Mike S. asks:

How should we think about gradations of certainty in Critical Rationalist terms?

don't.

there are the following 3 situations regarding one single unambiguous problem. this is complete.

1) you have zero candidate solutions that aren't refuted by criticism.

gradations of certainty won't help. you need to brainstorm!

2) you have exactly one candidate solution which is not refuted by criticism.

tentatively accept it. gradations of certainty won't help anything.

(if you don't want to tentatively accept it – e.g. b/c you think it'd be better to brainstorm and criticize more – then that is a criticism of accepting it at this time.)

3) you have more than one candidate solution which is not refuted by criticism.

this is where gradations of certainty are mainly meant to help. but they don't for several reasons. here are 6 points, 3A-3F:

3A) you can convert this situation (3) into situation (1) via a criticism like one of these 2:

3A1) none of the ideas under consideration are good enough to address their rivals.

3A2) none of these ideas under consideration tell me what to do right now given the unsettled dispute between them.

(if no criticisms along those lines apply, then that would mean some of the ideas you have solve your problem. they tell you what to do or think given the various ideas and criticism. in which case, do/think that. it's situation (2).)

3B) when it comes to taking action in life, you can and should come up with a single idea about what to do, which you have no criticism of, given the various unresolved issues.

3C) if you aren't going to take any actions related to the issue, then there's no harm in leaving it unresolved for now and not knowing the answer. you don't have to rate gradations of certainty, you can just say there's several candidates and you haven't sorted it out yet. you would only need to rank them, or otherwise decide which to pursue, if you were going to take some action in relation to the truth of this matter (in which case see 3B)

3D) anything you could use to rank one idea ahead of another (in terms of more gradations of certainty, more justification, more whatever kind of score) either does or doesn't involve a criticism.

if it doesn't involve a criticism of any kind, then why/how does it provide a reason to rank one uncriticized reason above another one (or add to the score of one over another)?

if it does involve a criticism, then the criticism should be addressed. criticisms are explanations of problems. addressing it requires conceptual thinking such as counter-arguments, explanations of why it's not a problem after all in this context, explanations of how to improve the idea to also address this criticism, etc. either you can address the criticism or you can't. if you can't that's a big deal! criticisms you see no way to address are show stoppers.

one doesn't ever have to act on or believe an idea one knows an unanswered criticism of. and one shouldn't.

also to make criticism more precise, you want to look at it like first you have:

• problem
• context (background knowledge, etc)
• idea proposed to solve that problem

then you criticize whether the idea solves the problem in the context. (i consider context implied as part of a problem, so i won't always mention it.)

if you have a reason the idea does not solve the problem, that's a show stopper. the idea doesn't work for what it's supposed to do. it doesn't solve the problem. if you don't have a criticism of the idea successfully solving the problem, then you don't have a criticism at all.

this differs from some loose ways to think about criticism which are often good enough. like you can point out a flaw, a thing you'd like to be better, without any particular problem in mind. then when you consider using the idea as a solution to some problem, in some context, you will find either the flaw does or doesn't prevent the idea from solving that problem.

in general, any flaw you point out ruins an idea as a solution to some problems and does not ruin it as a solution to some other problems.

3E) ranking or scoring anything using more than one variable is very problematic. it often means arbitrarily weighting the factors. this is a good article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-order-of-things

3F) suppose you have a big pile of ideas. and then you get a list of criticisms. (it could be pointing out some ideas contradict some evidence. or whatever else). then you go through and check which ideas are refuted by at least one criticism, and which aren't. this does nothing to rank ideas or give gradations. it only divides ideas into two categories – refuted and not refuted. all the ideas in the non-refuted category were refuted by NONE of the criticism, so they all have equal status.

i think what some people do is basically believe all their ideas are wrong, bad, refuted. and then they try to approach gradations of certainty by which ones are less wrong. e.g. one idea is refuted by 20 criticisms, and another idea is only refuted by 5 criticisms. so the one that's only refuted 5 times has a higher degree of certainty. this is a big mistake. we can do better. and also the way they count how much is one criticism (with or without weighing how much each criticism counts) is arbitrary and fruitless.

something they should consider instead is forming a meta idea: "Idea A is refuted in like a TON of ways and seems really bad and show-stopping to me b/c... Idea B has some known flaws but i think there's a good shot they won't ruin everything, in regards to this specific use case, b/c... And all the other ideas I know of are even worse than A b/c... So i will use idea B for this specific task."

then consider this meta idea: do you have a criticism of it, yes or no? if no, great, you've got a non-refuted idea to proceed with. if you do have a criticism of this meta idea, you better look at what it is and think about what to do about it.

for a lot more info, see this post: http://curi.us/1595-rationally-resolving-conflicts-of-ideas

anyone know some great books about ancient greece stuff?

i'm reading this and it's mediocre. 60 pages in.

The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World

author is kinda dumb

he doesn't know when he's making shit up vs. reporting facts very well

he doesn't know when to quote or reference other authors

he doesn't know what quotes or facts to include or not very well

he knows some stuff about greece. he knows what lots of scholars have written. he's summarizing lots of ideas. there's something good about that

i think he actually sorta likes multiple conflicting opinions at the same time

and there's something bad about that

but it helps him report more than just his personal biases

controversies can be interesting but i don't think he understands when to reject stuff as bad vs. consider it reasonable alternative possibility

he's bad at speculating about the motives of ancient social change and says some modern trendy lefty shit

that's one of the sadder things. he has travelled aroudn greece, spent his life studying it ... and doesn't recognize how much he's projecting modern notions on them

something that stood out was the white pillars like for parthenon are europoean invention

from like 1800s when revival of greece and finding its art was popular in europe

revival of greece the idea, not greece the country

he said the greeks painted stuff

and the euro recreations made it white

the parthenon ppl visit is really inaccurate in other ways

so the ottoman empire controlled the area

and built a mosque and a bunch of other buildings

and then greek independence and they tear that down and restore/rebuild some greek structures

and they left the area sparse with a few temples

and the original in ancient greece wasn't just a sparse tourist monument to look at, it was a functional part of life and there was stuff all over

1999 book. there's no ebook (lame for that recent!) so it's slow reading :/

this review has some good points in it

ppl who buy and read a book like that, and it's not for a school class, are a pretty promising group for someone who could be my audience. there are a lot of ppl like that (tens of thousands?) even tho it's not a big portion of the population.

i think they are mostly older ppl

not so many 20yos inclined to read that book. or others like it. or FoR as i read when i was 18. but still some.

school reading is one of the big blockers. puts ppl off reading and uses up their patience for reading scholarly works.

social life is another issue

Improving the world is hard. At least I've tried tons of stuff. You know a giant book series like The Wheel of Time? I've written way more than that about philosophy in lots of different styles and formats. I've tried tons of different approaches.

Most people won't try much. They aren't good enough to improve the world. You have to know a bunch of stuff before it makes sense to teach others. You need high quality knowledge, well above average, before you should put much effort into spreading it. People get stuck at the part where they need to learn good ideas themselves.

Some people in the TCS/FI community think they know stuff, but still don't do much. Doing they find doing stuff hard? What's hard about it? If you find it hard, there's problems there you don't know how to solve... Learn more!

People can be so passive. They can spend years and years not learning or doing much. It's sad. It makes the world kinda empty. Passivity leaves the memes in control, so all the passive people are kinda the same and sorta aren't really acting entities. They sorta are. They're still people. But it's iffy.

People don't communicate much. Maybe they think no one cares? Why not try anyway? The FI people do stuff. They play games, they date people, they do parenting activities, they make big career decisions, they go on diets, they hang out socially with friends, they watch movies, and so on. They just don't talk about it. They don't think it through or have questions or comments about their life, and they don't try to get criticism and advice to do it better. What the fuck?

I think they talk with their personal friends in private more. Everyone living in their tiny little world when the public internet is right here. But the public is scary because people like me will point out mistakes. Rather than try to improve their mistakes, they hide and live static lives. And they put a lot of their effort into pretending they are pretty rational people learning stuff and making progress and solving problems, rather than actually doing it. They pretend that being able to deal with public criticism is a really high standard, and actually they're doing quite well to the lower-but-high standard of their 5 buddies who think they're quite smart.

And people are so caught up with the standard stuff that fills your life:

• childhood
• school
• career
• dating
• marriage
• parenting/family
• travel
• socializing (IRL events and also Facebook, Instagram, etc)
• food
• exercise
• getting a house and filling it with appropriate stuff
• entertainment (TV shows, movies, watching sports, YouTube)
• the news (there's a kinda standard set of stuff people follow like some politics, some crime, some economic issues, really inaccurate articles reporting on recent "scientific" claims)
• sometimes some Activism for some Cause
• sometimes reading (mostly fiction or popular shallow books)
• retirement

And some of them tried to find good ideas for a bit when they were age 15-25 or so. And they found a lot of disappointment. They read a few books and blogs on philosophy, rationality, improving the world ... and found crap. (Some rejected the crap, others were fooled by it.) They tried talking with people about ideas and it wasn't productive. Some people blame others (sometimes mostly correctly, often very arrogantly) and some know they aren't that great themselves.

Lots of people made some effort to learn about critical thinking, philosophy, etc. And they found bad philosophies. They found Plato and Kant. Quite a few people still kinda liked it and kept trying even though it didn't help them with life. But then they start paying their mortgage and needing to get their car repaired and still get their kid to baseball practice and they can't take a day off work because they were sick for a whole week last month. And so they move on. They finished their education. They finished the phase of their life where they were actively pursuing new ideas (many people never do that, but quite a few do).

Schools really beat the curiosity out of people. Professors are so awful and really discourage anyone from trying to be a good thinker or know much, and point them in the wrong directions for where and what and how to learn.

People under 15 or so don't have much control over their lives and really need to avoid conflict with their parents. So it's hard to interact with them and share ideas. Around 15-30 is when people make some decisions of their own and kinda set up their life and coast from there. But they're already so fucked from 15 years of torture and indoctrination by their parents and teachers.

Lots of people assume someone else knows what they're doing or has it together. Children usually think adults do. Adults sure pretend to and put a lot of work into deceiving children. People aren't very inclined to think they are – or even could be – anyone special or important. That makes it hard to recruit for a community about being exceptional.

i figure it'd be useful to write about how to learn cuz ppl suck at it (and i know about it and like the topic). including how to discuss. ppl suck at asking questions, conceptual thinking, using examples, replying at all, choosing topics, knowing when they understand something (they often think they're done learning something when they're still pretty much clueless) etc, etc

it takes ppl tons of effort to do a little bit of stuff (e.g. learning) badly cuz they use their effort badly.

but if i start with this ppl:

• don't know how to learn it
• don't care, aren't very interested, want to get on with "practical" life

even if they say they care and read it, they usually still don't put much effort/study into it to actually understand it. just superficially look it over.

if i write instead about something people care about – let's say, diet – then ppl don't learn the concepts i'm using. they don't learn to think for themselves, judge ideas well, or figure out the next issue. and they may disagree with me about diet for badly thought out reasons and then have no clue how to seek the truth.

lots of how people judge ideas – about diet or anything – is by whether other people say the author is good. (e.g. gave him a PhD or an award or some praise). i don't want to compete at that stupid approach.

solutions? best approach?

People think changing emotions is really hard and limited. They have a bad perspective. These two stories help:

In the UK they drive on the left side of the road, in America on the right side. Alastair (who's British) was visiting America and traveling around by car. This quite a while back before smartphones, GPS, computer maps, etc. Signage was a lot worse. Driving was newer and the rules of the road were much less well known.

Alastair was driving on a small road out in the countryside with no one around. Suddenly another car comes along, around a bend. It's coming right at Alastair! He slams on his breaks. The other guy slams on his breaks. They stop just short of each other.

Alastair gets out of his car and starts yelling. "What the hell are you doing? Get on the left!"

Alastair is mad as hell. He's really steaming. This fool came pretty close to killing him. Alastair's seeing red. He's considering punching the guy.

The stranger gets out of his car. He's mad too, and yelling. He shouts, "The right! Drive on the right!"

And all of a sudden, Alastair wasn't mad anymore. He saw he was in the wrong.

The moment Alastair recognized intellectually that he was mistaken, his anger disappeared. Instantly he felt sorry and started apologizing.

Fortunately, once Alastair admitted he was in the wrong instead of yelling, the other guy didn't feel threatened anymore and relaxed a little bit. When Alastair explained he was from Britain, and they drive differently there, the stranger saw what happened and his anger faded too.

The lesson is that very strong emotions can change in an instant to match your intellectual view on what happened. E.g. if you're mad about someone's mistake, but you realize (with total clarity) that you were the one who made a mistake, then it's common to immediately stop being angry. And it's common to completely stop being angry with no lingering anger and no effort to suppress any anger.

This is not guaranteed. Some people would stay angry. But a lot wouldn't. It's completely achievable to dramatically change emotions like this in accordance with reason.

The second story comes from William Godwin:

let us suppose a man to be engaged in the progressive voluptuousness of the most sensual scene. Here, if ever, we may expect sensation to be triumphant. Passion is in this case in its full career. He impatiently shuts out every consideration that may disturb his enjoyment; moral views and dissuasives can no longer obtrude themselves into his mind; he resigns himself, without power of resistance, to his predominant idea. Alas, in this situation, nothing is so easy as to extinguish his sensuality! Tell him at this moment that his father is dead, that he has lost or gained a considerable sum of money, or even that his favourite horse is stolen from the meadow, and his whole passion shall be instantly annihilated: so vast is the power which a mere proposition possesses over the mind of man. So conscious are we of the precariousness of the fascination of the senses that upon such occasions we provide against the slightest interruption.

In other words, in the heights of sexual lust, people will forget all about sex if you tell them their father died, tell them they gained or lost a lot of money, or tell them their horse was stolen. People are so familiar with the fragility of sexual emotions that they take steps to avoid interruptions.

Read the whole chapter, The Voluntary Actions Of Men Originate In Their Opinions. Actually read the whole book, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice And Its Influence On Morals And Happiness. Godwin was one of the all time greatest thinkers. Not for his time (1756-1836), but period.

There's a new tape out. Trump said some rude stuff about women in the past. Trump has issued a great apology.

The left is attacking Trump. The media is attacking Trump. And a variety of Republicans are attacking Trump too:

Mitt Romney tweeted:

Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America's face to the world.

My reply: Why aren't you this mad about the much worse things the Clintons have done?

Ted Cruz tweeted:

These comments are disturbing and inappropriate, there is simply no excuse for them.

My replies:

1) Hillary's said much worse in public. Can we hear more about that? You don't have to attack a Republican every time the media is really mad.

2) Do you find #TrumpTape surprising? If so you're dumb. If you already knew he was like this then nothing's changed, so focus on immigration

Jeb Bush tweeted:

As the grandfather of two precious girls, I find that no apology can excuse away Donald Trump's reprehensible comments degrading women.

My reply: Why don't you attack Bill Clinton's reprehensible, sexist actions and Hillary's reprehensible comments about them?

David Horowitz's reply to Bush:

What an asshole. And there are many out tonight. This is a guy who will put his arm around Bill Clinton who actually raped & groped women.

Can we please try to win the election instead of sucking up to the outraged media? Hillary will do her best to destroy the country. Trump will do his best to Make America Great Again!

If Hillary is elected it'll materially increase the chance of civilization being destroyed (we're at war and Obama has been trying to lose, a policy Hillary will continue). And it'll mean tens of thousands more die in the war even if we win.

As just one of the issues that matter: Hillary will continue the Obama policy of helping Iran acquire money and weapons (including nuclear weapons and missles that can hit the US). Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism, wants to destroy the West, and has been actively taking steps to harm the West (including killing lots of people) for decades. And, by the way, a lot of women will be treated very badly when Hillary enables radical Islam to conquer and hold more territory.

Bill Gates:

"Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives," [Bill Gates] said. "The malaria vaccine in humanist terms is the biggest need. But it gets virtually no funding. But if you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding because of the voice in the marketplace than something like malaria."

Malaria already has a great solution called DDT. Gates is upset that people aren't spending a ton of money on difficult scientific research to address a problem which doesn't directly affect their lives and is caused by governments.

We don't need a malaria vaccine, we need the governments of rich countries to stop depriving poor countries of the wonderful, cheap anti-malaria technology we already have. The West has killed millions of third world poor people. There is a genuine lack of empathy here, but Gates isn't pointing it out, he's just attacking capitalism which isn't at fault for government technology bans.

And the other side of the issue is the governments (or lack thereof) in third world countries. Why do they get malaria when we don't? Because they are poor. They have too many swamps and too little civilization. And why are they poor? Lack of capitalism. Lack of liberalism. Violence. Bad governments that don't provide law and order. Corrupt governments. Local thugs who won't being stopped by the police (and sometimes are the police).

Bill Gates ought to know about this. He's a major philanthropist. But you can't just throw money at a country full of corruption, violence and theft. Then you're just giving money to the thugs. (Or if not money, then food, medicine, etc.)

Richard Branson:

Capitalism is a system that has offered opportunities and success to millions, but it’s time it helped all people and the planet thrive. As Paul said: “When we begin to put justness on par with profits, we get the most valuable thing in the world. We get back our humanity.”

Translation:

Capitalism is a system that has offered opportunities and success to millions. But lets stop now while there are still billions of poor ppl in China, India, etc, who want opportunities and success. Fuck them, all my friends are rich enough.

Elon Musk:

Elon Musk personally cancels blogger's Tesla order after 'rude' post

What a bastard who doesn't like criticism, doesn't value customers, doesn't have the ethos of "the customer is always right", and isn't willing to treat business transactions impersonally.

Imagine if Kellogg's wouldn't sell cereal to some health food blogger who criticized their sugary cereals. That'd be ridiculous and wouldn't fit the wonderful capitalist attitude of not messing up a trade for mutual benefit over some separate issue.

Musk again:

The path to the CEO's office should not be through the CFO's office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.

There should be more than one path to the CEO's office!

Musk doesn't respect money and profit. CFOs tell you if you're making or losing money. In other words, are you wasting resources or creating more than you use? And he doesn't care about that. He pursues massive government subsidies while pushing expensive solar power.

And disrespecting the marketing department is bad too. The marketing department is the communications department. You have to communicate the value of your product to people. Making something people understand and want is important.

Musk again:

It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.

We have a lot of coal left. Switching isn't just the sooner the better. Why does he refuse to consider prices? As we start getting low on coal then prices will go up and we'll switch efficiently. He wants to just switch now, never mind price. He doesn't care about economic efficiency. He doesn't understand the basics of capitalism.