mind [Dilbert]: "My hypothesis is that we humans automatically sort topics into two opposing viewpoints, or buckets. In the rare cases when we encounter a third opinion, we can't easily process it because our brains don't have a third bucket." ('18 Sep 16Added Sun 2018-Sep-16 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Rational Communication [LessWrong]: "Like most of the skills involved in nursing, and like many of the skills involved in rationality, communication skills aren't well transmitted by book learning." ('18 Sep 15Added Sat 2018-Sep-15 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Slow Down! Why Some Languages Sound So Fast [Time]: "[S]ome languages seem to zip by faster than others. Spanish blows the doors off French; Japanese leaves German in the dust - or at least that's how they sound. But how could that be? The dialogue in movies translated from English to Spanish doesn't whiz by in half the original time after all, which is what it should if the same lines were being spoken at double time. Similarly, Spanish films don't take four hours to unspool when they're translated into French. Somewhere among all the languages must be a great equalizer that keeps us conveying information at the same rate even if the speed limits vary from tongue to tongue." ('18 Sep 14Added Fri 2018-Sep-14 11 p.m. CDTin science | a)
- We Are All Ponzi Schemers Now [Mothe Rjones]: "If Social Security is a 'monstrous lie,' as Rick Perry says, then the entire federal government is a monstrous lie. Social Security is nothing special. It's just another tax-funded program. Taxes come in, benefits go out." ('18 Sep 13Added Thu 2018-Sep-13 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- How to seem good at everything - Stop doing stupid shit [Jinfiesto.posterous]: "Even without the explosive growth in skill that eliminating stupidity usually comes with, it's surprising how far just not making dumb mistakes will get people." ('18 Sep 12Added Wed 2018-Sep-12 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- The Lens That Sees Its Flaws [LessWrong]: "Mice can see, but they can't understand seeing. You can understand seeing, and because of that, you can do things which mice cannot do. Take a moment to marvel at this, for it is indeed marvelous." ('18 Sep 11Added Tue 2018-Sep-11 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Virtue of Narrowness [LessWrong]: "What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world." ('18 Sep 10Added Mon 2018-Sep-10 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Would Al Gore Have Won in 2000 Without The Electoral College? [538.blogs.nytimes]: "The popular vote results that emerge from a universe like ours in which the Electoral College does exist are not quite the same as the ones we'd see in a world where it didn't." ('18 Sep 09Added Sun 2018-Sep-09 11 p.m. CDTin politicalscience | a)
- The Neuroscience of Human Motivation [Commonsenseathe Ism]: "So if you're not up for a 20-page tutorial on human motivation, this post isn't for you, but I hope you're glad I bothered to write it for the sake of others. If you are in the mood for a 20-page tutorial on human motivation, please proceed." ('18 Sep 07Added Fri 2018-Sep-07 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong [LessWrong]: "Saying 'Words are arbitrary; I can define a word any way I like' makes around as much sense as driving a car over thin ice with the accelerator floored and saying, 'Looking at this steering wheel, I can't see why one radial angle is special - so I can turn the steering wheel any way I like.'" ('18 Sep 06Added Thu 2018-Sep-06 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Does Economics Still Progress? [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "I've never liked the notion of talking about economic "science" - it's much too raw and imperfect a discipline to be paired casually with things like chemistry or biology, and in general when someone talks about economics as a science I immediately suspect that I'm hearing someone who doesn't know that models are only models. Still, when I was younger I firmly believed that economics was a field that progressed over time, that every generation knew more than the generation before." ('18 Sep 05Added Wed 2018-Sep-05 11 p.m. CDTin economics | a)
- Harder Choices Matter Less [LessWrong]: "I do think there's something to be said for agonizing over important decisions, but only so long as the agonization process is currently going somewhere, not stuck." ('18 Sep 04Added Tue 2018-Sep-04 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Free to Die [NYTimes]: "The incident highlighted something that I don't think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions." ('18 Sep 03Added Mon 2018-Sep-03 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- Hard problem? Hack away at the edges. [LessWrong]: "I don't know how to build Friendly AI. Truth be told, I doubt humanity will figure it out before going extinct. The whole idea might be impossible or confused. But I'll tell you this: I doubt the problem will be solved by getting smart people to sit in silence and think real hard about decision theory and metaethics. If the problem can be solved, it will be solved by dozens or hundreds of people hacking away at the tractable edges of Friendly AI subproblems, drawing novel connections, inching toward new insights, drawing from others' knowledge and intuitions, and doing lots of tedious, boring work." ('18 Sep 02Added Sun 2018-Sep-02 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Update Yourself Incrementally [LessWrong]: "Whatever. Rationality is not for winning debates, it is for deciding which side to join. If you've already decided which side to argue for, the work of rationality is done within you, whether well or poorly. But how can you, yourself, decide which side to argue? If choosing the wrong side is viscerally terrifying, even just a little viscerally terrifying, you'd best integrate all the evidence." ('18 Aug 31Added Fri 2018-Aug-31 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Cognitive Science of Rationality [LessWrong]: "During the last four decades, cognitive scientists have discovered a long list of common thinking errors like these. These errors lead us to false beliefs and poor decisions. How are these errors produced, and how can we overcome them? Vague advice like "be skeptical" and "think critically" may not help much. Luckily, cognitive scientists know a great deal about the mathematics of correct thinking, how thinking errors are produced, and how we can overcome these errors in order to live more fulfilling lives." ('18 Aug 30Added Thu 2018-Aug-30 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Tragedy of the Anticommons [LessWrong]: "However, fewer are familiar with the Tragedy of the Anticommons, a term coined by Michael Heller. Where the Tragedy of the Commons is created by too little ownership, the Tragedy of the Anticommons is created by too much." ('18 Aug 29Added Wed 2018-Aug-29 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Rationality - Common Interest of Many Causes [LessWrong]: "It is a non-so-hidden agenda of this site, Less Wrong, that there are many causes which benefit from the spread of rationality - because it takes a little more rationality than usual to see their case, as a supporter, or even just a supportive bystander." ('18 Aug 28Added Tue 2018-Aug-28 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned [Stevenpressfield]: "Here it is. Here's the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life): Nobody wants to read your shit." ('18 Aug 27Added Mon 2018-Aug-27 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Writing naked (nakeder than Orwell) [Sethgodin.typepad]: "Orwell was on the right track. Just say it. Say it clearly. Say it now. Say it without fear of being criticized and say it without being boring." ('18 Aug 26Added Sun 2018-Aug-26 11 p.m. CDTin activism | a)
- New Words Needed [Dilbert]: "There's no derogatory label for people who label others. This creates an imbalance in the linguistic arsenal." ('18 Aug 25Added Sat 2018-Aug-25 11 p.m. CDTin random | a)
- Meritocracy and Economics - Herman Cain on Why You're Not Rich [Dangerousidea.blogspot]: "One of the main things that, for me, made me doubt and abandon the conservative politics of my high school days, was the fact this just didn't seem true. There were too many luck factors out there to believe that economic advantage is the product of personal merit." ('18 Aug 24Added Fri 2018-Aug-24 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Being a Dick is Not Binary [Measureofdoubt]: "What we should be asking ourselves, when choosing a message, is this: 'How offended do we want people to be, and offended how?'" ('18 Aug 23Added Thu 2018-Aug-23 11 p.m. CDTin activism | a)
- Liberal vs. Conservative on Climate Change [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "It is really interesting that what I have been arguing - based on free trade and individual rights - is seen as 'liberal' and condemned as 'socialists' by a large portion of the population. Those people, in turn, are defending a set of attitudes that I think can more accurately be called "corporate feudalism"." ('18 Aug 22Added Wed 2018-Aug-22 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Random Reinforcement [Dilbert]: "I read somewhere that rats become more obsessed with tasks that offer random rewards than tasks that offer rewards every time. In other words, if a rat touches a button with his nose and gets a pellet every time, he'll like the task, but if he only gets a reward now and then, he'll be addicted to it. It's counterintuitive." ('18 Aug 21Added Tue 2018-Aug-21 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Rhetoric For the Good [LessWrong]: "My other hope is that a few other writers decide theywould like to be the Voltaire of rationality and/or existential risk reduction. May this post be useful to them. It's a list of recommendations on writing style pulled from many sources, in no particular order." ('18 Aug 20Added Mon 2018-Aug-20 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- A Rationalist's Account of Objectification [LessWrong]: "Here's my confusion about objectification. Depending on what you mean by "objectification," it seems to be either something that (1) is very often perfectly acceptable, or that (2) means something very narrow and is usually not being exemplified when there is an accusation of it being exemplified." ('18 Aug 19Added Sun 2018-Aug-19 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Moneyball of Campaign Advertising [538.blogs.nytimes]: "So what do we know about campaign advertising? There is a better answer to this question. Just as Mr. Beane turned to math geeks, we can turn to a different species of geek: political scientists. Here are the lessons of their research about when campaign advertising does and does not matter." ('18 Aug 18Added Sat 2018-Aug-18 11 p.m. CDTin politicalscience | a)
- Better Disagreement [LessWrong]: "Now that most communication is remote rather than face-to-face, people are comfortable disagreeing more often. How, then, can we disagree well? If the goal is intellectual progress, those who disagree should aim not for name-calling but for honest counterargument." ('18 Aug 17Added Fri 2018-Aug-17 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Why Believe in Keynesian Models [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "A correspondent asks a good question: what evidence makes me believe that Keynesian economics is broadly right, given the relative absence of experience with large fiscal stimulus programs? I'd answer that question with several points." ('18 Aug 16Added Thu 2018-Aug-16 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Economics and Morality [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "Mark Thoma directs me to Eric Schoeneberg, who argues that the right is winning economic debates because people believe, wrongly, that there's something inherently moral about free-market outcomes. [...] I'm going to think about that; but right now, let me describe how I see the US income distribution in terms of justice or the lack thereof." ('18 Aug 15Added Wed 2018-Aug-15 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Not For the Sake of Happiness Alone [LessWrong]: "It is an undeniable fact that we tend to do things that make us happy, but this doesn't mean we should regard the happiness as the onlyreason for so acting. First, this would make it difficult to explain how we could care about anyone else's happiness - how we could treat people as ends in themselves, rather than instrumental means of obtaining a warm glow of satisfaction." ('18 Aug 14Added Tue 2018-Aug-14 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Terminal Values and Instrumental Values [LessWrong]: "I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves. People usually don't drive to the supermarket if they know the chocolate is gone. But I've also noticed that when people begin explicitly talking about goal systems instead of just wanting things, mentioning "goals" instead of using them, they oft become confused." ('18 Aug 13Added Mon 2018-Aug-13 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation [LessWrong]: "I suggest that an analogous bias in psychologically realistic search is motivated stopping and motivated continuation: when we have a hidden motive for choosing the "best" current option, we have a hidden motive to stop, and choose, and reject consideration of any more options. When we have a hidden motive to reject the current best option, we have a hidden motive to suspend judgment pending additional evidence, to generate more options - to find something, anything, to do instead of coming to a conclusion." ('18 Aug 12Added Sun 2018-Aug-12 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Money - The Unit of Caring [LessWrong]: "To a first approximation, money is the unit of caring up to a positive scalar factor - the unit of relative caring. Some people are frugal and spend less money on everything; but if you would, in fact, spend $5 on a burrito, then whatever you will not spend $5 on, you care about less thanyou care about the burrito." ('18 Aug 11Added Sat 2018-Aug-11 11 p.m. CDTin giving | a)
- Diseased Thinking - Dissolving Questions About Disease [LessWrong]: "If we can determine whether a person should get sympathy, and whether they should be allowed to seek medical treatment, independently of the central node 'disease' or of the criteria that feed into it, we will have successfully unasked the question are these marginal conditions real diseases" and cleared up the confusion.'" ('18 Aug 10Added Fri 2018-Aug-10 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Why I Do What I Do [Freethoughtblogs]: "And to everyone else reading this: Atheist activism works. Making arguments against religion works; coming out as atheist works; creating atheist communities works. If a lifelong evangelical like Brad can question and possibly let go of his religious beliefs, we should never assume that it's a waste of time." ('18 Aug 09Added Thu 2018-Aug-09 11 p.m. CDTin activism | a)
- Reality Check - What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True? [Debunkingchristianity.blogspot]: "Below I've put together all thirty theses (so far) that most Christians agree on and why they are all improbable" ('18 Aug 08Added Wed 2018-Aug-08 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- "Herman Cain, Outlier" [538.blogs.nytimes]: "Has there ever been a candidate with such strong polling but such weak fundamentals? Almost certainly not, at least not at this relatively advanced stage of the race." ('18 Aug 07Added Tue 2018-Aug-07 11 p.m. CDTin politicalscience | a)
- Echo Chamber or Picking Fights - Atheists Just Can't Win [Freethoughtblogs]: "f atheists spend time in religious public forums, and engage with religious believers… we're picking fights. And if atheists don't engage with religious believers, and spend most or all of our time with other atheists - we're living in an echo chamber. Is there any way we can win?" ('18 Aug 06Added Mon 2018-Aug-06 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Science Controversies Past and Present [Physicstoday]: "Although nearly all experts accept that the greenhouse gases emitted by humans have caused significant warming to the planet and will likely cause much more, only about half the US public agrees, even after years of heavy media coverage. How did we get into such a mess? What are the implications for science, for how it should be communicated, and for how debates should be interpreted? Some insights may be gained by noting that global warming is not the first 'inconvenient truth' in physics." ('18 Aug 05Added Sun 2018-Aug-05 11 p.m. CDTin metascience | a)
- The Profession and the Crisis [Palgrave-journals]: "As I see it, there are three main complaints one can make about economists and their role in the current crisis. First is the complaint that economists fell down on the job by not seeing the crisis coming. Second is the complaint that economists failed even to see the possibility of this kind of crisis - and that by pointing out the possibility, they could have helped head the crisis off. Third is the complaint that they have either failed to offer useful advice on what to do after the crisis struck, or that they have offered such a cacophony of voices as to provide no useful guidance for policy." ('18 Aug 04Added Sat 2018-Aug-04 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Not by Empathy Alone [LessWrong]: "Not only is there little evidence for the claim that empathy is necessary, there is also reason to think empathy can interfere with the ends of morality. A capacity for empathy might make us better people, but placing empathy at the center of our moral lives may be ill‐advised." ('18 Aug 03Added Fri 2018-Aug-03 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Magic Versus Metaphysics [Edwardfeser.blogspot]: "A third is the suggestion that theism entails a belief in "magical beings." Anyone who says this either doesn't know what theism is or doesn't know what magic is." ('18 Aug 02Added Thu 2018-Aug-02 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- "Bombs, Bridges, and Jobs" [NYTimes]: "A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe 'that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.'" ('18 Aug 01Added Wed 2018-Aug-01 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Missed Opportunities for Doing Well by Doing Good [LessWrong]: "The question now arises: if you, the reader, donated substantially more than you usually do with a view toward maximizing your positive social impact, would you become happier? Maybe, maybe not. What I would say is that it's worth the experiment. An expenditure on the order of 5% or 10% of one's annual income is small relative to one's lifetime earnings. And the potential upside for you is high." ('18 Jul 31Added Tue 2018-Jul-31 11 p.m. CDTin giving | a)
- Something to Protect [LessWrong]: "Similarly, in Western real life, unhappy people are told that they need a 'purpose in life', so they should pick out an altruistic cause that goes well with their personality, like picking out nice living-room drapes, and this will brighten up their days by adding some color, like nice living-room drapes." ('18 Jul 30Added Mon 2018-Jul-30 11 p.m. CDTin effectivealtruism | a)
- "The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism" [LessWrong]: "Among other things, if you try to violate 'utilitarianism', you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence." ('18 Jul 29Added Sun 2018-Jul-29 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- "The Trouble With "Good" [LessWrong]: "I am a normative utilitarian and a descriptive emotivist: I believe utilitarianism is the correct way to resolve moral problems, but that the normal mental algorithms for resolving moral problems use emotivism." ('18 Jul 28Added Sat 2018-Jul-28 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- The Truth About Violence [Samharris]: "Just as it is prudent to wear your seat belt while driving, it makes sense to know how best to respond to violence. In fact, it is overwhelmingly likely that some of you will become the targets of violence in the future. The purpose of this essay is to help you prepare for it." ('18 Jul 27Added Fri 2018-Jul-27 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- A Priori [LessWrong]: "Consider the problem of Occam's Razor, as confronted by Traditional philosophers. If two hypotheses fit the same observations equally well, why believe the simpler one is more likely to be true?" ('18 Jul 26Added Thu 2018-Jul-26 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Occam's Razor [LessWrong]: "Occam's Razor is often phrased as 'The simplest explanation that fits the facts.' Robert Heinlein replied that the simplest explanation is 'The lady down the street is a witch; she did it.' One observes that the length of an English sentence is not a good way to measure 'complexity'. And 'fitting' the facts by merely failing to prohibit them is insufficient." ('18 Jul 25Added Wed 2018-Jul-25 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Is Philosophy Just a Matter of Opinion? [Aphilosopher.wordpress]: "Those who fall victim to this misconception assume that there are no better or worse opinions on philosophical matters. So, any position is as good as any other and there is really no point in discussing it. From this is generally thought that once you have stated your opinion, that is enough and it should be accepted as being as good as anyone else's opinion. [...] These assumptions are appealing, but mistaken." ('18 Jul 24Added Tue 2018-Jul-24 11 p.m. CDTin philosophy | a)
- The Top Idea in Your Mind [Paulgraham]: "I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower." ('18 Jul 23Added Mon 2018-Jul-23 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- The Proper Use of Humility [LessWrong]: "It is widely recognized that good science requires some kind of humility. What sort of humility is more controversial." ('18 Jul 22Added Sun 2018-Jul-22 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- How to Prioritize [Stevepavlina]: "Virtually every time management system teaches that you must prioritize your projects to make sure you're working on what's truly important instead of getting caught up in minor things. However, few systems explain precisely how to do this. How do you decide which task is really the most important at any given time?" ('18 Jul 21Added Sat 2018-Jul-21 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Are Your Enemies Innately Evil? [LessWrong]: "Realistically, most people don't construct their life stories with themselves as the villains. Everyone is the hero of their own story. The Enemy's story, as seen by the Enemy, is not going to make the Enemy look bad. If you try to construe motivations that would make the Enemy look bad, you'll end up flat wrong about what actually goes on in the Enemy's mind." ('18 Jul 20Added Fri 2018-Jul-20 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points [LessWrong]: "There is a tradition of inquiry. But you only attack targets for purposes of defending them. You only attack targets you know you can defend. In Modern Orthodox Judaism I have not heard much emphasis of the virtues of blind faith. You're allowed to doubt. You're just not allowed to successfully doubt." ('18 Jul 19Added Thu 2018-Jul-19 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- A Letter to my Students [Blogs.berkeley.edu]: "The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits. And you aren't the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn't get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine. This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what's been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest." ('18 Jul 18Added Wed 2018-Jul-18 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Friday's Deals May Not Be the Best [NYTimes]: "It is not until early December, Professor Etzioni's research shows that prices are likely to be the lowest for electronics, products that are among the biggest sellers on the Friday after Thanksgiving." ('18 Jul 17Added Tue 2018-Jul-17 11 p.m. CDTin economics | a)
- Empty Definitions [Philosophyetc.net]: "One of the most frustrating aspects of non-philosophers' attempts to dabble in philosophy is that they tend not to clearly separate terminological and substantive questions. They often claim that disputes (from ethics to philosophy of mind) are just a matter of how we choose to "define" our terms. This is not so. How we define our terms will of course affect what claim we are making (or what proposition we express) when we assert some sentence. But the claim itself may concern some entirely language-independent matter of fact." ('18 Jul 16Added Mon 2018-Jul-16 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Education [Philosophyetc.net]: "Even more important is to change mere information into knowledge, and for that in turn to develop into understanding. Guiding this process should, I think, be the teacher's main role. Quickly forgotten isolated factoids don't even make it to the second stage knowledge, and they certainly don't contribute much to our overall understanding. Learning a whole bunch of pointless facts is just… well, pointless." ('18 Jul 14Added Sat 2018-Jul-14 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom [LessWrong]: "If every belief must be justified, and those justifications in turn must be justified, then how is the infinite recursion terminated? And if you're allowed to end in something assumed-without-justification, then why aren't you allowed to assume anything without justification?" ('18 Jul 13Added Fri 2018-Jul-13 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Some Considerations Against More Investment in Cost-Effectiveness Estimates [Blog.givewell]: "we are arguing that focusing on directly estimating cost-effectiveness is not the best way to maximize cost-effectiveness. We believe there are alternative ways of maximizing cost-effectiveness - in particular, making limited use of cost-effectiveness estimates while focusing on finding high-quality evidence" ('18 Jul 12Added Thu 2018-Jul-12 11 p.m. CDTin costeffectiveness | a)
- "Is Morality Unified? Evidence that Distinct Neural Systems Underlie Moral Judgments of Harm, Dishonesty, and Disgust" [Mitpressjournals]: "Is it worse to cheat on an exam or to eat your dog? Consideration of these acts feels very different, yet we tend to classify a diverse variety of acts as "morally wrong." This common linguistic label does not ensure that moral judgments of such diverse acts are similar enough to be studied as a single kind of judgment. Nonetheless, research investigating moral judgments has tended to treat moral judgments pertaining to vastly different contents as comparable or even equivalent." ('18 Jul 11Added Wed 2018-Jul-11 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Why Change Your Mind? [Somewhatabnormal.blogspot]: "In this view, the atheist who says, 'I never believe anything unless I have evidence for it' is saying something profoundly stupid. Such a principle would require a retreat to near total skepticism" ('18 Jul 09Added Mon 2018-Jul-09 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Beware Trivial Inconveniences [LessWrong]: "The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for 'how to set up proxy' before viewing their anti-government website." ('18 Jul 08Added Sun 2018-Jul-08 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate [LessWrong]: "Yes, a group which can't tolerate disagreement is not rational. But if you tolerate only disagreement - if you tolerate disagreement but not agreement - then you also are not rational. You're only willing to hear some honest thoughts, but not others. You are a dangerous half-a-rationalist." ('18 Jul 07Added Sat 2018-Jul-07 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- Star Wars vs Star Trek: An Objective Analysis [Cracked]: Everything that is wrong with Star Trek is wrong with Star Wars times 100. ('18 Jul 06Added Fri 2018-Jul-06 11 p.m. CDTin random | a)
- Is Rationality Teachable? [LessWrong]: "It is generally assumed around here that people can learn to be more rational. That's the purpose of The Sequences, after all. And veteran Less Wrongers do seem (to me) vastly more rational than the average person. But maybe it's a selection effect: maybe Less Wrong doesn't make people more rational, it's just that the people who are already relatively rational are the ones most likely to be attracted Less Wrong. Daniel Willingham (2008) thinks it's pretty hard to teach rationality / critical thinking,1 but what evidence do we have on the matter? Is rationality teachable?" ('18 Jul 05Added Thu 2018-Jul-05 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Top 10 Tips For Reaching Out to Atheists [Freethoughtblogs]: "In hopes for better future discussions between believers and non-believers, I decided to give some advice to believers who would like to reach out to us in the future, whether publicly or personally. In some cases I will use examples that assume the reader is a Christian since I live in America and in America seemingly 99.99% of would-be proselytizers are Christians of some sort. But most of the principles will be valuable to Muslims and those rare proselytizing Jews too." ('18 Jul 04Added Wed 2018-Jul-04 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Is Dualism Predicated Upon Incredulity? [Interiorcrocodilealligator.wordpress]: "Incredulity is dualism's best friend. It is the only thing that keeps it alive, and it is fueled mostly by superstitious myths. The only evidence that may be in favor of dualism is the near-death experience. [...] Dualism is pretty much the only belief system I've ever seen that exists from gaps. The incredulity is actually difficult to detect, but I'll show you how to translate the rhetoric to the actual assertion." ('18 Jul 03Added Tue 2018-Jul-03 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Approving Reinforces Low-Effort Behaviors [LessWrong]: "In addition to "liking" to describe pleasure and "wanting" to describe motivation, we add "approving" to describe thoughts that are ego syntonic. [...] Discussion of goals is mostly about approving; a goal is an ego-syntonic thought. When we speak of goals that are hard to achieve, we're usually talking about +approving/-wanting. The previous discussion of learning Swahili is one example; more noble causes like Working To Help The Less Fortunate can be others." ('18 Jul 02Added Mon 2018-Jul-02 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- "I Don't Really Give A Fuck About Tone, Per Se" [Freethoughtblogs]: "The reason I say that we should not call religious people names is because those are not truthful, they're false. And lying for atheism is as bad (if not worse) than lying for Jesus. I don't want you to avoid calling religious people stupid only because it will turn them off, but because it is false and it makes us look-you guessed it, stupid and immature when we stoop to it." ('18 Jul 01Added Sun 2018-Jul-01 11 p.m. CDTin activism | a)
- Reason as a Memetic Immune Disorder [LessWrong]: "You may have noticed that people who convert to religion after the age of 20 or so are generally more zealous than people who grew up with the same religion. People who grow up with a religion learn how to cope with its more inconvenient parts by partitioning them off, rationalizing them away, or forgetting about them. Religious communities actually protect their members from religion in one sense - they develop an unspoken consensus on which parts of their religion members can legitimately ignore. New converts sometimes try to actually do what their religion tells them to do." ('18 Jun 30Added Sat 2018-Jun-30 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- "If Money Doesn't Make You Happy, Then You Probably Aren't Spending it Right" [Dunn.psych.ubc.ca]: "Most people don't know the basic scientific facts about happiness-about what brings it and what sustains it-and so they don't know how to use their money to acquire it. It is not surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about wine end up with cellars that aren't that much better stocked than their neighbors', and it should not be surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about happiness end up with lives that aren't that much happier than anyone else's. Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don't." ('18 Jun 29Added Fri 2018-Jun-29 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- When Anyone Is Watching: Metaphors and the Slipperiness of Religion [Gretachristina.typepad]: "There's a trope going around among progressive religious believers and theologians. It goes something like this: 'Religious beliefs don't have to be literally true. They're just useful metaphors: stories that give shape and meaning to our lives.' I've been hearing this trope for a while. And something recently occurred to me about it: something so blindingly obvious that I'm smacking myself in the head for not having thought of it earlier. It's this: If religion is just a story, then why does it upset people so much when atheists say that it isn't true?" ('18 Jun 28Added Thu 2018-Jun-28 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Cached Selves [LessWrong]: "Today, I'd like to discuss a related effect from the social psychology and marketing literatures: "commitment and consistency effects", whereby any random thing you say or do in the absence of obvious outside pressure, can hijack your self-concept for the medium- to long-term future." ('18 Jun 27Added Wed 2018-Jun-27 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People [LessWrong]: "I've seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don't like. And that problem - too much ready ammunition - is one of the primary ways that people with high mental agility end up stupid, in Stanovich's "dysrationalia" sense of stupidity." ('18 Jun 26Added Tue 2018-Jun-26 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided [LessWrong]: "On questions of simple fact (for example, whether Earthly life arose by natural selection) there's a legitimate expectation that the argument should be a one-sided battle; the facts themselves are either one way or another, and the so-called "balance of evidence" should reflect this. Indeed, under the Bayesian definition of evidence, "strong evidence" is just that sort of evidence which we only expect to find on one side of an argument. But there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property. Why do people seem to want their policydebates to be one-sided?" ('18 Jun 24Added Sun 2018-Jun-24 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Spend Money on Ergonomics [LessWrong]: "Ergonomics is incredibly important. Sadly, so many of us in the techno-geek cluster ignore well-defined best practices of ergonomics and develop the infamous hunched back of late night computer toiling. [...] With straightforward monetary investment, you can dramatically improve the next hundreds of thousands of hours of your life. The effect size here is just enormous. Spend money on ergonomics, and you will be less fatigued, more energetic, more productive, and healthier into the later years of your life." ('18 Jun 23Added Sat 2018-Jun-23 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- The Quiz Daniel Kahneman Wants You to Fail [Vanityfair]: "In the December 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis profiles Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who pioneered research into 'heuristics,' or the shortcuts humans use when making decisions. Below, take our quiz to see how your own mind works." ('18 Jun 22Added Fri 2018-Jun-22 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- What Have We Learned about Fiscal Policy from the Crisis? [Imf]: "Via Brad DeLong, there's a paper by David Romer (pdf) summarizing recent research on fiscal policy, inspired by the crisis and aftermath. And his conclusion is not at all what you hear on the talk shows; it is that there is now overwhelming evidence that fiscal policy does in fact work when it's not offset by monetary policy. And since we're now in a liquidity trap in which conventional monetary policy has no traction, that's the world we're in." ('18 Jun 21Added Thu 2018-Jun-21 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- The Guardians of Ayn Rand [LessWrong]: "I admire Newton's accomplishments. But my attitude toward a woman's right to vote, bars me from accepting Newton as a moral paragon. Just as my knowledge of Bayesian probability bars me from viewing Newton as the ultimate unbeatable source of mathematical knowledge. And my knowledge of Special Relativity, paltry and little-used though it may be, bars me from viewing Newton as the ultimate authority on physics. Newton couldn't realistically have discovered any of the ideas I'm lording over him - but progress isn't fair! That's the point! Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road; and the most important milestone is the hero yet to come." ('18 Jun 19Added Tue 2018-Jun-19 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas [Paulgraham]: "If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't." ('18 Jun 18Added Mon 2018-Jun-18 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Luke Meuhlhauser's Moral Pluralism [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "When somebody adopts a moral theory, they do not necessarily adopt a set of beliefs about the world. Adopting a moral theory is to adopt a language - to decide to use moral terms in a particular way. When two people adopt two different moral languages, they will sometimes have trouble communicating. Because those languages are very similar to each other, they may be confused about the nature of their disagreements - mistaking differences in languages as differences in beliefs." ('18 Jun 17Added Sun 2018-Jun-17 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Ethical Injunctions [LessWrong]: "First, being human and running on corrupted hardware, we may generalize classes of situation where when you say e.g. 'It's time to rob a few banks for the greater good,' we deem it more likely that you've been corrupted than that this is really the case. (Note that we're not prohibiting it from ever being the case in reality, but we're questioning the epistemic state where you're justified in trusting your own calculation that this is the right thing to do - fair lottery tickets can win, but you can't justifiably buy them.)" ('18 Jun 16Added Sat 2018-Jun-16 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- "No, Virginia, There Is No Santa Claus" [Freethoughtblogs]: "Your friends have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except when they see. And good for them. Skepticism is healthy. It keeps us from being duped by liars and scam artists and people who want to control and manipulate us. More importantly: Skepticism helps us understand reality. And reality is amazing. Reality is far more important, and far more interesting, than anything we could make up about it." ('18 Jun 15Added Fri 2018-Jun-15 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- A Parable on Obsolete Ideologies [LessWrong]: "In the midst of the chaos, a group of German leaders come to you with a proposal. Nazism, they admit, was completely wrong. Its racist ideology was false and its consequences were horrific. However, in the bleak poverty of post-war Germany, people need to keep united somehow. They need something to believe in. And a whole generation of them have been raised on Nazi ideology and symbolism. Why not take advantage of the national unity Nazism provides while discarding all the racist baggage?" ('18 Jun 14Added Thu 2018-Jun-14 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- How William Lane Craig misleads his followers [Uncrediblehallq.net]: "For someone like me, it's tempting to ignore this kind of stuff, because to any informed person it's all just rhetoric. But based on my experiences with Campus Crusade types, that's not the whole story. For someone who hasn't read a few books on Biblical scholarship, this stuff is almost guaranteed to give a false impression of the facts. That's why Craig needs to be called out on it." ('18 Jun 13Added Wed 2018-Jun-13 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Storming the Ivory Tower [Bigthink]: "Part of what I aim to do is to (metaphorically) tear off the doors of the ivory tower and drag its inhabitants down to ground level, to show them the source of the clamor. Atheists aren't causing trouble for no reason; we're reacting to the real dangers posed by the aggressive imposition of religious ideas into law and public life. Of course, there's a remaining question of how we can most effectively fight back, and whether sweeping attacks on religious belief might be counterproductive. I'll address this further objection in an upcoming post." ('18 Jun 12Added Tue 2018-Jun-12 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success [Atlantic]: "The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad." ('18 Jun 11Added Mon 2018-Jun-11 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Why Does Anyone Like Ron Paul? [Ashleyfmiller.wordpress]: "I've been trying to understand why smart people I know support Ron Paul and I just can't get my head around it. I get the sense that maybe the Ron Paul People I know just don't realize what Ron Paul's all about. That or they just don't care." ('18 Jun 10Added Sun 2018-Jun-10 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- Behind John Boehner's Debacle on the Payroll Tax Cut Battle [The Dailybeast]: "The kamikazes' casualty list this year is long. They blew up the debt-ceiling vote this summer, sparking a downgrade in the nation's credit rating. They blew up the appropriations process so thoroughly that routine spending votes morphed into philosophical standoffs that nearly locked down the federal government three times and required seven temporary funding patches just to keep the lights on. And this week, they managed to blow up not just a tax cut that nearly everyone in Washington agrees is a good idea, but also their party's hard-earned reputation for cutting taxes and, quite possibly, their chances at a long-term majority in the House and future control of the Senate." ('18 Jun 09Added Sat 2018-Jun-09 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- 6 tips for giving like a pro [Blog.givewell]: "This time of year, just about every news agency publishes an article titled something like '6 tips to give wisely this holiday season.' The advice they give makes sense to a degree - make sure the charity isn't a scam, check that the CEO's salary doesn't account for 90% of the charity's budget, etc. - but it's really targeted at someone who's aiming to not waste his/her money. For donors interested in accomplishing the most good possible with their money, here are 6 tips to help you take your giving to the next level." ('18 Jun 08Added Fri 2018-Jun-08 11 p.m. CDTin giving | a)
- Self-Fulfilling Correlations [LessWrong]: "Correlation does not imply causation. Sometimes corr(X,Y) means X=>Y; sometimes it means Y=>X; sometimes it means W=>X, W=>Y. And sometimes it's an artifact of people's beliefs about corr(X, Y). With intelligent agents, perceived causation causes correlation. [...] Are vegetarian diets or yoga healthy for you? Does using the phone while driving increase accident rates? Yes, probably; but there is a self-fulfilling component in the data that is difficult to factor out." ('18 Jun 07Added Thu 2018-Jun-07 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? [Atlantic]: "The diamond invention-the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem-is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value-and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems." ('18 Jun 06Added Wed 2018-Jun-06 11 p.m. CDTin economics | a)
- Offense Versus Harm Minimization [LessWrong]: "Imagine that one night, an alien prankster secretly implants electrodes into the brains of an entire country - let's say Britain. The next day, everyone in Britain discovers that pictures of salmon suddenly give them jolts of painful psychic distress. [...] I think most decent people would be willing to go to some trouble to avoid taking pictures of salmon if British people politely asked this favor of them. [...] So why don't most people extend the same sympathy they would give Brits who don't like pictures of salmon, to Muslims who don't like pictures of Mohammed?" ('18 Jun 05Added Tue 2018-Jun-05 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Rationality is Systemized Winning [LessWrong]: "It is this that I intended to guard against by saying: "Rationalists should win!" Not whine, win. If you keep on losing, perhaps you are doing something wrong. Do not console yourself about how you were so wonderfully rational in the course of losing. That is not how things are supposed to go. It is not the Art that fails, but you who fails to grasp the Art." ('18 Jun 04Added Mon 2018-Jun-04 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- How to be a Philosopher [Richardcarrier.blogspot]: "In Sense and Goodness without God I open with an impassioned plea that everyone be a philosopher, that they replace all the devotion and time they spend on religion, all to doing philosophy instead. To which I'm often asked 'How?' Indeed, someone on FaceBook just asked me that the other day. [...] I got to thinking I should at least publish some basic starter tips, which by following you can figure out on your own how to do philosophy and be a philosopher-by which I mean in a useful way, not a boring, useless, academic way. To that end I have four suggestions to get started on finding your own path." ('18 Jun 03Added Sun 2018-Jun-03 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- I Think You're Fat [Esquire]: "The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough - a world without fibs - but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you're having fantasies about your wife's sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It's the only path to authentic relationships. It's the only way to smash through modernity's soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing." ('18 Jun 02Added Sat 2018-Jun-02 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Dwindling Power of a College Degree [NYTimes]: "One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor's degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability." ('18 Jun 01Added Fri 2018-Jun-01 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Nobody Understands Debt [NYTimes]: "So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way." ('18 May 31Added Thu 2018-May-31 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- How to Dispel Your Illusions [Nybooks]: "Kahneman is a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize for economics. His great achievement was to turn psychology into a quantitative science. He made our mental processes subject to precise measurement and exact calculation, by studying in detail how we deal with dollars and cents. By making psychology quantitative, he incidentally achieved a powerful new understanding of economics." ('18 May 30Added Wed 2018-May-30 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Utilitarian Policy [Philosophyetc.net]: "I think the world would be a much better place if public policy debates were more focused on cost-benefit analysis. Too often, people refuse to acknowledge trade-offs or opportunity costs (health and military spending are obvious candidates here). [...] It seems like there's a lot of scope for 'no brainer' policy improvements that every reasonable person should be able to agree on. But maybe I'm missing something. So let me take a stab at outlining some of the issues where the answer seems to me completely obvious - and I hope that others will add more suggestions in the comments, and/or explain where you think I'm going wrong." ('18 May 29Added Tue 2018-May-29 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans) [LessWrong]: "'The end does not justify the means' is just consequentialist reasoning at one meta-level up. If a human starts thinking on the object level that the end justifies the means, this has awful consequences given our untrustworthy brains; therefore a human shouldn't think this way. But it is all still ultimately consequentialism. It's just reflective consequentialism, for beings who know that their moment-by-moment decisions are made by untrusted hardware." ('18 May 28Added Mon 2018-May-28 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Factual Politics [Richardcarrier.blogspot]: "After posting on my blog a long while ago on the question Does Free Will Matter? a bizarre anarchist going by the local moniker Benjamin replied in elaborate length denouncing the very concept of all government whatever, insisting that if we got rid of it (all of it), everyone would live happily ever after in perfect harmony. [...] That went so far off the original topic my final reply to him follows here (in several ensuing parts). I'm not even responding to half the insane things he said or claimed, and yet it's still intolerably long for most readers. But anyone interested in political philosophy as a whole, or my political philosophy in particular, will find in the following a useful toolkit for constructing a sound political philosophy from the ground up (whether they follow mine or not), by seeing where crazies like Benjamin go wrong, and avoiding what they do by doing (methodologically) exactly the opposite." ('18 May 26Added Sat 2018-May-26 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- The Curse of Identity [LessWrong]: "It may not be immediately obvious, but all three examples have something in common. In each case, I thought I was working for a particular goal (become capable of doing useful Singularity work, advance the cause of a political party, do useful Singularity work). But as soon as I set that goal, my brain automatically and invisibly re-interpreted it as the goal of doing something that gave the impression of doing prestigious work for a cause (spending all my waking time working, being the spokesman of a political party, writing papers or doing something else few others could do). 'Prestigious work' could also be translated as 'work that really convinces others that you are doing something valuable for a cause'." ('18 May 25Added Fri 2018-May-25 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Dreams of AI Design [LessWrong]: "If you want an AI that plays chess, you can go around in circles indefinitely talking about how you want the AI to make good moves, which are moves that can be expected to win the game, which are moves that are prudent strategies for defeating the opponent, etcetera; and while you may then have some idea of which moves you want the AI to make, it's all for naught until you come up with the notion of a mini-max search tree." ('18 May 24Added Thu 2018-May-24 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- How We Won the War on Thai Chili Sauce [Schneier]: "Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to - a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant - now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it's a false alarm, it's not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he's wrong, it'll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he'll be praised for "doing his job" and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we're done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted." ('18 May 23Added Wed 2018-May-23 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- "Why "Yes, But" Is the Wrong Response to Misogyny" [Freethoughtblogs]: "It's depressingly predictable. And it's depressing that anyone should have to explain why this is a problem. It seems totally obvious to me. But apparently, it's not so obvious. So I'm going to spell it out. When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it trivializes misogyny. When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it conveys the message that whatever men want to talk about is more important than misogyny. When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject to something that's about them, it conveys the message that men are the ones who really matter, and that any harm done to men is always more important than misogyny." ('18 May 22Added Tue 2018-May-22 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- What You Can't Say [Paulgraham]: "If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it- that the earth moves. [...] It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right. [...] What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era." ('18 May 21Added Mon 2018-May-21 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- A Fish Did Not Write This Essay [Infidels]: "Sometimes I have the chance to explain that I am an atheist not because I know there isn't a god, but because I don't believe there is. If someone insisted that their pet fish could talk, I really couldn't say I knew it didn't, especially if I could not go and see for myself, but it would still be fair for me to say that there are no talking fish. The relevance of this is that I do not believe god exists any more than I believe fish can talk. Certainly, I have not examined all species of fish, nor every single fish for that matter, nor could I ever accomplish such a feat, but the claim that they exist is so contrary to my own personal experience and reliable facts that I simply will not believe it unless very definitive proof is provided." ('18 May 20Added Sun 2018-May-20 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Dead Child Currency [Raikoth.net]: "I think dead children should be used as a unit of currency. I know this sounds controversial, but hear me out. [...] So one dead child = eight hundred dollars. If you spend eight hundred dollars on a laptop, that's one African kid who died because you didn't give it to charity. Distasteful but true. Now that we know that, we can get down to the details of designing the currency itself. It should be a big gold coin, with a picture of a smiling Burmese child on the front, and a tombstone on the back. The abbreviation can be DC." ('18 May 19Added Sat 2018-May-19 11 p.m. CDTin giving | a)
- Why Pay More for Fairness? [Project-syndicate]: "What is curious about Lindsey's argument, however, is that the Fairtrade coffee campaign can be seen as doing just what he recommends - encouraging coffee farmers to produce a specialty coffee that brings a higher price. Pro-market economists don't object to corporations that blatantly use snob appeal to promote their products. If people want to pay $48 for a pound of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee because that's what James Bond prefers, economists don't object that the market is being distorted. So why be critical when consumers choose to pay $12 for a pound of coffee that they know has been grown without toxic chemicals, under shade trees that help birds to survive, by farmers who can now afford to feed and educate their children?" ('18 May 18Added Fri 2018-May-18 11 p.m. CDTin effectivealtruism | a)
- How to Beat Procrastination [LessWrong]: "Once you know the procrastination equation, our general strategy is obvious. Since there is usually little you can do about the delay of a task's reward, we'll focus on the three terms of the procrastination equation over which we have some control. To beat procrastination, we need to: (1) Increase your expectancy of success. (2) Increase the task's value. (3) Decrease your impulsiveness. You might think these things are out of your control, but researchers have found several useful methods for achieving each of them." ('18 May 17Added Thu 2018-May-17 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Don't vote for a politician like Obama. Just don't do it. Ever. [Freethoughtblogs]: "We need to spread the meme that you should never vote for a presidential candidate who thinks the president should have the power to order his own citizens killed or detained forever without trial. Just don't vote for someone like that. Ever." ('18 May 15Added Tue 2018-May-15 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Locked in the Ivory Tower - Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research [Atlantic]: "Step back and think about this picture. Universities that created this academic content for free must pay to read it. Step back even further. The public - which has indirectly funded this research with federal and state taxes that support our higher education system - has virtually no access to this material, since neighborhood libraries cannot afford to pay those subscription costs. Newspapers and think tanks, which could help extend research into the public sphere, are denied free access to the material." ('18 May 14Added Mon 2018-May-14 11 p.m. CDTin metascience | a)
- Levels of Action [LessWrong]: "Suppose that you go onto Mechanical Turk, open an account, and spend a hundred hours transcribing audio. [...] This is an example of what I'd call a Level 1 or object-level action: something that directly moves the world from a less desirable state into a more desirable state. On the other hand, suppose you take a typing class, which teaches you to type twice as fast. [...T]he typing class can still be very useful, because every Level 1 project you tackle later which involves typing will go better- you'll be able to do it more efficiently, and you'll get a higher return on your time. This is what I'd call a Level 2 or meta-level action, because it doesn't make the world better directly - it makes the world better indirectly, by improving the effectiveness of Level 1 actions. There are also Level 3 (meta-meta-level) actions, Level 4 (meta-meta-meta-level actions), and so on." ('18 May 13Added Sun 2018-May-13 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Homosexuality and the Choice Argument [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "Recently, when people are confronted with the opinion that homosexuality is a choice, will make the retort, 'When did you choose to become straight?' Clever, right? Actually, no. It is a clearly flawed response that suggests that the speaker is clutching at straws in a desperate attempt to defend a strongly desired conclusion, without regard to the reasonableness of the response." ('18 May 12Added Sat 2018-May-12 11 p.m. CDTin marriage | a)
- Dark Side Epistemology [LessWrong]: "If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy. [...] If you pick up a pebble from the driveway, and tell a geologist that you found it on a beach - well, do you know what a geologist knows about rocks? I don't. But I can suspect that a water-worn pebble wouldn't look like a droplet of frozen lava from a volcanic eruption. Do you know where the pebble in your driveway really came from? Things bear the marks of their places in a lawful universe; in that web, a lie is out of place." ('18 May 11Added Fri 2018-May-11 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Pledge and the Motto [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "From the time a child enters grade school, he or she encounters a very strong anti-atheist message. The pledge of allegiance tells her that people who do not support a nation 'under God' are to be thought of the same way as those who promote rebellion, tyranny, and injustice. If she looks at her money - when she learns to read the message printed there - she learns that if she lacks trust in God then she does not qualify as 'one of us'. 'We' trust in God." ('18 May 10Added Thu 2018-May-10 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- How to Do What You Love [Paulgraham]: "Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun-fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that." ('18 May 09Added Wed 2018-May-09 11 p.m. CDTin career | a)
- "I Was Wrong, and So Are You" [Atlantic]: "Shouldn't a college professor have known better? Perhaps. But adjusting for bias and groupthink is not so easy, as indicated by one of the major conclusions developed by Buturovic and sustained in our joint papers. Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey respondents who'd gone to college did only slightly less badly than those who hadn't. [...] Still, the fact that a college education showed almost no effect-at least for those inclined to take such a survey-strongly suggests that the classroom is no great corrective for myside bias. At least when it comes to public-policy issues, the corrective value of professional academic experience might be doubted as well." ('18 May 08Added Tue 2018-May-08 11 p.m. CDTin politicalscience | a)
- The Post-Truth Campaign [NYTimes]: "Over all, Mr. Obama's positions on economic policy resemble those that moderate Republicans used to espouse. Yet Mr. Romney portrays the president as the second coming of Fidel Castro and seems confident that he will pay no price for making stuff up. Welcome to post-truth politics. Why does Mr. Romney think he can get away with this kind of thing? Well, he has already gotten away with a series of equally fraudulent attacks. In fact, he has based pretty much his whole campaign around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn't done and believing things he doesn't believe." ('18 May 07Added Mon 2018-May-07 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- The Romney Conundrum [Nationaljournal]: "As president, would Mitt Romney follow his all-star economic advisers-or the promises he has made to the Republican base?" ('18 May 06Added Sun 2018-May-06 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Urges vs. Goals: The Analogy to Anticipation and Belief [LessWrong]: "Joe studies long hours, and often prides himself on how driven he is to make something of himself. But in the actual moments of his studying, Joe often looks out the window, doodles, or drags his eyes over the text while his mind wanders. Someone sent him a link to which college majors lead to the greatest lifetime earnings, and he didn't get around to reading that either. Shall we say that Joe doesn't really care about making something of himself?" ('18 May 05Added Sat 2018-May-05 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Thoughts in Captivity [Ebonmusings]: "Many critics of organized religion have compared it to brainwashing or mind control. Personally, I would not describe it in these terms. These are strong words with overtly pejorative connotations, and their use is likely to be perceived by believers as an ad hominem attack, rather than contributing to a civil and productive dialogue between atheists and theists. Nevertheless, the fact remains that their application is not without merit. Even the staunchest defender of theism cannot deny that, to an extent, religions teach their followers to prize faith over facts, to rely on the word of authorities rather than their own judgment, and to disregard arguments that run counter to their beliefs." ('18 May 04Added Fri 2018-May-04 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Pay No Attention to the Deity Behind the Curtain [Ebonmusings]: "I can imagine a world where cities in heathen nations regularly exploded in flames for no apparent reason; a world where we could go to the Middle East and see the entrance to the Garden of Eden, locked and barred and guarded by a flaming sword, with misty green Paradise visible in the distance beyond the gates; a world where angels flew alongside planes blowing trumpets and calling on sinners to repent. I can imagine a world of miracles and spirits, where faith healers could cure severed spinal cords or regenerate lost limbs, where prophets called fire from heaven, sent rain, parted seas and multiplied loaves and fishes, where voices boomed from the sky in answer to prayers, and where the entire geologic record consisted of fossils randomly jumbled throughout strata of flood-deposited sediments. I can readily imagine a world like this. However, we don't live in that world." ('18 May 03Added Thu 2018-May-03 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- 3 Strikes Against Fatalism [Naturalism]: "Here are three brief sallies against the plausibility of fatalism, one by Bob Miller of Charlottesville. They are designed to prevent any plunge into pessimism that determinism might engender among those who suppose we must have free will for life to be worth living. Fatalism is pretty obviously false, but we want to make sure no one gets demoralized by a naturalism that understands all our behavior as fully a function of environment and heredity. It's important (and not difficult) to avoid the false conclusion that determinism disempowers us. It doesn't in the least; rather it shows us how to make the most of our abilities. If after reading these, you find yourself depressed about not having free will, please be in touch." ('18 May 02Added Wed 2018-May-02 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- How Can We Learn From Our mistakes? [Spencergreenberg]: "[T]he next time you realize you may have made a mistake: Acknowledge it, if it was indeed a mistake. Otherwise you may be doomed to repeat it. See what useful principles you can learn from it, taking into account the context of the other mistakes you've made. Develop a strategy to change your behavior. Just willing yourself to do things differently next time often doesn't work. Figure out what you can do now to alter your future behavior. Keep a list of your big mistakes and what you should learn from them." ('18 May 01Added Tue 2018-May-01 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- The Problem of the Magi [Bigthink]: "This must be exceedingly awkward for Christians. Astrology is flatly condemned in the Bible as pagan foolishness, sinful idolatry, even the handiwork of demons. Yet according to the Gospel of Matthew, the magi learned of the baby Jesus' existence and nature from a star! Why would demons be interested in helping people find and worship the Son of God? And doesn't this mean that astrology does give true answers at least sometimes, in contradiction to those apologists who claim it never does?" ('18 Apr 30Added Mon 2018-Apr-30 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Desiring Each Good [Philosophyetc.net]: "Some critics allege that the utilitarian agent has but a single desire: to maximize welfare. This would seem to embody an objectionably instrumental attitude towards individual persons. Rather than caring about each of Tom, Dick, and Harry in their own right, the utilitarian (allegedly) just cares about helping them as a constitutive means to promoting aggregate welfare. Tom serves as a faceless 'receptacle' of utility, rather than mattering for his own sake. [...] So I think the objection ultimately fails. Even in the toughest case - that of merely possible persons, who cannot be the ultimate ground of our concern for their welfare - consequentialists can still desire each good separately, and hence refrain from treating people as fungible." ('18 Apr 29Added Sun 2018-Apr-29 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You [LessWrong]: "In hindsight bias, people who know the outcome of a situation believe the outcome should have been easy to predict in advance. Knowing the outcome, we reinterpret the situation in light of that outcome. Even when warned, we can't de-interpret to empathize with someone who doesn't know what we know. Closely related is the illusion of transparency: We always know what we mean by our words, and so we expect others to know it too. Reading our own writing, the intended interpretation falls easily into place, guided by our knowledge of what we really meant. It's hard to empathize with someone who must interpret blindly, guided only by the words." ('18 Apr 28Added Sat 2018-Apr-28 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- How Rationality Can Make Your Life More Awesome [Measureofdoubt]: "Sheer intellectual curiosity was what first drew me to rationality (by which I mean, essentially, the study of how to view the world as accurately as possible). I still enjoy rationality as an end in itself, but it didn't take me long to realize that it's also a powerful tool for achieving pretty much anything else you care about. Below, a survey of some of the ways that rationality can make your life more awesome:" ('18 Apr 27Added Fri 2018-Apr-27 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Don't Move the Goalpoasts [Galileounchained]: "To the Christian who thinks that science's unanswered questions make his point, I say: make a commitment. Publicly state that this issue (pick something-abiogenesis or the cause of the Big Bang or fine tuning or whatever) is the hill that you will fight to the death on. Man up, commit to it, and impose consequences. Say, 'I publicly declare that God must be the resolution to this question. A scientific consensus will never find me wrong or else I will drop my faith.'" ('18 Apr 25Added Wed 2018-Apr-25 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Ask Chris #81: Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism [Comicsalliance]: "I will fight tooth and nail over the idea that there should never, ever be even a trace of the supernatural in the world of Scooby-Doo. And as far as I'm concerned, it's not a matter of preference, either - it's so deeply ingrained into the premise of the show and the way the characters interact that if actual monsters do show up, the whole thing collapses." ('18 Apr 24Added Tue 2018-Apr-24 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- "Summary of "The Straw Vulcan" [LessWrong]: "The classic Hollywood example of rationality is the Vulcans from Star Trek. They are depicted as an ultra-rational race that has eschewed all emotion from their lives. But is this truly rational? [...] These characters have a sort of fake rationality. They don't fail because rationality failed, but because they aren't actually being rational. Straw Vulcan rationality is not the same thing as actual rationality." ('18 Apr 23Added Mon 2018-Apr-23 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- "You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You" [Forbes]: "Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it's worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won. It can't, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling." ('18 Apr 22Added Sun 2018-Apr-22 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Universal Basic Income [Philosophyetc.net]: "Should the state provide a baseline income to all adult citizens? It need not be a lot - though it could be - but even a few thousand dollars a year would surely help many of the less fortunate in our society. I think it is a much better idea than targeted (non-universal) welfare benefits, for several reasons." ('18 Apr 21Added Sat 2018-Apr-21 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Sticking to It [Project-syndicate]: "Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning. But when the temptations are not immediately present, we can erect barriers to them that make us less likely to succumb when they return. Knowing that we can control our own behavior makes it more likely that we will." ('18 Apr 20Added Fri 2018-Apr-20 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Knowing Why We Act [Spencergreenberg]: "A stranger asks you on a date, or asks you to dance at a club. Presumably your decision of whether to agree might depend on how good-looking you think the person is. But what other, subtler factors, might influence your decision? It turns out that a powerfully influential factor in these cases is whether the person gives you a brief touch on the upper arm when making their request." ('18 Apr 19Added Thu 2018-Apr-19 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- "The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition" [LessWrong]: "And conversely, one subsystem cannot increase in mutual information with another subsystem, without (a) interacting with it and (b) doing thermodynamic work. Otherwise you could build a Maxwell's Demon and violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics - which in turn would violate Liouville's Theorem - which is prohibited in the standard model of physics. Which is to say: To form accurate beliefs about something, you really do have to observe it. It's a very physical, very real process: any rational mind does "work" in the thermodynamic sense, not just the sense of mental effort." ('18 Apr 18Added Wed 2018-Apr-18 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- XFiles: Reasons and rationalizations [Realevang.wordpress]: "How do you account for the existence of suffering? Well, maybe God has a good reason for it. Ok, what good reason? Well, think of something God might be trying to do. If you can think of something, then that's a reason. But it might not be a good reason. So how can you be sure God's reasons are good? Well, what's He trying to do? If it's a good thing, then that makes the reason a good reason (aka "the end justifies the means"). Right? So maybe suffering exists because God wants us to get to know Him, because knowledge of God is the greatest possible joy and satisfaction for mankind, even if it doesn't happen until after we die. Since maximum happiness and satisfaction are good, that means God has a good reason for allowing suffering." ('18 Apr 17Added Tue 2018-Apr-17 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Religious Liberty [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "These organizations say that anything that can be defined as a 'religious practice' - even if it is hurtful or harmful to the interests of those who are not members of that religion - must be respected by the government. Since attacking infidels fits this definition, the logical conclusion that this religious practice must be provided with constitutional protections." ('18 Apr 16Added Mon 2018-Apr-16 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Why There Aren't More Googles [Paulgraham]: "From the evidence I've seen so far, startups that turn down acquisition offers usually end up doing better. Not always, but usually there's a bigger offer coming, or perhaps even an IPO. Of course, the reason startups do better when they turn down acquisition offers is not necessarily that all such offers undervalue startups. More likely the reason is that the kind of founders who have the balls to turn down a big offer also tend to be very successful. That spirit is exactly what you want in a startup." ('18 Apr 14Added Sat 2018-Apr-14 11 p.m. CDTin entrepreneurship | a)
- David Damberger - What happens when an NGO admits failure[TED Talk] [Ted]: "International aid groups make the same mistakes over and over again. At TEDxYYC David Damberger uses his own engineering failure in India to call for the development sector to publicly admit, analyze, and learn from their missteps. David Damberger's work with Engineers Without Borders has taken him from communities in India to Southern Africa where he ran development and infrastructure programs." ('18 Apr 13Added Fri 2018-Apr-13 11 p.m. CDTin development | a)
- Givewell's Giving 101 [Givewell]: "Your donation can change someone's life. For a few thousand dollars you can literally save someone's life in the developing world. For around $15,000 you can reduce the chance that a child born today in the United States ends up in prison. These claims aren't normal 'marketing pitches' you read in direct mail solicitations - these are the results that the top 1% of charities we've looked at achieve - and you can count on them." ('18 Apr 12Added Thu 2018-Apr-12 11 p.m. CDTin giving | a)
- Faith as a Last Resort [Freethoughtblogs]: "So why should you need faith to believe in God? I know that seems like a dumb-ass question. But hear me out. Why should there be a real, enormously powerful entity in the world, an entity with a more real and more powerful effect on the world than anything else… and yet, for this entity and this entity only, in order to fully understand and believe in its existence, the most essential requirement is that we want to believe?" ('18 Apr 11Added Wed 2018-Apr-11 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Keynes Was Right [NYTimes]: "The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren't actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem - a depressed economy and mass unemployment - worse. The good news, such as it is, is that President Obama has finally gone back to fighting against premature austerity - and he seems to be winning the political battle. And one of these years we might actually end up taking Keynes's advice, which is every bit as valid now as it was 75 years ago." ('18 Apr 10Added Tue 2018-Apr-10 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep [Daylightathe Ism]: "Only four in ten Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments. Astonishingly, even to me, only half can name even one of the four gospels. 12% of Americans - which is something in excess of thirty million people - believe that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. And finally, three-quarters of Americans - very nearly the nation's entire Christian population - believe that the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves". This maxim was actually uttered by Benjamin Franklin, and appears nowhere in scripture." ('18 Apr 09Added Mon 2018-Apr-09 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Tax and Redistribute [Philosophyetc.net]: "Really, this should be a no-brainer. And note that the lesson generalizes. Whenever someone complains that an economic disincentive "unfairly burdens the poor", the solution is to redistribute the proceeds. (Example: worried that gas taxes are a burden to the poor? Solution: redistribute the proceeds. The poor will profit, as will the environment.) Why is this not common knowledge?" ('18 Apr 08Added Sun 2018-Apr-08 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Various Forms of Atheism [Alexvermeer]: "The word atheist has different meanings in different contexts, so we need to unpack it if we want to use the word in productive discussion. Greg Epstein in his book good without God quotes an excellent paragraph from Sherwin Wine, who separates atheism into several distinct intellectual categories, as follows" (By these categories, I'm personally an ontological, ethical, existential, and potentially ignostic atheist.)" ('18 Apr 07Added Sat 2018-Apr-07 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Why We Should Use Odds All the Time [Rationallyspeaking.blogspot]: "One of the more beautiful things to discover in this world is that there are objective rules for the manipulation of subjective certainties and uncertainties. Bayesian statisticians call these levels of uncertainty 'probabilities.' (Frequentists… get confused at this point, on which I hope to write much more in the future). One of the most unexpected beneficial side-effects of thinking probabilistically as a habit, is that it makes you realize just how much you actually know. (This is probably the one skeptical conclusion that doesn't deflate one's ego.)" ('18 Apr 05Added Thu 2018-Apr-05 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Paul Bloom - The Origins of Pleasure [Ted]: "Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists - that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is." ('18 Apr 04Added Wed 2018-Apr-04 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- The Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka Why I Hate Your Freedom) [Raikoth.net]: "But the Internet, especially the parts of it where people debate politics, are full of libertarians. Some areas are downright dominated by them. And I see very few attempts to provide a complete critique of libertarian philosophy. There are a bunch of ad hoc critiques of specific positions: people arguing for socialist health care, people in favor of gun control. But one of the things that draws people to libertarianism is that it is a unified, harmonious system. Unlike the mix-and-match philosophies of the Democratic and Republican parties, libertarianism is coherent and sometimes even derived from first principles. The only way to convincingly talk someone out of libertarianism is to launch a challenge on the entire system." ('18 Apr 03Added Tue 2018-Apr-03 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Politics and the English Language [Mtholyoke.edu]: "Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language." ('18 Apr 02Added Mon 2018-Apr-02 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Inferring Our Desires [LessWrong]: "The idea that we lack good introspective access to our own desires - that we often have no idea what we want2 - is a key lemma in naturalistic metaethics, so it seems worth a post to collect the science by which we know that." ('18 Apr 01Added Sun 2018-Apr-01 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- The Human's Hidden Utility Function (Maybe) [LessWrong]: "Suppose it turned out that humans violate the axioms of VNM rationality (and therefore don't act like they have utility functions) because there are three valuation systems in the brain that make conflicting valuations, and all three systems contribute to choice. And suppose that upon reflection we would clearly reject the outputs of two of these systems, whereas the third system looks something more like a utility function we might be able to use[...] What I just described is part of the leading theory of choice in the human brain." ('18 Mar 31Added Sat 2018-Mar-31 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Is Christianity Absurd? [Infidels]: "For the purpose of my argument I will understand Christianity to mean the religious view that is characterized by doctrines such as Salvation through Christ, Heaven, the Atonement, the ethical views of Jesus, and belief in God. So understood is Christianity absurd? This question is seldom asked, let alone answered. I will argue that a plausible case can be made for the claim that Christianity is absurd in an important sense of that term. In what follows I will not so much present new arguments as deploy standard atheistic ones in new ways." ('18 Mar 30Added Fri 2018-Mar-30 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Creating God in One's Own Image [Blogs.discovermagazine]: "For many religious people, the popular question 'What would Jesus do?' is essentially the same as 'What would I do?' That's the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs." ('18 Mar 29Added Thu 2018-Mar-29 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- 2012 - A Campaign Year [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "Let's say you came to me wanting me to support gay marriage. Let's say that I agree with you on all of the points of evidence and reason - that the laws are discriminatory and unjust - perhaps even that these restrictions on gay marriage violate the principles on which the Constitution was founded. However, knowing my district, I know that voting for gay marriage would mean a sizable shift in campaign contributions and votes to my opponent - a bible thumping young-earth prayer-in-school creationist. [...] What you are asking me to do is, in practical terms, no different than asking me to resign my position and appoint the bible thumping young-earth prayer-in-school creationist in my place. Is that really what you want me to do? [...] Then you need to bring money and votes to the table." ('18 Mar 28Added Wed 2018-Mar-28 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- The Simple Truth [Yudkowsky.net]: "This essay is meant to restore a naive view of truth. [...] Many people, so questioned, don't know how to answer in exquisitely rigorous detail. Nonetheless they would not be wise to abandon the concept of 'truth'. There was a time when no one knew the equations of gravity in exquisitely rigorous detail, yet if you walked off a cliff, you would fall." ('18 Mar 27Added Tue 2018-Mar-27 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Free Will and Evil [Daylightathe Ism]: "Namely, an abiding puzzle for Christian theology is why, if God hates evil and sin so much, he created a world that would guarantee the production of massive quantities of it. As I've written in the past, free will is not a mathematical point, nor is it a simple binary choice between good and evil. Free will is a complex bundle of desires, habits and predispositions, any of which can be altered or taken away. Even if we grant the premise that free will is necessary for a world of meaningful choice, why wouldn't God create human beings with inclinations toward virtue, so that few people exercise the evil options that are theoretically open to them? The reality of our world seems rather to be the opposite." ('18 Mar 26Added Mon 2018-Mar-26 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Existential Risk [LessWrong]: "Our technology gives us great power. If we can avoid using this power to destroy ourselves, then we can use it to spread throughout the galaxy and create structures and experiences of value on an unprecedented scale. Reducing existential risk - that is, carefully and thoughtfully preparing to not kill ourselves - may be the greatest moral imperative we have." ('18 Mar 24Added Sat 2018-Mar-24 11 p.m. CDTin effectivealtruism | a)
- Peter Singer on The Ethics of Internet Piracy [Project-syndicate]: "Last year, I told a colleague that I would include Internet ethics in a course that I was teaching. She suggested that I read a recently published anthology on computer ethics - and attached the entire volume to the email. Should I have refused to read a pirated book? Was I receiving stolen goods, as advocates of stricter laws against Internet piracy claim?" ('18 Mar 23Added Fri 2018-Mar-23 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Does Altruism Actually Exist? [Atlantic]: "Some have argued that all acts of kindness are made with an ulterior motive, but new research suggests that there is a link between fairness and altruism, and it develops very early." ('18 Mar 21Added Wed 2018-Mar-21 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Good To & Good For [Philosophyetc.net]: "Regular readers will know that my theory of welfare is that our individual good consists in objective desire fulfillment. What matters is whether the world really is the way we desire it to be, not whether we merely believe it (and so are happy). The linked post supports this claim by appeal to thought experiments where we would prefer to be mistakenly sad rather than mistakenly happy." ('18 Mar 20Added Tue 2018-Mar-20 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- The Power of Positivist Thinking [LessWrong]: "Call me non-conformist, call me one man against the world, but…I kinda like logical positivism. [...] Positivism became stricter and stricter, defining more and more things as meaningless, until someone finally pointed out that positivism itself was meaningless by the positivists' definitions, at which point the entire system vanished in a puff of logic. [...] But if we've learned anything from fantasy books, it is that any cabal of ancient wise men destroyed by their own hubris at the height of their glory must leave behind a single ridiculously powerful artifact, which in the right hands gains the power to dispel darkness and annihilate the forces of evil. The positivists left us the idea of verifiability, and it's time we started using it more" ('18 Mar 19Added Mon 2018-Mar-19 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- A Better Tax System (Assembly Instructions Included) [NYTimes]: "It's that time again. Start filing all those W-2s, 1099s and scraps of paper you'll need for your annual tax return. No doubt, this isn't your favorite activity. At some point, you may ask yourself whether there's a better way. There is. Economists who study public finance have long agreed with William E. Simon, the former Treasury secretary, who said that 'the nation should have a tax system that looks like someone designed it on purpose.' Here are four principles of tax reform that most of those economists would endorse:" ('18 Mar 18Added Sun 2018-Mar-18 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- A Fable of Science and Politics [LessWrong]: "The conflict has not vanished. Society is still divided along Blue and Green lines, and there is a "Blue" and a "Green" position on almost every contemporary issue of political or cultural importance. The Blues advocate taxes on individual incomes, the Greens advocate taxes on merchant sales; the Blues advocate stricter marriage laws, while the Greens wish to make it easier to obtain divorces; the Blues take their support from the heart of city areas, while the more distant farmers and watersellers tend to be Green; the Blues believe that the Earth is a huge spherical rock at the center of the universe, the Greens that it is a huge flat rock circling some other object called a Sun." ('18 Mar 17Added Sat 2018-Mar-17 11 p.m. CDTin culturewar | a)
- Heuristics and Biases in Charity [LessWrong]: "So diversification and scope insensitivity are two biases that people have, and which affect charitable giving. What others are there? According to Baron & Szymanska (2010), there are a number of heuristics involved in giving that lead to various biases. Diversification we are already familiar with. The others are Evaluability, Average vs. Marginal Benefit, Prominence, Identifiability, and Voluntary vs. Tax." ('18 Mar 16Added Fri 2018-Mar-16 11 p.m. CDTin giving | a)
- Correspondence on Naturalism with Christian Heritage School [Naturalism]: "Below is correspondence on naturalism from the sophomore and senior worldview classes at Christian Heritage School in Hillsboro, Oregon. [...] The students raise interesting, well-formulated questions that anyone considering naturalism as a worldview would want answered. The replies therefore cover some central concerns about naturalism such as its internal coherence, the naturalist's commitment to empiricism, naturalistic metaphysics, and the naturalistic basis for morality." ('18 Mar 14Added Wed 2018-Mar-14 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Outside the Laboratory [LessWrong]: "Suppose we have an apparently competent scientist, who knows how to design an experiment on N subjects; the N subjects will receive a randomized treatment; blinded judges will classify the subject outcomes; and then we'll run the results through a computer and see if the results are significant at the 0.05 confidence level. Now this is not just a ritualized tradition. This is not a point of arbitrary etiquette like using the correct fork for salad. It is a ritualized tradition for testing hypotheses experimentally. Why should you test your hypothesis experimentally? Because you know the journal will demand so before it publishes your paper? Because you were trained to do it in college? Because everyone else says in unison that it's important to do the experiment, and they'll look at you funny if you say otherwise?" ('18 Mar 13Added Tue 2018-Mar-13 11 p.m. CDTin metascience | a)
- Worldview Naturalism: A Status Report [Naturalism]: "What follows is first an overview of naturalism and its implications, then a look at its connection to atheism and humanism, and then discussion of some differences between naturalism and anti-naturalism in assumptions and conclusions. Highlighting these differences can help make the choice between worldviews easier for the undecided. Of course your worldview may not be what matters most; after all, people live quite happily without giving much thought to the big questions. But if you're curious about what it is to be human here in the cosmos, caught up in a situation you certainly didn't ask for, your worldview can open, or close off, some avenues of exploration." ('18 Mar 12Added Mon 2018-Mar-12 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Critical Review of Victor Reppert's Defense of the Argument from Reason [Infidels]: "Victor Reppert has contributed what is surely the most extensive defense of the so-called 'Argument from Reason' yet to appear in print, despite its many (and serious) failings. In a nutshell, an argument from reason argues from 'the existence of rational thought' to the necessity of theism and the nonphysicality of the human mind, such that 'our very thinking' can 'provide evidence that theism is true'. In this critique I will not address every scientific and philosophic objection one could raise against Reppert's case. Rather, I will point out what I believe are the most important conceptual flaws in his arguments, and explain in detail how his arguments are ineffective against my own personal worldview." ('18 Mar 11Added Sun 2018-Mar-11 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- Dan Gilbert on Our Mistaken Expectations[TED Talk] [Ted]: "Dan Gilbert presents research and data from his exploration of happiness - sharing some surprising tests and experiments that you can also try on yourself." This talk presents a lot of data that demonstrates that making decisions is more about not knowing how to get what we want - we don't even know what it is we want!" ('18 Mar 10Added Sat 2018-Mar-10 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Probability is Subjectively Objective [LessWrong]: "Your 'probability that the ten trillionth decimal digit of pi is 4′, is an attribute of yourself, and exists in your mind; the real digit is either 4 or not. And if you could change your belief about the probability by editing your brain, you wouldn't expect that to change the probability. Therefore I say of probability that it is 'subjectively objective'." ('18 Mar 09Added Fri 2018-Mar-09 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Truth is Not Boring [Freethoughtblogs]: "I am far more in alliance with a religious believer who cares passionately about the truth, who genuinely wants to understand the truth, who sincerely believes that God is real and is carefully investigating that question to arrive at a better understanding of the truth, than I am with an atheist who thinks truth is boring. I think that this believer, if they genuinely care about and pursue the truth, will eventually reach the conclusion of atheism. But I am more allied with them, in their sincere pursuit of the truth, than I am with an atheist who thinks truth is boring… and who issues an ill-informed lecture chiding other atheists for being so naive as to care about it." ('18 Mar 08Added Thu 2018-Mar-08 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- An Essential Question That No One is Asking Charities [Blog.givewell]: "If a charity demonstrates that its core program has changed lives in the past, is likely to change lives in the future, and gets great 'bang for your buck,' is this enough reason to donate to it? We say no. The missing piece: Will more funding lead to more of the good program(s)? We generally call this the 'room for more funding' question, and we've seen next to no helpful discussion of the issue within academia, within the nonprofit sector, or anywhere else." ('18 Mar 07Added Wed 2018-Mar-07 11 p.m. CSTin costeffectiveness | a)
- Disguised Queries [LessWrong]: "How can reality vary with the meaning of a word? The points in thingspace don't move around when we redraw a boundary. But people often don't realize that their argument about where to draw a definitional boundary, is really a dispute over whether to infer a characteristic shared by most things inside an empirical cluster… Hence the phrase, 'disguised query'.." ('18 Mar 06Added Tue 2018-Mar-06 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- B.C.A.D.C.E.B.C.E. [Freethoughtblogs]: "You may know there are two conventions for representing historical years: the traditional A.D. and B.C., and the chic new C.E. and B.C.E. [...]But why do I think C.E. and B.C.E. are dumb? [...] Calling the sixth day of the week 'Saturday' (literally "Saturn's Day") does not entail embracing a Eurocentric worldview or belief in the God Saturn. It's just using the English language. So, too, the labels B.C. and A.D." ('18 Mar 03Added Sat 2018-Mar-03 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Where to Draw the Boundary [LessWrong]: "Just because there's a word "art" doesn't mean that it has a meaning, floating out there in the void, which you can discover by finding the right definition. It feels that way, but it is not so. Wondering how to define a word means you're looking at the problem the wrong way-searching for the mysterious essence of what is, in fact, a communication signal." ('18 Mar 02Added Fri 2018-Mar-02 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- "My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain" [Freethoughtblogs]: "So, I agree with Aristotle, contra-utilitarians, that our good must be sought in our flourishing itself, not directly in the pleasures which should ideally naturally attend that flourishing. It would only be right that doing well in terms of what we are would be pleasant since that would encourage us to continue to succeed according to what is objectively good for us. But pleasure should be an indicator of our doing well biologically, psychologically, intellectually, morally, socially, etc., and pain should be a warning we are not. Neither is an inherent good or an inherent evil for us. We need both pleasure and pain to experience the world properly and respond to it appropriately." ('18 Mar 01Added Thu 2018-Mar-01 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- The Relativity of Wrong [Hermiene.net]: "[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together" ('18 Feb 28Added Wed 2018-Feb-28 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Is There Progress in Religion? [Bigthink]: "If all that scientists had accomplished since the Enlightenment was a continual stream of reiterated assertions that skepticism and peer review are necessary to gain knowledge, we'd be right to disregard them. Instead, science has proved its worth with a tangible record of accomplishment. [...] And where is religion after all this - what comparable progress have the theologians made in this time? The answer is that they're still standing exactly where they've always been, reciting the same empty proverbs they've been handing down for thousands of years." ('18 Feb 27Added Tue 2018-Feb-27 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- "A Lattice of Coincidence: Metaphysics, the Paranormal, and My Answer to Layne" [Freethoughtblogs]: "But a few weeks ago, Layne made a comment here saying that he believed in some sort of telepathic or precognition phenomenon, at least partly because of an experience he had in his teens, when he had a sudden fear of his sister's car being hit by a train and later found out that it almost had been. I know Layne to be a smart person with a thick skin and a fondness for a good argument, so I decided to cadge an invitation, and asked if he wanted to know my skeptic's response to his experience. He said yes ("Go ahead, hit me with your best shot" were his exact words). Here is that response." ('18 Feb 26Added Mon 2018-Feb-26 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Remembering the Lost [Daylightathe Ism]: "In question #86 of his Reasonable Faith column, William Lane Craig addresses a question from a Christian who's troubled by one of the most wicked doctrines of that theology, the dogma of Hell. Craig's correspondent wonders whether the saved will feel compassion for the damned, but also worries that it would be a violation of free will for God to erase their memories of their lost loved ones. [...] This, then, is the Christian conception of the afterlife - blissed-out robots in Heaven, billions of the damned eternally suffering in Hell. If that's what William Lane Craig and others want to believe, that's their right. But I would hardly call this reassuring or comforting to the worried questioner - much less a 'reasonable faith'" ('18 Feb 25Added Sun 2018-Feb-25 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Error in Error Theory(PDF) [Www-bcf.usc.edu]: "Moral error theory of the kind defended by J.L. Mackie and Richard Joyce is premised on two claims: (1) that moral judgements essentially presuppose that moral value has absolute authority, and (2) that this presupposition is false, because nothing has absolute authority. This paper accepts (2) but rejects (1). It is argued first that (1) is not the best explanation of the evidence from moral practice, and second that even if it were, the error theory would still be mistaken, because the assumption does not contaminate the meaning or truth-conditions of moral claims. These are determined by the essential application conditions for moral concepts, which are relational rather than absolute. An analogy is drawn between moral judgements and motion judgements." ('18 Feb 24Added Sat 2018-Feb-24 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Getting Duped - How the Media Messes with Your Mind [Scientificamerican]: "Statements made in the media can surreptitiously plant distortions in the minds of millions. Learning to recognize two commonly used fallacies [straw man and weak man argumentation] can help you separate fact from fiction" " ('18 Feb 23Added Fri 2018-Feb-23 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Why Some Wild Animals Are Becoming Nicer [Wired]: "Nature is supposed to be red in tooth and claw, and domestication an artificial process for making animals gentle. But it appears that some corners of the animal kingdom are becoming kinder, gentler places. Certain creatures may be domesticating themselves." ('18 Feb 22Added Thu 2018-Feb-22 11 p.m. CSTin animals | a)
- A Polite Exchange Between Author and Editor [Epjournal.net]: "It has been three months since I did you the honor of submitting my masterpiecepaper to your journal. At 9,000 words in length, I calculate you would only have to read 100 words per day (fewer words than appear in Hop on Pop) in order to have read the entire manuscript by now. Can I expect a decision soon?" ('18 Feb 21Added Wed 2018-Feb-21 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- Blue or Green on Regulation [LessWrong]: "I understand that debates are not conducted in front of perfectly rational audiences. We all know what happens when you try to trade off a sacred value against a nonsacred value. It's why, when someone says, 'But if you don't ban cars, people will die in car crashes!' you don't say 'Yes, people will die horrible flaming deaths and they don't deserve it. But it's worth it so I don't have to walk to work in the morning.' Instead you say, 'How dare you take away our freedom to drive? We'll decide for ourselves; we're just as good at making decisions as you are.'" ('18 Feb 20Added Tue 2018-Feb-20 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Timeless Control [LessWrong]: "In Thou Art Physics, I pointed out that since you are within physics, anything you control is necessarily controlled by physics. Today we will talk about a different aspect of the confusion, the words 'determined' and 'control'." ('18 Feb 18Added Sun 2018-Feb-18 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Animal Research Paradox [Psychologytoday]: "The paradox is that the case for animal rights largely rests on the finding of experiments on captive animals - the very research that animal activists oppose. For example, the philosopher Tom Regan, author of the influential book The Case for Animal Rights, argues that the possession of rights should be extended to all species that possess consciousness, emotions, beliefs, desires, perceptions, memories, intentions, and a sense of the future. But how do we know which animals have these attributes? The answer, of course, is animal research." ('18 Feb 17Added Sat 2018-Feb-17 11 p.m. CSTin animals | a)
- Harms of Post-9/11 Airline Security [Schneier]: "In my previous two statements, I made two basic arguments about post-9/11 airport security. One, we are not doing the right things: the focus on airports at the expense of the broader threat is not making us safer. And two, the things we are doing are wrong: the specific security measures put in place since 9/11 do not work. Kip Hawley doesn't argue with the specifics of my criticisms, but instead provides anecdotes and asks us to trust that airport security-and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in particular-knows what it's doing. He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust the no-fly list: 21,000 people so dangerous they're not allowed to fly, yet so innocent they can't be arrested." ('18 Feb 16Added Fri 2018-Feb-16 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Lies We Tell Kids [Paulgraham]: "Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. [...] One of the most remarkable things about the way we lie to kids is how broad the conspiracy is. All adults know what their culture lies to kids about: they're the questions you answer 'Ask your parents.' If a kid asked who won the World Series in 1982 or what the atomic weight of carbon was, you could just tell him. But if a kid asks you 'Is there a God?' or 'What's a prostitute?' you'll probably say 'Ask your parents.'" ('18 Feb 15Added Thu 2018-Feb-15 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- How Journalism Distorts Reality [Spencergreenberg]: "Journalism provides us with important information about what's going on in the world. But when you consider the incentives that journalists have, combine that with their usual lack of scientific training, and add in the constraints of the medium in which they work, serious distortions of reality can result. Many journalists produce excellent work. But others leave you less informed after reading their articles than before you began. What causes journalistic distortion?" ('18 Feb 14Added Wed 2018-Feb-14 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Making Beliefs Pay Rent in Anticipated Experiences [LessWrong]: "Thus begins the ancient parable: 'If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air. Another says, No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain.' Suppose that, after the tree falls, the two walk into the forest together. Will one expect to see the tree fallen to the right, and the other expect to see the tree fallen to the left? Suppose that before the tree falls, the two leave a sound recorder next to the tree. Would one, playing back the recorder, expect to hear something different from the other? [...] Though the two argue, one saying "No," and the other saying "Yes," they do not anticipate any different experiences. The two think they have different models of the world, but they have no difference with respect to what they expect will happen to them." ('18 Feb 13Added Tue 2018-Feb-13 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Getting Yourself To Act How You Know You Should [Spencergreenberg]: "Just because you know what you should do, doesn't mean that you're going to do it. You may know that it would be smart to lose weight, but aren't on a diet. You may be convinced that when you're feeling tired during the day you should do jumping jacks to boost your energy, but instead you lie down on the couch. You may know that using a formal decision making procedure is a good idea when you're trying to make important decisions, yet you've never bother to use one. So why don't we always do what we know we should?" ('18 Feb 12Added Mon 2018-Feb-12 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- The Best Textbooks on Every Subject [LessWrong]: "For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff's Notes. How inefficient! I've since discovered that textbooks are usually the quickest and best way to learn new material. [...] But textbooks vary widely in quality. I was forced to read some awful textbooks in college. The ones on American history and sociology were memorably bad, in my case. Other textbooks are exciting, accurate, fair, well-paced, and immediately useful. What if we could compile a list of the best textbooks on every subject? That would be extremely useful. Let's do it." ('18 Feb 11Added Sun 2018-Feb-11 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Regulation and the Nature of Externalities [Freethoughtblogs]: "Capitalism is a good thing. A very good thing. But we've already lived through the robber baron era and we know what happens when it is unregulated. At the same time, we should use our understanding of how markets operate to design smart and effective regulation that increases competition rather than decreases it and that protects consumers and the public instead of corporate profits." ('18 Feb 10Added Sat 2018-Feb-10 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Sanity and Survival [Gwern.net]: "The following 3 essays were prepared from pages 737-780 of an ebook of Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (1985) by Douglas Hofstadter, an anthology of articles & essays primarily published in Scientific American between January 1981 and July 1983. [...] They are particularly interesting for introducing the idea of superrationality in game theory, an attempt to devise a decision theory/algorithm for agents which can reach global utility maxima on problems like the prisoner's dilemma even in the absence of coercion" ('18 Feb 09Added Fri 2018-Feb-09 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- The Basis for Morality [Ockhamsbeard.wordpress]: "You can acknowledge that there is no binding, logically necessary or factually obligatory reason to be moral, but you can choose to be moral. And there are plenty of good non-moral or prudential reasons for doing so, such as that social living benefits us, and it's a darn sight easier to live socially when there are rules of conduct. So you be moral. [...] And once you've chosen to be moral, that binds you to playing by the rules of the moral system you're in. Like when you agree to play a game of cricket, you can't just go around breaking or conforming to particular rules, or making up new ones, willy nilly. If you did that, in some important sense you wouldn't be playing cricket. And the other cricketers would certainly look upon you with great scorn and disapprobation." ('18 Feb 06Added Tue 2018-Feb-06 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- The 'Biblical View' That's Younger Than the Happy Meal [Pathe Os]: "In 1979, McDonald's introduced the Happy Meal.Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception. [...B]ack in the day, Dudley notes, Geisler 'argued for the permissibility of abortion in a 1971 book, stating: The embryo is not fully human - it is an undeveloped person.' That was in Ethics: Alternatives and Issues, published by Zondervan. It's still in print, kind of, as Christian Ethics: Contemporary Issues and Options. And now it says something different. Now it's unambiguously anti-abortion." ('18 Feb 05Added Mon 2018-Feb-05 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Earth Is Round (p < .05) [Ics.uci.edu]: "After 4 decades of severe criticism, the ritual of null hypothesis significance testing-mechanical dichotomous decisions around a sacred .05 criterion-still persists. This article reviews the problems with this practice, including its near-universal misinterpretation of p as the probability that H0 is false, the misinterpretation that its complement is the probability of successful replication, and the mistaken assumption that if one rejects H0 one thereby affirms the theory that led to the test. Exploratory data analysis and the use of graphic methods, a steady improvement in and a movement toward standardization in measurement, an emphasis on estimating effect sizes using confidence intervals, and the informed use of available statistical methods is suggested. For generalization, psychologists must finally rely, as has been done in all the older sciences, on replication." ('18 Feb 04Added Sun 2018-Feb-04 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- Will Atheism Become Easier? [Freethoughtblogs]: "In the next generation or so, will it be easier to become an atheist? I don't mean socially or politically easier. I'm not wondering whether there will eventually be less anti-atheist bigotry, discrimination, stigma, whether state and church will be better separated, etc. (That's not what I'm thinking about today, anyway.) I'm wondering if it will become emotionally easier, and philosophically." ('18 Feb 03Added Sat 2018-Feb-03 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Dissolving The Hard Problem of Conciousness [Consciousnessonline.files.wordpress]: "In this paper we attempt to dissolve worries around the hard problem of conscious by showing that there is no good argument for the existence of such a problem. The arguments for the existence of a hard problem, as defined by Chalmers (2002), come from some classic thought experiments. We are asked to imagine a scenario radically different from our experience of the world and draw the conclusion that the intrinsic qualitative nature of a mental state is independent of the structure and function of that state. The conclusion depends on the truth of identifiable key intuitions. We suggest that these intuitions are not theory neutral. [...] These thought experiments thus cannot serve as evidence for a hard problem; that would be question begging." ('18 Feb 02Added Fri 2018-Feb-02 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Your Intuitions Are Not Magic [LessWrong]: "But like statistical techniques in general, our intuitions are not magic. Hitting a broken window with a hammer will not fix the window, no matter how reliable the hammer. It would certainly be easy and convenient if our intuitions always gave us the right results, just like it would be easy and convenient if our statistical techniques always gave us the right results. Yet carelessness can cost lives. Misapplying a statistical technique when evaluating the safety of a new drug might kill people or cause them to spend money on a useless treatment. Blindly following our intuitions can cause our careers, relationships or lives to crash and burn, because we did not think of the possibility that we might be wrong." ('18 Feb 01Added Thu 2018-Feb-01 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Ethicists No More Likely Than Non-Ethicists to Pay Their Registration Fees at APA Meetings [Experimentalphilosophy.typepad]: "Until recently, the American Philosophical Association had more or less an honor system for paying meeting registration fees. There was no serious enforcement mechanism for ensuring that people who attended the meeting - even people appearing on the program as chairs, speakers, or commentators - actually paid their registration fees. [...] Here, then, are my preliminary findings: Overall, 76% of program participants paid their registration fees: 75% in 2006, 76% in 2007, and 77% in 2008. (The increasing trend is not statistically significant.) 74% of participants presenting ethics-related material (henceforth "ethicists": see the coding details) paid their registration fees, compared to 76% of non-ethicists, not a statistically significant difference." ('18 Jan 31Added Wed 2018-Jan-31 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Innumeracy among political journalists [The Monkeycage]: "John shoots down David Brooks's claim that 'If you look at the fundamentals, the president should be getting crushed right now.' John points out (as does Ezra Klein) that if you look at the fundamentals, you'd expect a close election. OK, there are lots of ways of looking at politics, elections, and the economy, and I'm sure that some forecasts give Obama a bit lead. But that's hardly a consensus reading of the fundamentals. [...] One aspect of innumeracy is seeing numbers as words, as rhetorical expressions rather than as quantities that can be added and subtracted, multiplied and divided. That's what's going on when Brooks talks about the fundamentals without looking." ('18 Jan 30Added Tue 2018-Jan-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Universal Fire [LessWrong]: "We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. "Phosphorus" is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks. If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter. Reality is laced together a lot more tightly than humans might like to believe." ('18 Jan 29Added Mon 2018-Jan-29 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Does Free Will Matter? [Richardcarrier.blogspot]: "But once you have shown that individual responsibility not only can be, but in practice already is, based on compatibilist free will, the result is nearly zero net change in human behavior-unless the supernaturalists have yet other irrational beliefs that in actual fact weren't based on their views of free will, regardless of what they claim." ('18 Jan 28Added Sun 2018-Jan-28 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- "On "Where the Conflict Really Lies" [Wordsideasandthings.blogspot]: "Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism is Alvin Plantinga's popular-level challenge to the idea that science and religion are in conflict. At least, that's the defensive portion of the book. He goes on to argue that the real conflict is between science and an irreligious worldview. I'm concerned that people eager for this conclusion will cite Plantinga as an intellectual authority without understanding which parts of his overall argument are strong vs. which parts are weak, overly specialized, or overly generalized. My plan is to cover select portions of his book, supporting or criticizing Plantinga as appropriate." ('18 Jan 27Added Sat 2018-Jan-27 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- What Is An Effective Altruist? [80000hours]: "80,000 Hours is built around the idea of effective altruism. What does that mean? At its most basic, effective altruism is based on two simpler concepts: effectiveness and altruism. So far so good. Altruism means wanting to help other people. It means thinking that other people's welfare matters. Effectiveness is a more fiddly idea. It's about doing something well. Say I'm in the business of making match-sticks. It's all well and good to take a whole tree and whittle away at it until all that remains is a match-stick. You've done what you set out to do, but you could have done much more with your time." ('18 Jan 25Added Thu 2018-Jan-25 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately [LessWrong]: "To purchase warm fuzzies, find some hard-working but poverty-stricken woman who's about to drop out of state college after her husband's hours were cut back, and personally, but anonymously, give her a cashier's check for $10,000. Repeat as desired. To purchase status among your friends, donate $100,000 to the current sexiest X-Prize, or whatever other charity seems to offer the most stylishness for the least price. Make a big deal out of it, show up for their press events, and brag about it for the next five years. Then-with absolute cold-blooded calculation-without scope insensitivity or ambiguity aversion-without concern for status or warm fuzzies-figuring out some common scheme for converting outcomes to utilons, and trying to express uncertainty in percentage probabilitiess-find the charity that offers the greatest expected utilons per dollar. Donate up to however much money you wanted to give to charity, until their marginal efficiency drops below that of the next charity on the list." ('18 Jan 24Added Wed 2018-Jan-24 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- From neural 'is' to moral 'ought' - what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? [Wjh.harvard.edu]: "Many moral philosophers regard scientific research as irrelevant to their work because science deals with what is the case, whereas ethics deals with what ought to be. Some ethicists question this is/ought distinction, arguing that science and normative ethics are continuous and that ethics might someday be regarded as a natural social science. I agree with traditional ethicists that there is a sharp and crucial distinction between the 'is' of science and the 'ought' of ethics, but maintain nonetheless that science, and neuroscience in particular, can have profound ethical implications by providing us with information that will prompt us to re-evaluate our moral values and ourconceptions of morality" ('18 Jan 22Added Mon 2018-Jan-22 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Between 'New Atheism' and 'Accomodationism' [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "I have often wondered whether I am in the camp of the 'new atheists', or if I am an 'appeaser'. Or, what I think is probably more accurate, I am a mixture of the two. On the 'new atheist' side, I can write a post defending the conclusion that faith, when it concerns beliefs that affect the life, well-being, or aspirations of others, is a vice. [...] At the same time, I do not blame religion. Intellectual recklessness is at fault, and atheists are just as prone to intellectual recklessness as theists. [...] Being an opponent of intellectual recklessness, rather than being an opponent of religion, I am morally critical of intellectually reckless atheist and pass no judgment against the intellectually responsible theist." ('18 Jan 21Added Sun 2018-Jan-21 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute? [LessWrong]: "For many years before the Wright Brothers, people dreamed of flying with magic potions. There was nothing irrational about the raw desire to fly. There was nothing tainted about the wish to look down on a cloud from above. Only the "magic potions" part was irrational. [...] If a rocket launch is what it takes to give me a feeling of aesthetic transcendence, I do not see this as a substitute for religion. That is theomorphism-the viewpoint from gloating religionists who assume that everyone who isn't religious has a hole in their mind that wants filling." ('18 Jan 20Added Sat 2018-Jan-20 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul [Wjh.harvard.edu]: "In this chapter, I draw on Haidt's and Baron's respective insights in the service of a bit of philosophical psychoanalysis. I will argue that deontological judgments tend to be driven by emotional responses, and that deontological philosophy, rather than being grounded in moral reasoning, is to a large extent an exercise in moral rationalization. This is in contrast to consequentialism, which, I will argue, arises from rather different psychological processes, ones that are more "cognitive," and more likely to involve genuine moral reasoning. These claims are strictly empirical, and I will defend them on the basis of the available evidence. Needless to say, my argument will be speculative and will not be conclusive. Beyond this, I will argue that if these empirical claims are true, they may have normative implications, casting doubt on deontology as a school of normative moral thought." ('18 Jan 19Added Fri 2018-Jan-19 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Do People Become More Conservative as They Age? [News.discovery]: "Contrary to popular belief, people generally do not become more conservative as they age.Seniors often describe themselves as being more tolerant and more open to new ideas in their old age. What's happening in society when people come of age often greatly influences the set point for their core beliefs." ('18 Jan 17Added Wed 2018-Jan-17 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- The Instability of Professional Philosophers' Endorsement of the Famous 'Doctrine of the Double Effect' [Experimentalphilosophy.typepad]: "The simplest interpretation of our overall results, across three types of scenarios (Double Effect, Moral Luck, and Action-Omission), is that in cases like these skill in philosophy doesn't manifest as skill in consistently applying explicitly endorsed abstract principles to reach stable judgments about hypothetical scenarios; rather, it manifests more as skill in choosing principles to rationalize, post-hoc, scenario judgments that are driven by the same types of factors that drive non-philosophers' judgments." ('18 Jan 16Added Tue 2018-Jan-16 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- The Grindstone of Persuasion [Bigthink]: "When we think about changing minds, we should bear in mind the "wind and water" analogy. Minds do change, but that change doesn't come in great tectonic shifts. It comes in slow, patient accumulation, like water dripping on stone, carrying away a few grains at a time; like ice freezing and thawing, widening the cracks a little each year. The next time you get into one of these arguments, bear this in mind." ('18 Jan 15Added Mon 2018-Jan-15 11 p.m. CSTin activism | a)
- "To Like Each Other, Sing and Dance in Synchrony" [LessWrong]: "If you want to make the members of the group like each other more and feel more like a group, synchronized actions may be one of the easiest ways of achieving this goal. Anthropologists have long known the community-building effect of dancing[...] The implication for meetup groups, as well as any other groups that might want to make their members like each other more, seems clear: spend some time singing and dancing together, possibly in the form of drinking songs if people are too self-conscious to sing while sober." ('18 Jan 13Added Sat 2018-Jan-13 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How Bad the Debate Is [Krugman.blogs.nytimes]: "Many pundits still like to pretend that we're having something resembling a rational national debate, with members of both parties saying reasonable things given their views about how policy works. And when you find a politician saying something not at all reasonable, there's a lot of false equivalence - surely both sides do it, even if you don't have any, you know, actual examples from one side." ('18 Jan 12Added Fri 2018-Jan-12 11 p.m. CSTin culturewar | a)
- Answering Greta - My Goals As An Atheist Writer [Freethoughtblogs]: "What I am against is not religion per se but a set of awful things that existing religions, particularly in the West but also in other places, are especially prone to. Here's a somewhat comprehensive list of 16 things which I vehemently oppose which are to one or extent another unforgivably bound up with the dominant religions of the West: faith (i.e., the willful belief contrary to rational evidence), supernaturalism, superstition, moral and cultural regressivism, traditionalism for its own sake, fundamentalism, tribalism, patriarchal values, nationalism, racism, anti-intellectualism, pseudoscience, moral and cultural stagnation, anti-natural moralities, homophobia, and, most importantly, authoritarianism in all its ugly forms-be they intellectual, moral, or political." ('18 Jan 11Added Thu 2018-Jan-11 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Matrix as Metaphysics [Consc.net]: "I will argue that the hypothesis that I am envatted [and thus am in a computer simulation and not the real world, aka the Matrix Hypothesis] is not a skeptical hypothesis, but a metaphysical hypothesis. That is, it is a hypothesis about the underlying nature of reality. Where physics is concerned with the microscopic processes that underlie macroscopic reality, metaphysics is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality. A metaphysical hypothesis might make a claim about the reality that underlies physics itself. Alternatively, it might say something about the nature of our minds, or the creation of our world. I think the Matrix Hypothesis should be regarded as a metaphysical hypothesis with all three of these elements. It makes a claim about the reality underlying physics, about the nature of our minds, and about the creation of the world." ('18 Jan 10Added Wed 2018-Jan-10 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- What Do Atheists Feel? [Ladyathe Ist.blogspot]: "Believers, especially evangelical Christians, seem to be immune to logical arguments against their beliefs. My theory is that they believe for emotional reasons, as their emotional "arguments" for belief indicate. I have enountered many completely emotional responses to my rational arguments. It's like we speak two different languages. Atheism as a non-belief position rather than a systemic response to existential fears and feelings, so it offers nothing for them. In fact, they actually accuse atheists of believing in "nothing." To them, our worldview is dark, depressing, and nihilistic. So I thought I would answer some of the questions I've heard and seen coming from the other side." ('18 Jan 09Added Tue 2018-Jan-09 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Trouble With Airport Profiling [Schneier]: "Why do otherwise rational people think it's a good idea to profile people at airports? Recently, neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris related a story of an elderly couple being given the twice-over by the TSA, pointed out how these two were obviously not a threat, and recommended that the TSA focus on the actual threat: 'Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim.' This is a bad idea. It doesn't make us any safer - and it actually puts us all at risk." ('18 Jan 07Added Sun 2018-Jan-07 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Privileging the Hypothesis [LessWrong]: "Suppose that the police of Largeville, a town with a million inhabitants, are investigating a murder in which there are few or no clues-the victim was stabbed to death in an alley, and there are no fingerprints and no witnesses. Then, one of the detectives says, 'Well… we have no idea who did it… no particular evidence singling out any of the million people in this city… but let's consider the hypothesis that this murder was committed by Mortimer Q. Snodgrass, who lives at 128 Ordinary Ln. It could have been him, after all.' I'll label this the fallacy of privileging the hypothesis." ('18 Jan 06Added Sat 2018-Jan-06 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists [Ebonmusings]: "Ask any believer what would convince him he was mistaken and persuade him to leave his religion and become an atheist, and if you get a response, it will almost invariably be, 'Nothing - I have faith in my god.' Although such people may well exist, I personally have yet to meet a theist who would acknowledge even the possibility that his belief was in error. [...] Thus, in the spirit of proving that atheists' minds are not closed, I've assembled below a list of everything I can think of that I would accept as proof that a given religion is true. Also included are things that I would accept as circumstantial evidence of a particular religion's truth and things that would not be acceptable to me as proof of anything. [...] To be fair, I invite all theists to respond by preparing a list of things that they would accept as proof that atheism is true. If any theist prepares such a list, posts it on the Internet and tells me about it, I'll link to it from this page." ('18 Jan 04Added Thu 2018-Jan-04 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- "Happiness, Money, and Giving It Away" [Project-syndicate]: "For 50 years, Buffett, now 75, has worked at accumulating a vast fortune. [...] Yet his frugal lifestyle shows that he does not particularly enjoy spending large amounts of money. Even if his tastes were more lavish, he would be hard-pressed to spend more than a tiny fraction of his wealth. [...] Coincidentally, Kahneman's article appeared the same week that Buffett announced the largest philanthropic donation in US history - $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and another $7 billion to other charitable foundations. [...] Perhaps, as Kahneman's research would lead us to expect, Buffett spent less of his life in a positive mood than he would have if, at some point in the 1960's, he had quit working, lived on his assets, and played a lot more bridge. But, in that case, he surely would not have experienced the satisfaction that he can now rightly feel at the thought that his hard work and remarkable investment skills will, through the Gates Foundation, help to cure diseases that cause death and disability to billions of the world's poorest people. Buffett reminds us that there is more to happiness than being in a good mood." ('18 Jan 02Added Tue 2018-Jan-02 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- "Weigh More, Pay More" [Project-syndicate]: "I am writing this at an airport. A slight Asian woman has checked in with, I would guess, about 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of suitcases and boxes. She pays extra for exceeding the weight allowance. A man who must weigh at least 40 kilos more than she does, but whose baggage is under the limit, pays nothing. Yet, in terms of the airplane's fuel consumption, it is all the same whether the extra weight is baggage or body fat." ('17 Dec 30Added Sat 2017-Dec-30 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Macromuddle [Andrewgelman]: "More and more I feel like economics reporting is based on crude principles of adding up "good news" and "bad news." Sometimes this makes sense: by almost any measure, an unemployment rate of 10% is bad news compared to an unemployment rate of 5%. Other times, though, the good/bad news framework seems so tangled. For example: house prices up is considered good news but inflation is considered bad news. A strong dollar is considered good news but it's also an unfavorable exchange rate, which is bad news. When facebook shares go down, that's bad news, but if they automatically go up, that means they were underpriced which doesn't seem so good either." ('17 Dec 29Added Fri 2017-Dec-29 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- A Defense by Example of Uncompromising Secularism [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "I said at the start that I was going to defend a strict and unaccommodating form of secularism. This is it. There is zero tolerance in a court of law for sectarian argument. All evidence, and all forms of reasoning, must be secular. Even when the debate is over what evidence the jurists are allowed to see and what arguments are permitted, other than evidence excluded because it was obtained illegally, the concern is over whether the jurists might draw inferences harmful to the accused that are unsound in the secular sense." ('17 Dec 28Added Thu 2017-Dec-28 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now? [Religiondispatches]: "A reporter tracks down the remnants of Harold Camping's apocalyptic movement and finds out you don't have to be crazy to believe something nuts." ('17 Dec 27Added Wed 2017-Dec-27 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- "Passions, Reason & Moral Hypocrisy" [Whywereason]: "When it comes to assessing moral situations we have a gut-reaction immediately followed by a more deliberate line of reasoning. For example, when someone asks us if killing an innocent person is wrong you know right away that the answer is yes, but it usually takes a few moments to think of reasons for why this is true. This is not to say that these two systems (system 1 and system 2 as they are referred to in the popular literature) are neurologically separate, but it is to suggest that they are not necessarily on the same page at all times. Understanding their relationship is key to understanding how humans think about moral judgments." ('17 Dec 26Added Tue 2017-Dec-26 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Hack Away at the Edges [LessWrong]: "Humanity's intellectual history is not the story of a Few Great Men who had a burst of insight, cried "Eureka!" and jumped 10 paces ahead of everyone else. More often, an intellectual breakthrough is the story of dozens of people building on the ideas of others before them, making wrong turns, proposing and discarding ideas, combining insights from multiple subfields, slamming into brick walls and getting back up again. Very slowly, the space around the solution is crowded in by dozens of investigators until finally one of them hits the payload." ('17 Dec 25Added Mon 2017-Dec-25 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Peter Singer and William Easterly[Video] [Bloggingheads.tv]: "Peter Singer and William Easterly talk about foreign aid and non-profit organizations working in the developing world, and talk about how you can find an effective charity and best approach aid, and how aid can fail and be counter-productive if we don't look for effectiveness rigorously." ('17 Dec 24Added Sun 2017-Dec-24 11 p.m. CSTin development | a)
- Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism [Singinst]: "Suppose you find an unconscious six-year-old girl lying on the train tracks of an active railroad. What, morally speaking, ought you to do in this situation? Would it be better to leave her there to get run over, or to try to save her? How about if a 45-year-old man has a debilitating but nonfatal illness that will severely reduce his quality of life - is it better to cure him, or not cure him? Oh, and by the way: This is not a trick question. I answer that I would save them if I had the power to do so - both the six-year-old on the train tracks, and the sick 45-year-old. The obvious answer isn't always the best choice, but sometimes it is." ('17 Dec 23Added Sat 2017-Dec-23 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- The Problem of Unfreedom [Philosophyetc.net]: "I've never understood how anyone could be at all convinced by the 'free will' defence against the problem of evil. It seems obvious that any cosmic designer did a shockingly poor job of designing us to be free agents. There are all sorts of barriers to human choice and free action that no perfect being could tolerate. [...] Here's the problem: humans are not ideally free agents. Due to our imperfect biological design, we suffer a variety of internal maladies - from cravings and addiction to mental illness and simple irrationality - that impede the rational exercise of our will. Our brains are far from optimally designed for rational decision-making. If God existed, he would free us from the bondage of addiction, bias and other mental defects." ('17 Dec 22Added Fri 2017-Dec-22 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Hell With Christianity [Realevang.wordpress]: "Craig has a real problem here, and that is that he himself cannot stomach what the Bible really says about Hell. Read Matthew 25. Read Jesus' description of God's attitude towards the unsaved. It's not, 'Oh dear, you're going to Hell, if only there were something I could do to save you.' God's attitude can be summed up by two words: 'Fuck you.' You pissed Me off, and I am throwing your ass in Hell, and you can stay there. No apologies, no regrets. The God of the Bible absolutely does throw people in Hell, and doesn't ask for Craig's approval or consent. Call that Inconsistency #3: Craig has to reinvent damnation before he can defend it." ('17 Dec 21Added Thu 2017-Dec-21 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination [LessWrong]: "After three months of practice, I now use a single algorithm to beat procrastination most of the times I face it.1 It probably won't work for you quite like it did for me, but it's the best advice on motivation I've got, and it's a major reason I'm known for having the 'gets shit done' property. There are reasons to hope that we can eventually break the chain of akrasia; maybe this post is one baby step in the right direction." ('17 Dec 20Added Wed 2017-Dec-20 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- How To Take Good Advice and Actually Use It To Better Your Life [Alexvermeer]: "Good advice is a waste of your time. Yes, you read that right. Good advice is mostly useless. Why? Because no matter how good the advice is you'll probably forget it and never use it. One of the big ironies of the many personal development blogs that have sprouted up all over the internet is that people can waste a lot of time reading them. Alas, I'm guilty of doing this. I've wasted many hours reading many articles on productivity, and I forget most of it! But it doesn't have to be this way, if we're smart about it." ('17 Dec 19Added Tue 2017-Dec-19 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- Do We Concede The Ground of Death Too Easily? [Freethoughtblogs]: "I think this is a huge mistake. I agree that the fear of death is one of the main reasons people cling to religion. But I don't agree, even in the slightest, that religious philosophies of death are inherently more comforting than secular ones. And if we want to make atheism a safe place to land when people let go of their faith, we need to get these secular philosophies into the public square, and let the world know what we think about death." ('17 Dec 18Added Mon 2017-Dec-18 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- What We Miss in the Free Will Debate [Cognitivephilosophy.net]: "What does the debate on free will actually accomplish in a practical sense? Does it tell us anything new about human cognition? About the psychological and neurological factors that cause human behavior? Does it help us form systems that can lead to a more desirable society? Whether you want to label something free will or not is, ultimately, not what I'm interested in. If we want to draw a line and call everything beyond that line of neurological functioning 'free will', I'm fine with that. Whether someone in prison for armed robbery was truly 'free' in their action is not what I'm concerned with. What I am concerned with is what are the causal factors that led to this person committing that act and what are steps we can take to help that person realize the error of their ways so to speak." ('17 Dec 17Added Sun 2017-Dec-17 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Drawing Out Our Better Angels: The Important Role of Moral Reminders [Whywereason.wordpress]: "Vohs' and Ariely's work suggests that the question of humans being inherently good or bad is largely irrelevant. The more accurate picture is the cartoon image; our moral senses are dictated by an angel over one shoulder and a devil over the other. Therefore, the more fruitful question is: what are the external contexts and circumstances that favor one over the other? This is not to suggest a blank slate view of human morality - far from it - but it is to say that societies where messages of honesty and fairness dominate are better off. Ariely's conclusion is bad news for societies where it is almost impossible to go a day without seeing a photo, video or advertisement where avarice rules. And this is the larger and more important point. When given a chance to cheat most people do; not a lot, but enough to improve a test score by a few points (One can easily see how this can perpetuate in a negative way). But when the same people are reminded about honestly and fairness it is their moral codes that take the drivers seat." ('17 Dec 16Added Sat 2017-Dec-16 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- The Science of Happiness [Edge]: "Dan Gilbert [...] is a scientist who explores what philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics have to teach us about how, and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how, and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy. Below he talks about a wide range of matters that include how we measure a person's subjective emotional experience; the role of "positive hedonic experience"; science as an attempt to replace qualitative distinctions with quantitative distinctions; the role negative emotions play in our lives; the costs of variety; and the need to abandon the romantic notion that human unhappiness results from the loss of our primal innocence." ('17 Dec 15Added Fri 2017-Dec-15 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Can All Religion Be True? - The Problem With Ecumenicalism [Freethoughtblogs]: "his notion that "all religion's true"? This notion that everyone finds their own path to God - even atheists, in our own way? This notion that people can hold religious beliefs that are not only different but totally contradictory - Jesus both is and is not the son of God, dead people both go to Heaven and are reincarnated, homosexuality is both loved and despised by God, there are many gods and there is only one God and God is a sort of three-for-one deal, Catholicism is the one true faith and Mormonism is the one true faith and Islam is the one true faith and no one faith is the one true faith - and that, somehow, all of these contradictory beliefs can be true? It's not just laughably absurd. It's not just logically impossible. It shows a callous unconcern about whether the things you believe are true." ('17 Dec 14Added Thu 2017-Dec-14 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Thou Art Physics [LessWrong]: "My position [on Free Will] might perhaps be called 'Requiredism.' When agency, choice, control, and moral responsibility are cashed out in a sensible way, they require determinism-at least some patches of determinism within the universe. If you choose, and plan, and act, and bring some future into being, in accordance with your desire, then all this requires a lawful sort of reality; you cannot do it amid utter chaos. There must be order over at least over those parts of reality that are being controlled by you. You are within physics, and so you/physics have determined the future. If it were not determined by physics, it could not be determined by you." ('17 Dec 13Added Wed 2017-Dec-13 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Steven Pinker on the myth of violence [Ted]: "Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence." ('17 Dec 12Added Tue 2017-Dec-12 11 p.m. CSTin development | a)
- Listening to the Hair Dryer [Freethoughtblogs]: "Let's say Person 1 thinks their hair dryer is talking to them, and is telling them to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train. And let's say that Person 2 thinks their hair dryer is talking to them, and is telling them to volunteer twice a week at a homeless shelter. Is it better to volunteer at a homeless shelter than it is to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train? Of course it is. But you still have a basic problem - which is that you think your hair dryer is talking to you." ('17 Dec 11Added Mon 2017-Dec-11 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Why Do Atheists Gather? [Bigthink]: "In the first of my posts summing up the Reason Rally, there was a commenter who said that gathering on the National Mall was 'sink[ing] to the level of the religious'. At the time, I considered this too self-evidently absurd to merit refutation - but then I heard it again, in an NPR interview featuring Hemant Mehta and James Randi, where a caller charged that that we were 'turning atheism into a religion' by gathering in this way. Since this confusion seems to be more widespread than I thought, I decided to address it." ('17 Dec 10Added Sun 2017-Dec-10 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Accepting Your Error Rate [Spencergreenberg]: "It's disturbing to discover we've been mistaken about something important - especially when we've wasted time or effort because of the belief, or expressed the belief in front of others. So we're incentivized to come up with justifications for why we weren't actually wrong. We try to avoid psychological discomfort, and we try to save face in front of others. But there is a healthier way to think about wrongness: recognizing that we have an error rate." ('17 Dec 09Added Sat 2017-Dec-09 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- The Resurrection of Jesus [Somewhatabnormal.blogspot]: "Now, if you discount the idea that this was actually Jesus and the magical disappearance, this all seems very reasonable. Two followers were walking along and discussing Jesus's death (not implausible). They met a traveling rabbi who didn't look like Jesus (not implausible). They told him they were discussing the Messiah, and the rabbi began explaining the messianic interpretation of various scripture passages (not implausible). Later on, they reflected on this conversation and decided it was Jesus himself who had met them. This last step might strike some as implausible, but I think if there were already stories of Jesus's appearance circulating, it would actually be quite psychologically reasonable." ('17 Dec 08Added Fri 2017-Dec-08 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- On The Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor [Mcsweeneys.net]: "I maintain that the trash compactor onboard the Death Star in Star Wars is implausible, unworkable, and moreover, inefficient. [...] The Death Star clearly has a garbage-disposal problem. Given its size and massive personnel, the amount of waste it generates - discarded food, broken equipment, excrement, and the like - boggles the imagination. That said, I just cannot fathom how an organization as ruthless and efficiently-run as the Empire would have signed off on such a dangerous, unsanitary, and shoddy garbage-disposal system as the one depicted in the movie. Here are the problems, as I can ascertain them, with the Death Star's garbage-disposal system:" ('17 Dec 07Added Thu 2017-Dec-07 11 p.m. CSTin random | a)
- The Root Causes of Poverty [Blog.givewell]: "GiveWell generally focuses on the question of how to get "bang for your buck" as a donor - help as many people as possible, as much as possible. Against this approach, one might seek to factor in the potential of a program to get at the "root causes" of poverty, and start - or be part of - a chain reaction that ends poverty at the country or even world level. Below is our take on the following broad question: Why have some parts of the world emerged from poverty while others haven't? How can financial aid from developed nations best be directed to cause large-scale emergence from poverty?" ('17 Dec 06Added Wed 2017-Dec-06 11 p.m. CSTin development | a)
- Test My Wings? That Would Mean Less Time For Flying! [Blog.givewell]: "Measuring success at helping people is hard; it has inherent limits; it's time-consuming; and it's expensive. But it has to be done. The first reason is that no matter how much sense an idea makes in your head, translating it to reality is another matter. I'd argue that acceptance of this basic idea is the single reason that we now have medical alternatives to prayer. The second reason is that there are a a LOT of different charities out there for a donor to choose from - and without some sense of what they've actually accomplished, a donor has nothing to go on but theories and brochures. To me, that's not much better than flinging our money randomly around the globe, with anyone who has a good story and a good accountant getting a chance to play. That isn't a reasonable approach to solving the world's problems." ('17 Dec 05Added Tue 2017-Dec-05 11 p.m. CSTin costeffectiveness | a)
- Beware of Other-Optimizing [LessWrong]: "We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape. Even I am often surprised to find that X, which worked so well for me, doesn't work for someone else. But with so many others having tried to optimize me, I can at least recognize distance when I'm hit over the head with it." ('17 Dec 04Added Mon 2017-Dec-04 11 p.m. CSTin productivity | a)
- "Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and Other Delusions - Just Say No" [Philosophynews]: "On January 27th, 2012, Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University presented a controversial thesis to a packed crowd : faith is a belief-producing process that does not lead one to the truth. [...] There are many bad ways of discovering truth about the way the world works like divination, dowsing, sacrificing animals, and lucky guesses. And most people-even people of faith-would agree that these are poor and unreliable. Faith, says Dr. Boghossian, is like these other methods and should be discarded on the same grounds. He shows how the practices of various religious traditions have been shown using the methods of science to be ineffective and lead their practitioners to false conclusions." ('17 Dec 03Added Sun 2017-Dec-03 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Easy Useless Economics [NYTimes]: "So now we're in another depression, not as bad as the last one, but bad enough. And, once again, authoritative-sounding figures insist that our problems are 'structural,' that they can't be fixed quickly. We must focus on the long run, such people say, believing that they are being responsible. But the reality is that they're being deeply irresponsible." ('17 Dec 02Added Sat 2017-Dec-02 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Social Control - Why Heaven is Evil [Freethoughtblogs]: "It's just now occurring to me, way later than it should have: Heaven is almost as evil a doctrine as Hell. [...] So when people offer an infinitely huge reward to get us to do what they want… without having any good reason to think this reward will happen? We should be furious. And that's exactly what the doctrine of Heaven does. [...] The doctrine of Heaven is every bit as screwed-up as the doctrine of Hell. It is every bit as insidious a form of social control. We should give it every bit as much hostility and scorn as we give to Hell." ('17 Dec 01Added Fri 2017-Dec-01 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Omega Bowl [Freethoughtblogs]: "What I'm thinking of is-the Omega Bowl. Is that name taken? We could call it the Alpha and Omega Bowl if we need to be more specific. But it's not a contest between two football teams. It's a battle of the gods. Literally. Here's how it works. [...] The rules are simple: all gods are invited, and the first god to move the iron ball into the basket under his/her/their own name, WITHOUT any intervention on the part of his/her/their believers, is the One True God for the entire year. [...] Time limit is fifty-five minutes, divided into four ten-minute periods with a 5-minute intermission (stop by the snack bar!) between periods. In the event that none of the gods is able to emerge victorious, the title of One True Belief for the Year will be shared by atheism and skepticism. How about it, believers? Anyone out there with a god big enough to go head-to-head with the competition?" ('17 Nov 30Added Thu 2017-Nov-30 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Substitution Principle [LessWrong]: "System 1, if you recall, is the quick, dirty and parallel part of our brains that renders instant judgements, without thinking about them in too much detail. In this case, the actual question that was asked was 'what are the best careers for making a lot of money'. The question that was actually answered was 'what careers have I come to associate with wealth'." ('17 Nov 29Added Wed 2017-Nov-29 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Spreading the Wealth Around - Reflections Inspired by Joe the Plumber [Economics.harvard.edu]: "This essay discusses the policy debate concerning optimal taxation and the distribution of income. It begins with a brief overview of trends in income inequality, the leading hypothesis to explain these trends, and the distribution of the tax burden. It then considers the normative question of how the tax system should be designed. The conventional utilitarian framework is found to be wanting, as it leads to prescriptions that conflict with many individuals' moral intuitions. The essay then explores an alternative normative framework, dubbed the Just Deserts Theory, according to which an individual's compensation should reflect his or her social contribution." ('17 Nov 28Added Tue 2017-Nov-28 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Christopher Hitchens and the Protocol for Public Figure Deaths [Salon]: "Etiquette-based prohibitions on speaking ill of the dead should apply to private individuals, not public figures[.]" ('17 Nov 27Added Mon 2017-Nov-27 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Inconsequential Intuition Test [Philosophyetc.net]: "Chances are, you'll feel a lot more sympathy for one or other of these two lines of attack. If the first, you exhibit symptoms of deontology, and should consult a health professional immediately for psychiatric evaluation. If the second, you have broadly consequentialist intuitions, and should not be allowed near sharp implements, babies, or political power." ('17 Nov 23Added Thu 2017-Nov-23 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Why I'm Giving 10% of My Income to Charity [Tcs.cam.ac.uk]: "The lifetime earnings of a UK doctor are in the top 0.1% of the planet by wealth. By giving away 10% of my lifetime earnings I'll buy around 120000 years of healthy life - or, on the saving babies metric, about 1200 lives. My life is not going to be worse for giving money away (science shows that although money doesn't make you happy, giving it to charity does), and thousands of lives would be much better. Ethically, it's a no brainer. Cambridge grads usually earn quite a lot, so everyone reading this can do something similarly awesome." ('17 Nov 22Added Wed 2017-Nov-22 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- "A Different Way of Knowing" - The Uses of Irrationality… And It's Limitations" [Gretachristina.typepad]: "There's a trope I've noticed in debates about atheism, about skepticism, about science. And the trope goes something like this: 'Logic and reason isn't everything. Not everything in this world is rational. Not everything that we know in the world is known through logic and reason. Sometimes we have to use our intuition, and listen to our hearts. There are different ways of knowing than just reason and evidence.' The thing is? I actually think there's a lot of truth to this. And I still think it's a terrible argument to make against atheism, skepticism, and/or science. Let me explain." ('17 Nov 21Added Tue 2017-Nov-21 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Does Philosophical Method Rest On a Mistake? [Experimentalphilosophy.typepad]: "Intuitive judgments elicited by thought-experiments, such as the Trolley Problem, are unlikely to be correct just as perceptual judgments elicited by perceptual illusions, such as the checkerboard illusion, are unlikely to be correct, since both perceptual illusions and intuition pumps are cognitively unusual scenarios. What do you make of this argument?" ('17 Nov 20Added Mon 2017-Nov-20 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- There Is No Progress in Philosophy [Dl.dropbox]: "Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity, in the form of logic and language, philosophy is exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled with. Even more outrageous than this claim, though, is the blatant denial of its obvious truth by many practicing philosophers. The No-Progress view is explored and argued for here. Its denial is diagnosed as a form of anosognosia, a mental condition where the affected person denies there is any problem. The theories of two eminent philosophers supporting the No-Progress view are also examined. The final section offers an explanation for philosophy's inability to solve any philosophical problem, ever. The paper closes with some reflections on philosophy's future." ('17 Nov 19Added Sun 2017-Nov-19 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- Meta-Research [Blog.givewell]: "Meta-research refers to improving the incentives in the academic world, to bring them more in line with producing work of maximal benefit to society. Below, we discuss [1] Problems and potential solutions we perceive for (the incentives within) development economics, the area of academia we're currently most familiar with. [2] Some preliminary thoughts on the potential of meta-research interventions in other fields, particularly medicine. [3] Why we find meta-research so promising and high-priority as a cause. [4] Our plans at the moment for investigating meta-research further." ('17 Nov 17Added Fri 2017-Nov-17 11 p.m. CSTin metascience | a)
- Causality and Moral Responsibility [LessWrong]: "This, it seems to me, is the very essence of moral responsibility - in the one case, for a cowardly choice; in the other case, for a heroic one. And I don't see what difference it makes, if John's decision was physically deterministic given his initial conditions, or if John's decision was preplanned by some alien creator that built him out of carbon atoms, or even if - worst of all - there exists some set of understandable psychological factors that were the very substance of John and caused his decision." ('17 Nov 16Added Thu 2017-Nov-16 11 p.m. CSTin ethics | a)
- Why Did God Create Atheists? [Freethoughtblogs]: "Why did God create atheists? This is a question I always want to ask religious believers. (One of many questions, actually. 'What evidence do you have that God is real?' and 'Why are religious beliefs so different and so contradictory?' are also high on the list.) If God is real, and religious believers are perceiving a real entity… why is anyone an atheist? Why don't we all perceive him? If God is powerful enough to reach out to believers just by sending out his thoughts or love or whatever… why isn't he powerful enough to reach all of us? Why is there anyone who doesn't believe in him? [...] I've seen a couple of religious responses to this question. Neither of which is very satisfactory. But they keep coming up… so today, I want to take them on." ('17 Nov 15Added Wed 2017-Nov-15 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- The Fivefold Challenge [The Skepticalreview]: "Fundamentalist Christians claim that the Bible is a historically accurate work in every detail. They delight in showing how 'modern archaeology"'has verified this little biblical detail or that minor biblical event. But something they don't talk about much is the failure of modern archaeology to confirm some major events in the Bible." ('17 Nov 14Added Tue 2017-Nov-14 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Evolutionary Psychology [LessWrong]: "This historical fact about the origin of anger confuses all too many people. They say, 'Wait, are you saying that when I'm angry, I'm subconsciously trying to have children? That's not what I'm thinking after someone punches me in the nose.' No. No. No. NO! Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers. The cause of an adaptation, the shape of an adaptation, and the consequence of an adaptation, are all separate things. If you built a toaster, you wouldn't expect the toaster to reshape itself when you tried to cram in a whole loaf of bread; yes, you intended it to make toast, but that intention is a fact about you, not a fact about the toaster. The toaster has no sense of its own purpose." ('17 Nov 13Added Mon 2017-Nov-13 11 p.m. CSTin rationality | a)
- Free Will - mere semantic quibble? [Philosophyetc.net]: "The real disagreement is about the meaning of 'free', about whether it requires a categorical 'could', or merely a hypothetical one. Clearly the incompatibalist intends his use of 'could' to be interpreted categorically[. ...] Given that premise 2 is thus a logical truth, any counterargument must instead attack the first premise. [...] Put another way, it is a redefinition of freedom to mean 'not coerced', rather than 'not (deterministically) caused'. [...] Is this whole debate really that trivial? Well, not exactly. After all, we do use the word 'freedom' a lot, so it's fairly important to be clear about which concept we are referring to. The really important question, then, is 'which concept (F1 or F2) is most useful for our purposes (when using the word 'freedom')?' That, I think, is what the free will debate is really all about." ('17 Nov 12Added Sun 2017-Nov-12 11 p.m. CSTin philosophy | a)
- America Isn't A Corporation [NYTimes]: "But there's a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn't at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen - even great businessmen - do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery. Why isn't a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there's no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company." ('17 Nov 11Added Sat 2017-Nov-11 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Secularism and Religion in the Public Square [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "It is interesting that it is not the symbols of the Christian religion, but the ancient Roman and Greek religions, that survive today in our concept of justice. In addition to trials where evidence was presented and a verdict rendered, they also gave us democracy. In fact, we can find much closer representations of our current form of government in ancient Greek and Roman forms than we can in any Christian government formed before 1700. The omnipresence of the religious symbolism of Justitis (and even the very name Justice) tells us the true origin of these concepts. We are not so much a Christian nation as we are an ancient pagan Greek nation. We show this by continuing to include ancient pagan Greek and Roman religious symbolism in our government documents." ('17 Nov 10Added Fri 2017-Nov-10 11 p.m. CSTin skepticism | a)
- Peter Singer and Tyler Cowen transcript [LessWrong]: "In March 2009, Tyler Cowen (blog) interviewed Peter Singer about morality, giving, and how we can most improve the world. They are both thinkers I respect a lot, and I was excited to read their debate. Unfortunately the interview was available only as a video. I wanted a transcript, so I made one" ('17 Nov 09Added Thu 2017-Nov-09 11 p.m. CSTin effectivealtruism | a)
- Tradeoffs [Givinggladly]: "Before I parted with any money, I'd ask myself what it could do for a woman in Africa. (It doesn't have to be her, but that's who I always imagined.) Did I value my new jeans more than her month's groceries? More than her children's vaccinations or school fees? Could I make that tradeoff? [...] I also think there's only so much grief we can carry. I cannot go the next 70 years counting dead children on every receipt. I would break. So my advice is to spend a while really noticing that tradeoff. Notice whether you really do value the milkshake more than a child's vaccination. And then, after a time, make yourself a budget that reflects those values. Set aside money for unnecessary things that make you happy. Do what you think will nurture you to age 100 as a generous and strategic giver. Because that, in the end, is what will help the most people." ('17 Nov 08Added Wed 2017-Nov-08 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- Why I Should Pay Higher Taxes [Bigthink]: "It doesn't do me any good to be personally wealthier if my country or the world as a whole is becoming more unequal, more unstable, more gripped by poverty, more resentful, more insecure. I want to be successful, of course, but not at the expense of millions of people who didn't have the same advantages or the same good fortune I've enjoyed. As I've written in the past, what I want is a society that offers equality of opportunity, and I think we've wandered far from this ideal. Anti-tax dogma is causing a dangerous deterioration of the social contract, and we can't reverse that trend unless we accept that sometimes, yes, our taxes do need to be increased." ('17 Nov 07Added Tue 2017-Nov-07 11 p.m. CSTin policy | a)
- Charity - the video game that's real [Blog.givewell]: "What sucked about this experience was that it was all fake, and in the back of my head I knew that. In the end I felt pretty empty and lame. Enter altruism - where the bad guys are ACTUALLY BAD GUYS. Sure, I don't get the same satisfying explosion when they die… I don't even know to what extent, or whether, they die. So you can think of this video game as being more in the camp of something lame, like an RPG or something. But it's infinitely better because it's real. I don't care whether the kids are cute, or whether the organizations are nice to me, or whether my friends like my decisions. As with video games, I probably spend 99% of my time frustrated rather than happy. But… Malaria Man just pisses me off. It's that simple." ('17 Nov 06Added Mon 2017-Nov-06 11 p.m. CSTin giving | a)
- "So-Called "Litmus Tests": Skepticism and Social Justice" [Freethoughtblogs]: "There's this argument that keeps cropping up. Some skeptics argue that skepticism - skeptical organizations, conferences, publications, meetups, etc. - should branch out from the traditional topics we're usually associated with, such as astrology and UFOs and Bigfoot, and spend more time applying skepticism to social justice issues. The drug war; abstinence-only sex education; laws about birth control; laws about homosexuality and same-sex marriage; police policy… that sort of thing." ('17 Nov 03Added Fri 2017-Nov-03 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Arguing by Definition [LessWrong]: "When people argue definitions, they usually start with some visible, known, or at least widely believed set of characteristics; then pull out a dictionary, and point out that these characteristics fit the dictionary definition; and so conclude, 'Therefore, by definition, atheism is a religion!' But visible, known, widely believed characteristics are rarely the real point of a dispute." ('17 Nov 02Added Thu 2017-Nov-02 11 p.m. CDTin rationality | a)
- The Death-Penalty Debate Represents a Market Failure [Bloomberg]: "The debate over the death penalty offers a vivid illustration of a tragic flaw in the market of ideas: Strong beliefs attract a lot more attention, and can have a lot more influence, than the truth. [...] The reality, unsatisfying and inconvenient as it may be, is that we simply don't know how capital punishment affects the homicide rate." ('17 Nov 01Added Wed 2017-Nov-01 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- What Makes Countries Rich or Poor? [Nybooks]: "Power, prosperity, and poverty vary greatly around the world. Norway, the world's richest country, is 496 times richer than Burundi, the world's poorest country (average per capita incomes $84,290 and $170 respectively, according to the World Bank). Why? That's a central question of economics." ('17 Oct 31Added Tue 2017-Oct-31 11 p.m. CDTin development | a)
- Pushing moral buttons: The interaction between personal force and intention in moral judgment [Wjh.harvard.edu]: "In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person's life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent's intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-effect) and (2) whether the agent harms the victim in a manner that is relatively "direct" or "personal". Here we integrate these two classes of findings." ('17 Oct 30Added Mon 2017-Oct-30 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Indirect Utilitarianism [Philosophyetc.net]: "Utilitarianism is a much maligned moral theory, in part because it's so easily abused. It's easy for people to misunderstand the theory, and use it to 'justify' all sorts of atrocities. But of course utilitarianism properly understood does not lead to this. In fact, it tends to support our common-sense moral intuitions. Strange as it may seem, utilitarianism recommends that we do not base our everyday moral decision-making on calculations of utility." ('17 Oct 29Added Sun 2017-Oct-29 11 p.m. CDTin effectivealtruism | a)
- How to Get Your Dream Job [Wizards]: "My assignment was very straightforward. I had forty minutes to talk about what I did, how I came to do it, and what kids could do if they wanted a similar career. That wasn't enough for me, though. I wanted to have a message bigger than just that-this is the life of a game designer. After much thought, I decided my theme was going to be 'How To Get Your Dream Job.' I didn't just want to talk to the kids about my job, but rather about what my job represented to me. I wanted to explain the holy grail of the job search. I hoped to instill in the kids that, when planning your future, you should aim high." ('17 Oct 28Added Sat 2017-Oct-28 11 p.m. CDTin career | a)
- The Way It Was [Givinggladly]: "In thinking about problems that currently devastate developing nation, I try to remember that the US was a developing nation not so long ago. Malaria once plagued the American south and Midwest. It's the reason English colonists abandoned the Jamestown, Virginia settlement for somewhere with fewer mosquitoes. In 1946, the Centers for Disease Control were formed to fight malaria. Five years later, malaria was eradicated in the United States. [...] We've come a long way. Now I want this life for everyone." ('17 Oct 26Added Thu 2017-Oct-26 11 p.m. CDTin development | a)
- Abortive Virtues [Philosophyetc.net]: "Peter Thurley argues that circumstances of rape or incest are irrelevant to the (im)morality of abortion. Mostly everyone else in the world disagrees. Peter argues that the circumstances shouldn't register on the two extreme ideologies of 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice'. But he neglects to note that most people have a more moderate view. Indeed, I think that the common-sense view is best reflected in theory by some form of virtue ethics." ('17 Oct 25Added Wed 2017-Oct-25 11 p.m. CDTin ethics | a)
- Today's Reasons To Quit the Catholic Church [Bigthink]: "Consider the picture painted by all these stories taken together. The Catholic church admits that its most powerful officials have participated in the cover-up of child molestation; it pays off the child molesters and castrates their victims; and wherever the laws permit it, it tries to have its critics arrested and imprisoned. Is this arrogant, corrupt, medievally minded institution the kind of religion you want to belong to? If you haven't left the church yet, what are you waiting for?" ('17 Oct 24Added Tue 2017-Oct-24 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- Faith is a Vice [Athe Istethicist.blogspot]: "Faith is like drunk driving, or failing to secure a load when going on the highway. He creates a risk for others. Faith that a prayer may cure a young child puts the child at risk of dying from an easily treatable disease. The person who kills that child is no different than a drunk parent driving with their child in the back seat. The person who boasts about his faith should be looked at the same way we look at the person who brags that he constantly drives while drunk and hasn't killed anybody . . . yet. They display the same qualities, and deserve to be treated as such." ('17 Oct 23Added Mon 2017-Oct-23 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- The Psychology of the Honor System at the Farm Stand [Npr]: "But what customers seem to love at least as much as the expansive views and good food is Swanton's old-style method of payment: Step up to the unmanned counter whenever you're ready, figure out what you owe (scratch paper provided), and stuff the cash through a slot in the honor box. Swanton founder Jim Cochran says his stand has thrived for years on the honor payment system, a style of business he first admired as a college student at his favorite bakery in Santa Cruz decades ago. [...] That doesn't surprise social psychologist Michael Cunningham of the University of Louisville who has used "trust games" to investigate what spurs good and bad behavior for the last 25 years. For many people, Cunningham says, trust seems to be at least as strong a motivator as guilt. He thinks he knows why." ('17 Oct 22Added Sun 2017-Oct-22 11 p.m. CDTin economics | a)
- Don't Replace Data With Ideology [Bloomberg]: "In the U.S., a battle is brewing in Congress over two of the most valuable gauges of the nation's economic health: the American Community Survey and the Economic Census. The data sets, which the U.S. has maintained in some form since the early 1900s, provide researchers and the public with a trove of information on everything from the size of families' mortgage payments in Boise, Idaho, to the nation's median annual income. [...] It's hard to overstate how dangerous the destruction of high-quality, objective statistical information would be. Policy making would become more subjective, and hence more ideological. Governments would have more leeway to lie to the people about the success of their policies and the state of the economy." ('17 Oct 21Added Sat 2017-Oct-21 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Rand Paul Takes on The TSA [Schneier]: "It doesn't matter if an airport screener receives a paycheck signed by the Department of the Treasury or Private Airport Screening Services, Inc. As long as a terrorized government - one that needs to be seen by voters as "tough on terror" and wants to stop every terrorist attack, regardless of the cost, and is willing to sacrifice all for the illusion of security - gets to set the security standards, we're going to get TSA-style security." ('17 Oct 20Added Fri 2017-Oct-20 11 p.m. CDTin policy | a)
- Seek Criticism [Spencergreenberg]: "There was a time as a kid when I believed I was pretty much flawless. Unsurprisingly, it turned out I had even more flaws as a kid than I do now. I just had very poor self-awareness. [...] Criticism is easier to hear when you have sought it out than when it is thrust on you. And most people won't volunteer it, until they are quite annoyed. So don't wait until criticism comes your way. Seek criticism from your friends, your boss, and your spouse. Even acquaintances can provide an interesting perspective. Break down this criticism into the Accurate, Ignorant, and Emotive components. Know your flaws so you can correct them. Become greater." ('17 Oct 19Added Thu 2017-Oct-19 11 p.m. CDTin productivity | a)
- Some Mistakes of Scripture - When the Bible Gets the Bible Wrong [Ebonmusings]: "As most atheists are well aware, fundamentalist Christians generally treat the Bible as a perfect, self-contained whole: missing nothing, containing no errors, and every word written by the infallible inspiration of God. [...But t]he Bible is not the flawless, self-contained whole they imagine it to be: the text convicts itself of this, by repeatedly quoting and referring to other writings, evidently considered in their own day to be just as canonical as the surviving ones, but that are now long lost or have long since been rejected as pious forgeries. Nor were the Bible's authors the inspired, divinely guided saints of Christian myth; on the contrary, they were as fallible and forgetful as any other human being. We can see proof of this in the mistakes they made - mistakes that are preserved in the text as we have it today." ('17 Oct 18Added Wed 2017-Oct-18 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- How Science Works: As Told By the Higgs Boson [Skepticdetective.wordpress]: "The astrologers and homeopaths of the world want to enjoy the benefits of being scientifically proven without going through any of the tiresome business of actual testing. While groups like the AIDS deniers want you to believe that all scientists are evil and are trying to deceive you for their own dastardly ends. The discovery of the Higgs is a wonderful opportunity for scientists and science advocates, like myself, to point out how science actually works." ('17 Oct 17Added Tue 2017-Oct-17 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)
- The Crisis of Big Science [Nybooks]: "The International Space Station was partly responsible for the cancellation of the SSC [The Supercolliding Superconductor, and even bigger particle accelerator that was being constructed in Texas, but had its funding cut]. Both came up for a crucial vote in Congress in 1993. Because the Space Station would be managed from Houston, both were seen as Texas projects. After promising active support for the SSC, in 1993 the Clinton administration decided that it could only support one large technological project in Texas, and it chose the Space Station. Members of Congress were hazy about the difference." ('17 Oct 16Added Mon 2017-Oct-16 11 p.m. CDTin metascience | a)
- Does the Higgs Boson Discovery Resolve the Religion-Science Debate? [Huffingtonpost]: "Strong religious and anti-religious language has swirled around the search for the Higgs boson. One group took to calling it 'the God particle.' After all, they said, the Higgs boson is the foundation on which the standard model of physics rests. Not only that; the Higgs field adds real mass to pure energy, so it's like the moment of creation. 'Baloney!' replied the other group; we should just call it 'the God-damn particle,' since it's been so bloody difficult to detect over so many years." ('17 Oct 15Added Sun 2017-Oct-15 11 p.m. CDTin science | a)
- Particle Consistent with Higgs Boson Found [Cam.ac.uk]: "Researchers from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN have today, 4 July 2012, confirmed that they have found a new particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs Boson. [...] Andy Parker is the Professor of High Energy Physics at the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics (the Cavendish Laboratory). His current research interests involve experiments to reveal new physics such as extra space dimensions, quantum-sized black holes, and supersymmetry. [...] Below, he answers some questions surrounding the Higgs Boson." ('17 Oct 14Added Sat 2017-Oct-14 11 p.m. CDTin science | a)
- What Exactly is the Higgs Boson? [Science.howstuffworks]: "Particle physics usually has a hard time competing with politics and celebrity gossip for headlines, but the Higgs boson has garnered some serious attention. That's exactly what happened on July 4, 2012, though, when scientists at CERN announced that they'd found a particle that behaved the way they expect the Higgs boson to behave." ('17 Oct 13Added Fri 2017-Oct-13 11 p.m. CDTin science | a)
- The Higgs Boson Explained[Vimeo] [Vimeo]: "We visit particle physicist Daniel Whiteson at CERN, where he talks to us about what the mysterious Higgs Boson is and how the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] is going to find it (if it exists)." ('17 Oct 12Added Thu 2017-Oct-12 11 p.m. CDTin science | a)
- The Higgs Boson: Why You Should Care [The Dailybeast]: "Tiny particles visible for fractions of a second? Turns out the implications are a very big deal for how we understand the planet, the universe, and ourselves." ('17 Oct 09Added Mon 2017-Oct-09 11 p.m. CDTin science | a)
- Biased Accomodations [Philosophyetc.net]: "As a society we tend to be much more accommodating of some commitments (e.g. religious or familial) than others (hobbies, etc.). Is this fair?" ('17 Oct 08Added Sun 2017-Oct-08 11 p.m. CDTin skepticism | a)