jnicholasp

It does when the question is, "Does first person evidence exist?"

I agree with your basic sentiment, that it's wrong that we so often assume that housework is women's work, and that it would be better if that gender expectation were not taken as a fundamental given.

I disagree with the view that the washing machine, and other domestic labor-saving devices, haven't been deeply beneficial for hundreds of millions of women, even though it is still a mistake that we still see doing the laundry as a job for women. I disagree because changing cultures is really hard and really slow, while changing technology is, by comparison, incredibly easy and fast. And it is absolutely better to make easy, fast changes, whenever that is possible, than to sneer at them because they do not solve the underlying problem. They still solve some part of the problem. Sometimes to a significant degree. That matters: billions of hours of trivial human labor have been saved, many of them going instead to the leisure, study, and thought necessary to move people toward the real solution.

You seem to be using a very broad definition of 'science'. What do you mean by the term? Do we know mathematical truths via science, or is that a different realm of knowledge? Are philosophical arguments categorizable as science? What about questions that are in theory testable, but the test involves huge numbers of complex interfering factors and decades of time (like many questions of political and social policy) - are they usefully labeled as scientific questions, or do we gain something by recognizing them as requiring some other mode of knowledge than just empirical observations?

> answerable questions not addressable by science

So what does 'answerable' mean? There's no such thing as proof, rigorously speaking, outside of math and other formal systems, and not always within them. The answers that the best hard science provides are strong, but not provably certain, and the spectrum of certainty extends a long way down from there - at what level of certainty does an answer stop being an answer? I think there are many important questions that don't admit hard scientific answers, and for which 'science' as I understand the term isn't the most useful mode of knowledge for finding the 'answers' that are most likely to be fruitful.

I'm in the same familial boat. Have you looked into lithium supplementation yet?

> So it doesn't really matter what you intend it to say, as long as the grader can and does interpret something consistent from it.

Which, for any sufficiently complex and ambiguous sentence, any motivated reader will always be able to do.

I won't speculate on how large a percentage it is, but some percentage of these papers are straight up Rorschach ink blots, even if the authors themselves believed they were writing something coherent and intelligible.

The 'deadweight' administrative cost is itself an economic benefit - it's money paid to some administrator, who will thus have extra money and will be able to return it to the market in turn. It just means that the $500 of benefits isn't actually $500, and doesn't just go the end recipient: it's actually $550 (or whatever) and goes to the end recipient as well as the administrators and other intermediaries who deliver the money to the end user. That extra money doesn't evaporate into the void.

Exactly. Does it take ten times as much work for a real estate agent to sell a $1m house versus a $100k house? Obviously not. So what are we paying ten times as much for in the one case, and if there's no connection between effort and fee, what are we paying for, and why, even in the low end case? Totally a scam, totally ripe for disruption.

Why is it that we believe employers have a duty to employees to provide benefits like health coverage?

If you have a viable model by which the entire human race can plausibly work together to fund and implement this, the rest of us would love to hear it.

There's plenty that's flawed about capitalism, but the thing is that it works better than anything else we've so far thought of for providing actual incentives for people to push the envelope of what's possible and create new things in economically viable ways. If there were some way to equally effectively incentivize regulatory oversight - which we manifestly do not have in existing governmental structures - we'd be in solid shape.

I read your article and all of your comments, and my consequentialist argument is this: you will be a lot happier, and other people will like you more, if you learn to use rationalist thinking modes and lists of fallacies less as weapons to wield against others, and more as tools for self-examination and ways to question not only what you're thinking but why - sometimes you'll realize that you're over-reacting to a perceived insult, and justifying your angry response with a weakly related argument about why the entity that insulted you is terrible. And maybe you'll stop yourself before you do that publicly where people can see your tantrum.

It's pretty clear that you are confused about what Wikipedia is (not your personal cloud server) vs what you think it ought to be (your personal cloud server). Getting angry about your clearly-against-the-rules behavior being stopped and using that as a reason to go on a rant about Wikipedia dying of incivility is ridiculous.

Wikipedia may or may not have a problematic culture. You were still obviously in the wrong and no one owes you their time to go into a gentle negotiation about it.

Mate, this isn't about abstract philosophical disagreements over what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia is a private platform entitled to make and enforce its own rules about what it is and how it should be used, that you've been using for years and have no excuse for not knowing the obvious basic rules of, one of which is "don't abuse wikipedia by treating it as an all-purpose host for your personal data". You have zero grounds to be pissed, and zero entitlement to the time and effort of a volunteer moderator who saw someone blatantly abusing the site's hosting generosity. Not letting you use Wikipedia's servers as your personal cloud service has absolutely nothing to do with a perceived decline in the character or culture of the site.

Make a Google doc next time.

Marijuana is good for both nausea and the sense of wonder.

I didn't read the statement where they discuss this, but Prineville, OR does not get a lot of rain. It is in the eastern Oregon high desert, very near Bend, and it gets more than 200 days per year that are sunny or mostly sunny, the highest number of clear sky days in the state.

I'm interested in at least the elevator pitch. What's your basic idea?

I assume you're referencing Grady Towers' essays about high IQ people feeling like 'Outsiders'. His argument, I think, was that high IQ does not inherently doom people to be outsiders/fail to get appropriate education/be unhappy and mal-adjusted/etc., but that high IQ is a potentially alienating trait and that it is the alienation - in those cases where the high IQ person doesn't have enough peers, support, and meaningful challenge - that does the damage.

What do you think of that argument, and do you know of any relevant research on that aspect of the question? It anecdotally resonates with my experience, and seems to be a prominent subsection of the responses in most threads of this type, but I would like to know what formal attempts have been made to measure it, if any exist.

Also, again IIRC, I thought Towers reassessed one of Terman's longitudinal studies and found that there was a correlation between the highest IQ individuals and social/emotional mal-adaption. Do you disagree with Towers' assessment?

How much steady, difficult progress is currently being made?

This seems like a thing that is being under-funded and under-researched, and more money, and particularly attention, being given to it is a good thing even if you don't think the particular method is likely to be effective.

That is, unless you get yourself a time-traveling space ship and dedicate yourself to the engrossing project of personally insulting every single being in the universe, in alphabetical order.

http://www.hhgproject.org/entries/wowbagger.html (That site sucks to read, btw. White text on black background, ugh.)

All of the meaning and wisdom derived from their lives was because they were alive. Now they aren't, and we don't get any more of their particular genius, and that is a damned shame.

It's also a damned shame that my grandfather, who is precisely nobody on the world stage, but still somebody, and currently in the hospital and I might get a text any minute saying he's dead, is on the brink of exiting the world, joining the hundred billion or so other humans who've ceased to exist for no good reason other than that the blind god Nature doesn't care about anything we care about. What Nature has ordained, she has ordained without reference to meaning or wisdom or the interests of those who live and die within her system, and we will be doing right when we remake her.

That's roughly correct, but it means that because it is saying that if you really believe something you should be willing to back up that belief with something that will cost you if you're wrong - i.e., a genuine belief that you honestly think is correct is something you should be willing to bet on because you will expect to win the bet.

People telling someone else to 'put their money where their mouth is' are essentially asking the someone else to prove the sincerity of their belief - or the person saying it has an opposing sincere belief and they would like to make some money off of a bet over who is right.

The original argument was about business success, and that's what my original comment was mostly about. But the reply to my original comment that I was replying to here, seemed to be taking the argument toward the general success of our species, and that's what I was responding to (although I did note even within that context how it related to business success).

> Ideas are the only thing of fundamental value to us as an intelligent species.

In my usage, 'information' describes patterns that exist in the universe, and 'ideas', at least loosely, describes the apprehension of one or more of those inherent patterns by an intelligent mind. An idea is the mental perception or conception of external information. Information might be fundamental to the universe, but ideas are fundamental to intelligent minds, being the lens through and by which we perceive everything.

My point, though, was mostly that it's false that ideas have no value - I wasn't trying to make the complete opposite error and say that execution has no value. Of course to make something happen in the world you need execution as well as something to execute.

> Ideas are the only thing of fundamental value to us as an intelligent species.

I'm not arguing that execution has no value. Obviously ideas, particularly business/startup ideas, must be acted on effectively in order to become real. But: ideas are logically prior to execution; the ability to conceive of abstract ideas is a far larger developmental step than is the subsequent ability to act on those ideas; and being able to have abstract ideas is the thing that most definitively separates homo sapiens from all other species on Earth.

The idea that ideas have no value is prima facie ridiculous. The reason we aren't just a slightly odd species of chimpanzees is that we developed the ability to produce ideas. Ideas are the only thing of fundamental value to us as an intelligent species.

The statement that ideas don't matter, only execution matters, can only apply among sets of trivial ideas that don't change the landscape. Yes, if you want to make Facebook for Farmers, that's an idea that is completely interchangeable with hundreds of other equally trivial ideas, and it doesn't matter which one you choose so much as how well you execute on it. But if you have a genuinely significant idea, something that can fundamentally alter the landscape or advance humanity, then execution is secondary, and, in fact, lots of different people or organizations could implement it. That isn't to say that you can't screw up the execution and fail thereby, but the limiting factor to success is different for trivial ideas vs significant ideas: there are thousands of trivials and the major factor of success is how well you execute the one you choose; there are few significants, and the major factor in success is having them first/getting to market first. If you think you have one of the latter, NDAs might make sense.

There is no reasonable argument for preferring that more people should die as long as the agents of their deaths are the kinds of biological organisms we're used to. What we happen to be already accustomed to has no relevance in determining what we ought to do in the future, except in trivial cases where the different alternatives don't lead to widely distinct numbers of casualties.

Thanks for the reply. I understand that you may need to hold your cards a little close to your chest, but it's cool to get an idea of what you're working on. What you're proposing sounds really useful. I'm excited about the prospects for what another commenter called the startup approach to science; so many of the ways we're doing research and science could be improved drastically with newer, smarter platforms and methods. Good luck with yours, I hope you're wildly successful.

> So where are they?

There are two questions here, I think: are there a proportionately greater number of people in the world today with Shakespeare-level talent for language; and do those who exist now have the same chance of being recognized and lionized as Shakespeare did?

I don't know how we could answer the first question, but I assume it's roughly correct, just on faith in the statistical likelihood of the normal distribution of IQ/talent holding true. The second question maybe gives us some way to account for why we don't seem to see them, though. For one thing, people with that set of talents have a much wider set of fields to go into, now: in Shakespeare's time, people with literary talent could write poetry, or plays (or, as he did, both), and not much else. Today, both of those are sub-divided into lots of sub-genres, and prose fiction exists (and is also highly sub-divided), and prose non-fiction, and song-writing, and journalism, and writing for tv and movies, etc. We wouldn't expect to see every current Shakespeare working solely as a playwright: we should be looking across all the fields that need literary talent, if we want to accurately count today's Shakespeares.

And we need to consider whether a Shakespeare-level talent today has any reasonable chance of getting Shakespeare's level of recognition and admiration. There is so much more content today that any one person's output can't get nearly the attention and focus that the smaller world of Elizabethan England could give to Shakespeare. Achieving 'legendary' status probably depends less on absolute talent level than on how much one stands out from one's competitors - that's much harder to do in a larger, more sophisticated world. You would probably have to be significantly better than Shakespeare today to stand out as much as he did in his time.

Going back to the sciences, the situation is a little different because it probably is the case, as you suggested, that the field is finite and there will probably come a time when there is nothing significant for a new Newton to discover, and thereby be recognizable as a Newton-level mind. That's less the case for the arts - the working space there is much larger, possibly infinite. But the increasing sophistication and the growing number of fields to work in is the same in science as in literature, and so is the consequent dilution of attention and recognition. I'm not sure that conditions now allow us to reliably recognize our geniuses.

Can you elaborate on the platform you're building? What is it, how does it work, what problems do you think it solves, etc.?

I didn't down vote you, and I have no special insight into why others have, but my guess would be that at least some of those votes were meant to indicate disagreement with your interpretation: I think more people see the equal sign as representing legs, rather than a pedestal.

If I were to speculate further, I would suspect that some people are wary of interpretations of ambiguous texts that unnecessarily imply sexist/culturally fraught meanings.

You wouldn't beam energy directly from near-solar orbit to the surface of the Earth; you would relay it to orbiting receivers around the planet, which would in turn beam it to the surface, and reaching the night-side as well as day-side.