What Ayn Rand is saying is: if you say we should care about animals, you should care about animals. You should actually notice if you're eating meat. You should actually check if your pet that appears to be happy is actually happy. You should ask questions about wild animal suffering. You shouldn't be having discussions about caring about animals only when it happens to come up, which is when you and your buddies happen to talk about it, or on online forums, or when you choose to buy the more expensive "organic" option because it's probably better, or whatever, and the rest of the time live a life completely orthogonal to that, as if they're just words you emit to play a game instead of true, meaningful statements. If you say "nobody can be certain of anything", you shouldn't be certain of anything. If you say "we need to be more compassionate", you should be more compassionate. If you say "we should teach critical thinking in schools", maybe you should actually try to get that to happen, and that involves knowing if it already happens, and why it is failing or succeeding, and to what degree.

What Ayn Rand isn't saying is any sort of linguistic gotcha, or something like that. Why did so many commenters go that route? Jesus. "No, you misinterpreted her, when the whole point of what she said is you shouldn't do that but take her at face value. Unlike you, whose interpretation is a misinterpretation, my interpretation is taking her at face value." Very funny, in a sort of meta way, but no.

I mean, judging by what you said, context and intent (or what you assume is the intent) is more important to you than the straightforward meaning. What did you think Ayn Rand said? "We should use dictionaries" but in more words? No, the important thing she says is that we should live by ideas we accept as true, that we should uphold values we claim to defend. You don't need to impose your meaning on others, but there needs to be a meaning you take seriously.

>What really matters is the idea someone is trying to convey and sometimes people are not great at that which requires work on the receiving end

That's what she's saying. You'd know that if you actually did it.

What she means is that when you say something like "narcissism leads to linguistic tyranny", you should actually make sure you know what that means, and that that means anything at all, not just let vibes do the work for you.

Nothing to do with sarcasm. It means that if you claim to believe something, or if you think someone else believes something, you should start by acting as if it's actually true. Like when people hear "abortion is murder" and somehow end up parsing that as "I hate women" - don't do that. Or when people claim to think "abortion is murder" and yet don't act like millions of children are being murdered, but act as if it's a minor inconvenience to be settled with ballots.

As the title said: take ideas seriously. Don't use them as attire or status markers, to identify which political group you're in, or for fun philosophical discussions you ignore in real life. Did you know 2/3rds of self-described vegetarians claim to have eaten meat in the last 24 hours?

Programmers, especially programmers of statistics software/packages, usually take numerical stability into account, and put recommendations in the documentation. E.g. Numpy and Scipy have log1p, exp1m, logsumexp and such for stability reasons. R mentions it often iirc. It's the researchers that aren't likely to know.

Not really. We're actually close to some rather hard limits. However, "close" means "there are still orders of magnitude of improvement up for grabs for anyone who wants to try and has millions of dollars to spare" - we already know, today, that we can make much better models, and how to do that. Look up "scaling laws" maybe.

Must we, though?

For all that she speaks in a reasonable and measured way, she endorses bad faith tactics. She straight up admits this - Malcolm X was good because he made MLK seem reasonable in comparison. Seeing nothing wrong with this kind of mercenary realpolitik is not conductive to getting anyone to ally with you.

>I think most of us have experienced at some point or another, where we find ourselves drawn to (whether sexually, romantically or just as a friend) someone that politics tells us we shouldn’t be drawn to, someone who has the wrong body shape, or the wrong race, or the wrong background, or the wrong class. I think most of us have had those experiences.

I have no earthly clue what the "wrong" traits of person to be attracted to alluded to are. She seems to take it as a given that people follow this notion of hierarchy by default. I don't have "dreams where we have sex with the wrong kinds of people" because I've never had a mental category of "wrong person" to begin with, and I don't think that's uncommon! The article mentions she's the daughter of an investment banker, and it shows.

>It’s the women who have to figure out how to feed their children and feed their husbands and so on.

Lol. Lmao, even.

Saying that death is straighforwardly bad? Nah, that's too obvious, so it's a stupid and unwise opinion. The smart and wise opinion must be that death is good, actually.

I'm not convinced that there's anything more to discuss. It's all this kind of trivial contrarianism. Attempts to signal intelligence by playing devil's advocate - "what if bad thing... good?"

Obviously you can infer causation from raw "passive" data. What else could our brains possibly be doing when they learn? We don't affect most things.

One way imagine how it's possible is to contrast the DAGs A->C, A->D, B->C, B->D, C->E, C->F, D->E, D->F and the one with arrows flipped. Then think about conditional dependence, P(C|D,A,B) = P(C|A,B) vs. P(C|D,E,F) != P(C|E,F). Knowing everything about effects can increase mutual information between C and D; knowing everything about causes can't. That's how you can distinguish between this DAG and the backwards one using only correlations. No need to intervene anywhere.

Is governments choosing to put children in schools not a deliberate and artificial improvement? So it's certainly possible, because it's been done.

Turns out, in the real world, nobody cares about philosophical debates, they don't wait, they go with their gut feeling or weird preconceived cultural notions about what's "improvement", and sometimes it even works out.

Also, what is a "viable belief"? Something being false is different from something being unpopular, and "unpopular" is different from "unpopular in the West".

Fun fact: (with some assumptions about operators) only one of the cyclic permutations of a RPN (or PN) string is valid, so you can be sneaky and define the value of any string as the value of the only parsable-as-RPN cyclic permutation of it, leading to funny stuff like 1 + 2 - 3 = 2, 5 * 6 - 7 + 8 * 9 = 368. Another fun fact: all strings with N numbers and N-1 binary operators are valid under that scheme, such as - + 8 7 * 6 5 * * 4 3 = 169. Proofs are an exercise to the reader.

Your comment takes it for granted that Rand's views are wrong and expects that refuting them should be straightforward, and never offers any attempted refutations of actual positions.

Like, "I hear X but there's an obvious response to it I can think of, Y, and I'm sure people have written books and gotten degrees on Y, so it's been definitively addressed, I'm certain" is borderline fallacious in this day and age. You go check and the learned academics are also writing nothing more than tumblr posts, refering to each other, never actually bothering to refute X, assuming someone else did it.

Compare what your reaction would be to someone saying e.g. "racism against Hispanics isn't real". Also, ever? What about the draft? What about Jews, or Italians?

What are you talking about? The definition of "hate" is expanding, not shrinking, and it's definitely not conservatives doing that. Though, of course, you can still say "kill all men" or "kill all whites" and nobody cares. Even here on reddit, the admins say it's ok - even though neither men nor whites are a majority worldwide.

On the one hand, sure, I want to be free to murder people if I really want, and free of creepy 24/7 observation, and people shouldn't assume things about me even if they're 100% accurate, and I would never trust anyone who wants to put cameras on me who claims it comes from a desire to reduce murders - let alone if it's lesser crimes.

On the other hand, if we really had a magical technology that allowed us to predict and stop murders with perfect accuracy and without the usual surveillance indignities and risks, it would be criminal not to use it. That hypothetical wouldn't be just another way for the powerful to assert themselves. And the problem with using it for other crimes is mostly that certain actions shouldn't be criminal, i.e. that the law is not lenient enough or not specific enough (perhaps for good reasons). In an ideal world with better institutions, we would resolve such a problem by changing the law.

If a professor started asking me why I'm laughing at a YTP I'd just leave.

We could switch to nuclear. Also, too late for what? The worst predictions are "the planet will warm up a few degrees by 2100".

Why all the comments just angry at Ayn Rand? Is signaling how angry you are at someone accepted as a refutation of their arguments, and the arguments of anyone else who is somehow loosely associated with something named after them?

Bringing up Hume dismissively doesn't work either. Science can obviously study some facts about ethics, for example what people say about ethics under what situations, or what oughts children usually learn and when, even if it can't directly tell anyone what they ought to do. And once someone has some oughts, new ises can get you to make different decisions, and science can give you plenty of those. If you were omniscient, surely that would help you make morally better decisions, if you wanted.

Finally, if you want to understand morality, you should have some knowledge of the variety of naturally occuring morality, and ideally explanations of why it came to be that way. It's easy to make untrue generalizations that exclude behaviors (or patterns of behavior) that aren't merely hypothetical but already exist somewhere.

Why do you find blatant racism "funny and relatable"?

If their epistemology is "warped", what's a non-warped epistemology, and where do we find it?

Thinking about recent news as an example, allegedly a tweet by someone with a $8 checkmark calling insulin free dropped the stock price of a pharma company. There was a graph and everything. This is a thing many thousands or millions of people now believe.

However, if you look at it carefully, you might discover that the most often used graph's y-axis is misleading, and it was only a 2% drop made to look much bigger. Or that the dip actually started a day before the tweet. Or that many pharma companies also dropped at the same time. Or, if you're brave enough, that the primary cause of high insulin prices is the FDA.

Believing in the "conspiracy theory"-like set of thoughts that journalists tell stories they like, journalists distort the facts all the time, and journalists hate Elon Musk can be highly predictive: It told me that something is off with this story and I shouldn't take it seriously, before I even had to check. Correctly so.

What was the reaction on popular subreddits instead? Immediate acceptance. Discussion of how this came to be. Calling stock valuations entirely fake. Vague death threats against Musk, Big Pharma executives, capitalists in general. Blaming the right wing. Predicting the fall of Twitter and legal action for this. Lamenting how easily large mobs can believe such brazen lies, ironically.

Anyway, if you can't trust Forbes, Fortune, Snopes, Business Insider, The Independent, Financial Times, all of whom wrote suggestive articles linking the tweet with the price dip, but never mentioning or downplaying any of the pertinent facts that are one google search away that clearly show this is mere coincidence, whom can you trust? And if someone says this is probably coordinated action instead of sites just copying each other - given that the existence of groups like JournoList where journalists collude with each other has leaked in the past - is he a "conspiracy theorist"? And if there are no trustworthy sources anywhere, how do you learn anything about the news?

Fret not: This is still useful information. When you know what liars want you to believe, you can get often indirect knowledge of that the truth must have been. If someone has a coin and wants you to believe it is biased, "this coin is clearly biased, I got 5 heads in a row" without specifying e.g. "5 heads in a row in the first 5 flips" tells you that the longest streak he could manage was 5 heads in a row, which means a pro-head bias can't have been very high. It also tells you that he had no easier/more convincing method to show bias, so it involved the hard work of flipping a coin (an expected number of) 62 times, and reporting the longest streak instead of the average. It's hard work to do the Bayesian updating math, but it tells you that you should consider it more likely that the coin is fair now, not less.

What conspiracy theorists often do is approximate this sort of thinking. When journalists tell them X is true, they look for reasons why X is false, or reasons to falsely report X is true now instead of earlier or later, and usually find some fairly clear-cut ones. Are they wrong to do so? They're in an adversarial environment. Such an epistemology makes sense.

Your vote is part of a signal. It is unfortunate that one cannot simultaneously signal "I don't like the B option" without also signaling "I'm okay with the A option" when there are practically 2 options + abstaining.

Nevertheless, you should think on the margin - the people most likely to skip voting for B are the people who dislike B the most and are okay with A the most, and will probably not be swayed by the usual argumetns. If anything, they're part of the reason they'll skip.

As the author said: "A good arguer has to speak to and be heard by those with whom they disagree. This requires that they know the alternative views in the ways that those who hold those alternative views know them."

The people you perceive as emotional think they're holding their own beliefs for logical reasons. Maybe they're angry or annoyed because you're violating some deeply held principle of theirs, or misunderstanding their position, or seemingly accusing them of something - but from their perspective, the emotions will be reasonable, too.

Bad faith is rarer than people think, but it does happen (e.g. knowing your opponent is right about something specific, but pretending otherwise so you can "win"; or suspecting you're wrong about something but flinching away from any thought or evidence that would confirm it). Those are genuine cases of "emotional rather than logical". Even then, understanding the true details of the position your opponents hold and how they arrived there can only help you, not hurt you. The urge to "retaliate" with bad faith of your own should be ignored, because your perception is almost certainly biased to see bad faith where there isn't any. Bulverism (investigating your opponent's motives instead of the argument itself, using that to explain why they're wrong) needs to be used carefully or not at all - it's easy to do, it's often actually correct, but it harms your arguments a lot if you're wrong but helps very little if you're right, so it's not worth it.

That's, like, "watermelons vs. the color red" - what are you even talking about?

An utility function is little more than a mathematical abstraction that captures already existing preferences. Saying someone "values utility" is tautological. Arguably, being consequentialist is tautological. Perhaps confusingly, "utilitarianism" usually means "you should value other people's values equally", sometimes without the "equally".

Many people have a strong preference for freedom. That's just a fact, something that has to be incorporated whenever you try to calculate someone's preferences/utility function correctly. Keeping these ideas in mind, your post makes little sense.

>Second, utility arises as part of an amoral biological process of evolutionary adaptation. Something amoral cannot create something moral.

That makes "moral" a completely useless word, then. It can't refer to anything, since the planet was 100% amoral at some point in the past.

Trump wanted to ban it, and Trump is bad, so banning it is bad, so it didn't get banned. It's that simple.