My crisis

This is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, if you got a moment, it's a twelve-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying 'This Is a Large Crisis'. A large crisis requires a large plan. Get me two pencils and a pair of underpants.

I'm currently undergoing a crisis of faith, I'm trying (to a greater or lesser extent) to embrace this fact. The crisis is the following. Over the last few months I've been slowly exposed to weird little niggling ideas that I realised I was trying too hard to force into my ethical system. So I'm going to say it now. WOOPS. Turns out my ethical system is built on a foundation of sand. This is a crisis, I need to fix it. Not being wildly and madly optimistic and looking at other's experience I dont expect this problem to be fixed before 2014. So I'm not going to be able to post more on foundational ethics for a while.

The virtue of honesty.

I believe that every aborted child goes to heaven.

So women are doing them a favour by aborting them then?

That's a very trivial response to a very serious issue.

This exchange, taken from here, is typical of a certain type of argument. The moral failure of the first speaker isn't his notion of heaven. If you want that notion and think you can defend it go ahead, I'll argue that another day. There's something more serious here. There's a fundamental lack of honesty. Not that he is lying to others, but far far more importantly, to himself. This is probably the biggest single failure of human thought. Pretty much all the other mad thoughts people have are examples of it. I want to consider this failure.

Climate Change

The Ascent of Man is not just a species-wide phenomenon. The joy of science is that the whole species progress by means of individuals progressing. It is the defining characteristic of a rational scientific mind to despair at its past self. A scientist corrects the errors in her worldview, over time her map looks more and more like the territory. Errors only get smaller. I'm annoyed at my past self, just as my future self will be annoyed at me. One error my past self made I dont get annoyed at, because I dont think it was unreasonable. Though I have now corrected it in my map, it should not be hard to imagine why others should not have done so yet. This phenomenon tells us something wider about the danger of a little information and science communication.

Against Spock

When I used to get into arguments with religious/alt. med./supernaturalist/generally wrong people on the internet* I would often come up against a common TV trope. The Spock. "You want to be so rational," goes the argument, "but have you thought that The Spock is flawed for this reason?" The short answer is yes I have, I'm vastly more intelegent than you, of course I've thought about and dismissed your pathetic argument. But it's not polite to say this. I want to argue that the Spock trope is fundamentally misconceived, and that we perhaps need to alter what we generally mean when we say "rational".

Human Rights

Against my better judgement I've been reading up on Dale Farm. Against my better judgement because it sounds like, and turns out to be, the kind of rank stupidity that just gives me a headache. At issue is a small part of the land, those living there have no planning permission to build the houses that they have built. Various groups have claimed that the law as it stands should not be enforced against these people because they are part of a particular ethnic group. This has got me thinking about how annoying are a lot of public supporters of human rights. And how damaging to the rights they claim (and ought) to be supporting. There's a deep confusion about the extent and nature of human rights.

Nonzero

There are 3 rough categories of "games". Games here in the sense of game theory, a branch of maths dealing with massively simplified and anaemic economic situations. In a game there are some number of players, they all make a decision and walk away with some amount of happiness depending on what everyone decided. Playing roulette is such a game. You turn up and call out a number and leave with (on average) less money than you started with. My question is why people play each category of game.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Every generation needs The Ascent of Man, Cosmos or Wonders of the Universe. It needs a documentary series not about the facts of science per se, but about Science. You need a popular work that gets the culture of science across, explaining to people that science feels good and is exciting. In short you need a popular manifesto for a scientific philosophy of life. One such is provided by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fanfiction written by Eliezer Yudkowsky. I want to explain why I've read this story from start to last update not less than 3 times and why it's had a huge impression on me.