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@Eliezer - nope, sorry, 3/8 now, seems like 10,000 words of cod fiction and OB has truly jumped the shark.
There's load of good ideas there but praps you shoulda' waited until LessWrong was working AllRight.
yup. alien ones.
wellll.. it's kinda fun, Eleizer, I guess so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and keep reading .... but....but... is this format quite right for OB?
Would this series not be better in - ooh, I don't know - a new and more open sister site of some kind, perhaps with the key points written up at the end and posted on to OB, if they seem popular? Or am I wrong.
"Your opinions have been noted and completely disregarded"
Ouch!
I think perhaps my opinion wasn't clear:
- I don't think atheism is a religion
- I don't believe you think atheism is a religion But I think your post sure made it sound like one :-)
"Yes, she's a solid atheist in no danger whatsoever, thank you for asking"
Eliezer I have never heard you make atheism sound so much like a religion.
I'll put it down to too much turkey and pecan pie :-)
Jo - I think you will be surprised to find out that many of your co-religionists are, actually, in pretty much the same boat and don't 'really' believe 90% of the stuff they parrot (eg who really believes Exodus:12:29-30 nowadays?)
What people do have is a general feeling that there is a God(s) (seems to be almost hardwired in Human brains, and hard to overcome), and a liking for the companionship and structure that a religion brings.
Belief in Belief, as Dennett calls it in 'Breaking the Spell', which is good book to read..
"I hope the bailout fails decisively, so this calculation can be tested"
more pragmatically you can't teach creationism because you wouldn't know which which creationist story to teach? The christian one isn't the only creation story. How about the jain one? the buddhist story? the viking story? the Roman creation story?
One way to go about it would be to assemble the whole canon of stories, and then look about in the world around us to see if there is any evidence that helps support or falsify the different accounts. Maybe one could examine the stories and create some testable predictions from them and .... oh, hang about...
typo in the post, surely..
"Wade repeatedly selected insect subpopulations for low numbers of adults per subpopulation"
Didn't he in fact select sub-populations with low numbers of infants? Or am I misunderstanding completely.
very cool!
Devil's Advocacy explained: "While many undergraduates prefer teachers to give them the one true answer on policy questions, I try to avoid taking sides. In class discussions, I ask students to take and defend policy positions, and then I defend any undefended major positions, and mention any unmentioned major criticisms of these positions. The important thing is for students to understand the sorts of arguments that an economist would respect. Hanson :-)
Eliezer - a suggestion. I'd really welcome a posting that acts a table of contents to the series: An overview of your argument, laying out the basic narrative with links to each of the posts in the best reading order, somethnig that gives shape to the series.
The great thing about a blog format is the way it develops over time. The bad thing about it is that it's a terrible archive... reverse order, etc etc. I'd like to be able to tell someone 'read Eliezer's series on Quantum Physics... here's a link to the overview page...
Eliezer (and Robin) this series is very interesting and all, but.... aren't you writing this on the wrong blog?
I used to like this blog better when it was all about overcoming bias
"If I had a hammer that seemed to me to work really well, but no one was willing to pay me the going rate for hammers of that quality"
.. then by definition you have mis-estimated the going rate.
hmm... well, it was an interesting month but I'm not sure I didn't enjoy this blog more when it was a blog just about, well, overcoming bias. Eliezer, perhaps you should have your own blog...
BTW I saw you on the TV the other night, talking about the singularity.
It's always odd, isn't it, seeing a person for the first time whom you have previously known only in writing. As always, you didn't look/sound at all like I expected.
Which led me to an interesting line of thought: why does reading someone's writing produce any expectation at all of what the person looks/sounds like? It's a bias. Is there a halo effect: we expect intelligent writers to look tall and beautiful? Or is there a einstein-bias: we expect intelligent writers to be wild-looking with messy hair, talking quickly?
Anyway, there you were on the screen. Looking different. "Quick!", I yelled to my wife, who was in the kitchen, "quick, come here! It's Eliezer Yudkowsky!"
hmmm...perhaps I need to get out more.