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Author Topic: Life, Death, Rationality and Immortality
Raymond Arnold
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I think (mostly agreeing with Tom here) if people started setting future-trusts en mass for this purpose, laws regarding such things would end up changing radically and only the first few to emerge from their frozen state would actually benefit from them.

Regarding rationality and desires: I don't know that I'd say they're completely orthogonal. Lots of people *think* they desire a lot of things that are, in fact, conflicting. I'm not sure if there's an official rationalist-handbook answer here, but I assume that the point of rationality is to understand all of your desires, and beliefs, and their ramifications. And then decide which of them is most important to you.

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King of Men
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If you desire something that is genuinely impossible under the laws of physics, then I suppose you might call that irrational; but I think you'd be misusing the word. Rather, irrationality would lie in continuing to work towards your desire after you realised it was impossible. And if you desire two things without realising that they are in opposition, then likewise you are being irrational; but it is not the desires that are irrational, it is the failure to see the tradeoff.

quote:
I thought rationality was a tool for determining the conditions of reality. Desire should be curbed and focused based on whatever the reality is.
The second statement does not connect to the first.
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Armoth
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Don't see how it doesn't connect, given the context if our conversation.

I don't mind the distinction you made between irrational desire, and being irrational by desiring opposing thing. Why did you specifically choose the words - "without realizing that they are in opposition?" Don't people desire competing things even though they realize they compete? Like, to be skinny and to eat cheesecake?

And connected back to our example, a person may desire to grow old with his children or he may day and not exist. At this moment if I kill him, what does he stand to lose? The opportunity to grow old with his children. However, he also loses the desire to grow old with his children at the same time...

Anyways, still mulling over the desire to desire thing...

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Raymond Arnold
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There's a lot of different ways you can believe/do things that are in opposition. Some of it with your knowledge, some without. The cheesecake example is an example of knowing what it is you're compromising over.

People may desire to live safely. They may also desire not to travel by plane because they think it is dangerous because of 9/11. Because of this, many people ended up dead in the months after 9/11 because they drove instead of flew.

I'm trying to think of examples that are not politically charged (arguing using political and religious examples is pretty guaranteed to make yourself less clear), but I can't. So some examples that make sense from my perspective (hopefully also yours, but if not you can probably at least get the idea)

People may desire US citizens not to use drugs. They may also desire there to be less overall conflict in the world. They may not know (or fully understand) the amount of suffering caused by the fighting with drug cartels that drug prohibition requires.

People may desire to eat cheap meat, or have cheap food/supplies, and may also desire the world to be not have needless suffering and wage slave labor.

Do you genuinely not understand the "so long as I'm alive, I desire to live" thing, or are you just posing a question to verify that we have thought through our beliefs? Because it really isn't any more complicated than we've been saying. As long as I'm alive, I am receiving (on average) positive happiness. Because I am a biological creature with a central nervous system that creates desire for happiness, I have assigned happiness to be a trait that is good in and off itself. Once I die, I get zero happiness, and never can get more again.

Nuking the entire world would end all suffering. Ending suffering is easy. But ultimately the point of ethics is not to end suffering but encourage goodness (whether you define goodness to be happiness or some other thing is up to you).

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King of Men
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quote:
Originally posted by Armoth:
Why did you specifically choose the words - "without realizing that they are in opposition?" Don't people desire competing things even though they realize they compete? Like, to be skinny and to eat cheesecake?

Yes, and then they make a choice; either they eat the cheesecake, or not. In other words, they weigh off their desires one against the other; this is not irrational, whichever decision they make, although it may be inconsistent with what they've publicly proclaimed.

quote:
And connected back to our example, a person may desire to grow old with his children or he may die and not exist. At this moment if I kill him, what does he stand to lose? The opportunity to grow old with his children. However, he also loses the desire to grow old with his children at the same time...
What does that have to do with anything? A desire existed, and you removed any possibility of the desire being fulfilled. One more time: People are not indifferent being having their desires fulfilled, and having them removed.

I don't understand what you're trying to argue, here; and honestly I don't think you do, either. It feels like undergraduate-philosophy bullshit for its own sake. What's your point?

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TomDavidson
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quote:
Once I die, I get zero happiness, and never can get more again.
But you don't exist to never further accrue happiness. In other words, once you die, the amount of happiness you might have is completely irrelevant to everyone, including yourself.
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The Rabbit
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Anyone who thinks immortality is possible for all people, doesn't understand conservation of matter and energy. Every carbon atom in my body came directly from another living thing, that had to die.

For all people to be immortal, conservation of matter and energy would demand that we would reach a point when there could be no new people. Unless we find a way off this earth and to a place with far more of the resources needed to sustain life (which seems highly improbable), we've probably already past that point. We can argue that if you are interested, but its truly irrelevant. No matter how far out that point is, its a finite time that is an infinitesimal fraction of the life span of immortals. If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.

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Xavier
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quote:
Every carbon atom in my body came directly from another living thing, that had to die.
I'm not sure I get this. There's plenty of carbon in the universe that does not seem connected to living beings (like CO2 on Jupiter for instance).

quote:
Unless we find a way off this earth and to a place with far more of the resources needed to sustain life (which seems highly improbable)
Do you really think it improbable that we could extract resources from the gas giants in the next few hundred years? I see it as highly probable.

quote:
If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.
Seems to me we would need to limit births, not get rid of it altogether. So long as habitations expand at a similar rate as population, I don't see the problem. Sure we'll run out of carbon/whatever in a few billion years, but a life of several million years seems well within my concept of "immortal".
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The White Whale
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quote:
Originally posted by The Rabbit:
For all people to be immortal, conservation of matter and energy would demand that we would reach a point when there could be no new people. Unless we find a way off this earth and to a place with far more of the resources needed to sustain life (which seems highly improbable), we've probably already past that point. We can argue that if you are interested, but its truly irrelevant. No matter how far out that point is, its a finite time that is an infinitesimal fraction of the life span of immortals. If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.

If we're talking about achieving immortality, I think imagining us off of this earth and exploring the universe a very probably possibility. The universe is a big place. There is a lot of potential expansion, growth, and development that can happen before we worry about filling it up.
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Black Fox
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It is an argument confusing a few concepts. Mainly, that wanting to live another day has anything in particular to wanting to live in the first place. Bertrand Russel would have some fun with this, this sort of thinking reminds me of some of the limits of logic and how it can do funny things when not applied properly.

Check this out, once upon a time a problem in logic was that if you negated the proposition "The King of France is Bald" ( That is disproving the proposition therefore the negation must be prove) you would be saying "The King of France is not bald", which is actually also false ( as there is not King of France. Simply put, simple statements are generally more complex than they seem.

That and I've been doing some reading/research into modern rhetoric and it is actually rather interesting. Basically, think of it as escaping the idea of things simply being about truth. Looking at how things perform etc.

So what they said is technically logical to a part, but then inductive thinking has many pitfalls. Really you can't positively claim a lot by induction. The dog barked at me yesterday so he will bark at me today. Although, there are people who would claim that all "knowledge" is inductive, but anyhow.

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Black Fox
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That and the idea of "immortality" rests upon a lot assumptions. I for one would say that immortality was impossible based on the idea that what you are is not just a physical body, but a rational being. Since your personality will evolve its rather impossible for the you today to be the same as you tomorrow, or really you in thirty minutes. Which, is also a rather good argument for why we do not necessarily need more new people.

Plus when you think about it we do continue to exist even after we die, mainly in the sense that we are really just amalgamations of people from the past and present. We pass ourselves onto all the people that we have close contact with.

Think of it like this, would be it be worse to kill a person, or to wipe out the existence of a person after they had died. If you agree with the latter, which I do, then I think you have to agree that in many ways people do not die, at least not what is important.

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Black Fox
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Rabbit, for some reason you just reminded me of an interesting argument I took place in where a bunch of physics students got stumped on how the laws of physics are inductive, that being how do you know the laws of physics are immutable and might not just change tomorrow, or for that matter be changing at this very instance in some small almost imperceptible manner.

Not to mention, from what little I do know about physics the laws of physics were different at one point and time, so who says that some rational being might not be able to figure out how to tune the laws of physics to their own desires. I just love being difficult.

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Black Fox
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Raymond: What would these rationalists say to the idea that a person may very well not know what is best for them, or what is most important to them? That and of course problems such as, how do I know what are my most important desires if I have not had all desires, or the very real possibility that my greatest desire today may pale next to my desire from tomorrow.

Not to mention it is completely possible to actually desire things that are conflicting ( in the real world not everything likes to play by the rules of formal logic ). Life does not like to play all its games in binary.

For me, there are just a lot of problems with the idea of living life completely rational. Rationality tends to always remind me of the bogey men from the enlightenment and early parts of the 20th century. Rational thought is more like a tool to me, to live life focusing exclusively on being rational ( which completely misses the point that many things that seem to be integral to being a person are not rational ) seems to me like living life for a mental screwdriver.

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Raymond Arnold
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I'm not sure how that follows from anything I've said. People have desires. Those desires are neither rational nor irrational, they simply are. They (often) include a need for food, shelter, safety, love and respect, and various other things. And a lot of times, these things DO conflict. That's inescapable. Most of life is spend negotiating between conflicting desires. I want to take a nap vs I want to get the lawn mowed. I want to eat a cheesecake vs I want to be thin (or I want to not have to exercise to work it off).

A lot of time, because we are ill informed, we make a lot of bad choices. That ill-informed-ness can be about the external world ("I didn't know cheesecake would make me so unhealthy") or about our internal self ("I thought becoming rich or getting married would make me happy").

Rationality is a tool to make your knowledge more accurate, so that you can make more informed decisions. Yes, there are cases where careful analysis may not yield the best results (say, passionate lovemaking). That doesn't mean that rationality fails in this instance, it means that rationality specifically dictates that you don't think so hard about it.

People have this notion that rationality makes you a cold hearted robot, and that's simply not the case. If a romantic partner "looks good on paper" (i.e. good job, funny, clever, good looking) but for some reason you just don't spark with them the right way, rationality does not say "Well, they look good on paper so clearly you should just ignore your emotional spark." Quite the opposite. If something/someone clearly isn't making you happy, rationality suggests you should probably try something else.

Rationality does not mean life is full of binaries. It does not mean you ignore emotion. Nowhere does it suggest that being rational is "more important" than anything else. If rationality reminds you of bogey men, you're probably misconstruing it a lot.

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King of Men
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Or, more succinctly, "Ur doin' it rong". This should not surprise you; anyone who thinks the evidence for theism convincing has clearly got a lot of room for epic fail in their rationality circuits.
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Juxtapose
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Great post, Raymond.
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Raymond Arnold
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I will regard it as a good post myself if I observe evidence suggesting that it actually is persuasive to someone who heretofore was fearful or unimpressed or poorly informed about rationality. [Razz]
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mr_porteiro_head
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
I would not want to die as long as living continued to be enjoyable, or the cost of my life did not exceed its value. I have difficulty of conceiving of any scenario in which one of those two things would not eventually prove true, however, meaning that I strongly suspect that at some point I would not in fact wish to live forever.

Indeed. The idea that we can accurately extrapolate we would or would not desire after having lived billions of years is pretty far-fetched.

[ August 24, 2010, 02:44 AM: Message edited by: mr_porteiro_head ]

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Black Fox
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I get what you are going for Raymond, but I also feel that definition of rationality is much different than what I am used to. What you seem to be going at is that critical thinking is very valuable, which in itself is not exactly something ground breaking.

In many circles saying that you are a rationalist is much different than saying you use rational thought or even that you go about your day trying to be rational.

I'm all for critical thinking, so I suppose in that sense I am very much a rational human being an all for more rational thought. There just happen to be a smorgasbord of ways to describe being a critical thinker.

That and wanting to take a nap and wanting to get the lawn mowed are not conflicting desires, unless of course you put in the requirement that you actually mow the lawn. Hence, what I was getting at. A lot of critical thinkers would go the step further and ask, why do you want a nap and why do you want to mow the lawn. Are those deeper needs actually "conflicting" or are you just not going about things the right way.

Anyhow, a lot of this boils down to labels all of which do have meaning with various groups. Go rational thought and go critical thinking!

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The Rabbit
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quote:
Originally posted by Xavier:
[QB] [QUOTE] Every carbon atom in my body came directly from another living thing, that had to die.

I'm not sure I get this. There's plenty of carbon in the universe that does not seem connected to living beings (like CO2 on Jupiter for instance)[quote]

Yes, but human beings can't fix CO2. We get all our carbon atoms from the plants and animals we eat. Are we talking about living forever as something radically different from what we are now, or remaining pretty much like we are but living forever. I think that makes a pretty significant difference for most people. I think most people would answer the questions "Do you want to keep living?" and "Would you want to keep living, as a nanobot." very differently.

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The Rabbit
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quote:
Originally posted by The White Whale:
quote:
Originally posted by The Rabbit:
For all people to be immortal, conservation of matter and energy would demand that we would reach a point when there could be no new people. Unless we find a way off this earth and to a place with far more of the resources needed to sustain life (which seems highly improbable), we've probably already past that point. We can argue that if you are interested, but its truly irrelevant. No matter how far out that point is, its a finite time that is an infinitesimal fraction of the life span of immortals. If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.

If we're talking about achieving immortality, I think imagining us off of this earth and exploring the universe a very probably possibility. The universe is a big place. There is a lot of potential expansion, growth, and development that can happen before we worry about filling it up.
That's irrelevant. The question at hand isn't "Would it be good for people to live a really really long time", it's "Would it be good for people to live forever. People have mass and utilize energy. The energy of this universe is constant and finite. Ergo, there is a finite number of people who can exist simultaneously in this universe. If people lived forever, we would eventually reach the point where the number of people existing would equal the maximum number possible in this Universe. At that point, no new people could be born. And if we are talking about living forever, it doesn't really matter whether we've already reached that point or we reach it in 100 billion years. We will live forever in a Universe where there is no birth, no new people ever again.

But the real point is this. People don't exist in isolation, we are part of natural cycles and systems. If we made people immortal, it would change the system in other ways as well. If we are talking, as Lesswrong clearly is, not just in abstract fantasy but about actively pursuing scientific ways to eliminate human death, then we must rationally consider what that means and how it is likely to change human life, the world and the universe. I just pick the first and most undeniable as an example.

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King of Men
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Yes, yes. But is that really an objection? Are you genuinely worried that life-extension research will lead to problems with the amount of carbon in the universe? Because honestly, it sounds a bit like the guy who's relieved to hear that the Sun will go out in five billion years. "Oh, billion! What a relief! I thought you said five million!" The amount of carbon we have available for making new humans in 100 million years doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that ought to affect your life-and-death choices right now. You can only cross one bridge at a time.
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Raymond Arnold
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I think that "live for billions of years" and "live for thousands of years" are both worth discussing in this context.

quote:
I get what you are going for Raymond, but I also feel that definition of rationality is much different than what I am used to. What you seem to be going at is that critical thinking is very valuable, which in itself is not exactly something ground breaking.

In many circles saying that you are a rationalist is much different than saying you use rational thought or even that you go about your day trying to be rational.

Using critical thinking is not groundbreaking, no. But the thing that blew my mind going to lesswrong is how deep rational thought gets. Human brains are not just a little bit flawed, and using some critical thinking will get you through the day having made the right choices. Human brains are incredibly biased in all kinds of ways, and it takes enormous work to understand and account for all those biases. As I said in the first post, someone who has spent their life thinking they are a rationalist will come to lesswrong and realize "woah, I'm only a beginner at this."

So I do think there is a difference between being a "rationalist" and someone who generally tries to be rational. (This is a bit of semantic judo on my part - I'm not sure if there are official definitions I am about to butcher). I think that the people who identify as "rationalist" tend to be who DO see rationalism as something pursuing over the course of their lives with extreme dedication. This is not because rationalism is some ideal all by itself worth pursuing, but because rationalism makes you better at a lot of other things.

Most people, honestly, cannot, should not and would not want to put that amount of effort in. Different people's brains are wired different ways. One of the projects going on at lesswrong is breaking down the results of high level rational thought into simpler memes that have a chance of propogating through the general populace without requiring people to read several books worth of material. Even then, most people are going to go through life being wrong about a lot of things. Sometimes in ways that don't matter in the end. A lot of times in ways that cause a lot of suffering that they don't notice or manage to ignore.

quote:
That and wanting to take a nap and wanting to get the lawn mowed are not conflicting desires
This... does not follow. I have a choice on how to spend the next hour of my life. I can choose to mow the lawn, or I can choose to take a nap. Taking a nap provides short term biological happiness and provides me with some extra energy I might use later in the day when I have some other obligation. Mowing the lawn makes my yard prettier which increases status among the neighbors, keeps it easy to walk through, reduces chances of tick bites, etc. Long term goals vs short term goals.

I can mow the lawn LATER, but then there will likely be some other thing that I want to do instead. The question will not go away. In no way is it possible to take a nap and mow the lawn myself at the same time.

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rivka
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Well, you could, but it would probably involve a trip to the ER.
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Raymond Arnold
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Also a true statement. (I would note that "not go to the ER whenever possible" generally falls under my personal category of "things I desire.")
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mr_porteiro_head
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Whenever possible? Why, that's easy -- when you get mangled in the sleepmowing accident, you just decline to go to the ER, and bleed out on the front lawn.

Not only do you not have to go to the ER, but you don't have to worry anymore about the conflict between your lawn and your sleepy time.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call the "trivial solution".

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rivka
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Yeah. My list has "avoid doing things that will require trips to the ER", but yours is certainly simpler.
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mr_porteiro_head
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Occam's razor says that my solution is the correct one, right?
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Raymond Arnold
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I guess.
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mr_porteiro_head
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Done and done.
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Black Fox
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I have read a lot of the stuff at less wrong and most of it is very neat stuff. A lot of the thinking found there is paralleled in other places. Still, very cool place.

That and generally when people, at least the ones I'm apt to be around, talk about rationalism they are talking about the idea that knowledge can be justified through thought and not through the senses ( empirical study ). I am fairly sure your notion of rationality is not that one ; )

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Black Fox
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That and what I was trying to get on about binary thought earlier, and its weakness at times, can easily be shown with the lawn mowing/ nap analogy.

When you say that they are "conflicting" desires, all you are really saying is that both cannot be done by x at the same point and time ( not exactly deep rationality here). Basically (x)~(Mx & Nx), that is for all x x cannot both mow and nap. However using that same thinking You cannot mow, nap, fly a kite, or draw a picture at the same time.

The notion of two ideas conflicting seems to go much deeper than simply the fact that you are unable to do both at the same time, which is what I was getting at. Modern rhetoric might ask what are you actually doing by mowing ( pretty lawn, acceptance by the neighbors, you have to otherwise the neighborhood association will have your head) or by napping ( telling the neighborhood association to take it up theirs, you dislike physical labor, its just really hot outside). It could all be multiples of these, which does not come through in binary thinking.

Formal logic is obviously very helpful when it comes to a great deal of things. However, I would say that thinking in any school of thought is rational, some is just less wrong.

Also in the above thought you can have an action do conflicting things ( that is I can not mow the lawn to show the neighborhood association to shove it, but they might have been waiting for such an opportunity to finally oust me from the neighborhood. Make sense?

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Raymond Arnold
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I think the "speaking in binaries" thing comes up a lot because it's a convenient way to provide shorthand explanations of things. This is true both when you're making a rational argument or when you're making a horribly flawed one. It's very easy to end up doing it badly, in a way that oversimplifies things, but I don't think it's inherently wrong.

In a real world practical scenario, mowing the lawn and taking the nap may not be the only two options and there may be dozens of reasons and methods of executing each ones. But the basic point is we have to make choices all the time about how to prioritize short term vs long term benefits, and we can't do that if we don't fully understand the consequences over the long term.

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Jhai
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It's very easy to accurately describe trade-offs of the type Raymond is discussing using economic notation - as clear as using formal logic notation to deconstruct philosophical arguments and sentences. We could all have these discussions by talking about utility functions*, budget constraints*, and so forth, in this notation but it'd be rather dry and not particularly illuminating for the purposes of the discussion.

(*Unless you've read the relevant chapters of Mas-Colell, or, at the very, Varian, the definitions of these words in the way I am using them is almost certainly more complex, over-arching, and precise than the definitions of the words as you're used to them.)

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Black Fox
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I'm not trying to make the case that thinking/speaking in binary is wrong, simply that it has limitations that people should be aware of. Not to mention we often tend to overlook how we frame a debate with the very question that we ask or how we tend to make many assumptions in the questions that we ask. Which for you may very likely fit into being rational or being a rationalist.


That and I'm rather sure what I'm trying to get at Jhai could not be described with economic notation as at its root it has little if anything to do with utility.

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Raymond Arnold
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quote:
That and I'm rather sure what I'm trying to get at Jhai could not be described with economic notation as at its root it has little if anything to do with utility.
Can you expand on this point more?
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Black Fox
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Not all actions, effects, etc. have to do with some form of utility or benefit. They can certainly be ascribed to have some utility or benefit, but they also perform multiple things to different people.

To apply this to our lawn mowing analogy the idea would be what is the lawn mowing performing and what is the sleep performing. Some, if not most, of what these two actions perform can be described to be utilitarian. In a universal sense you could certainly describe them simply by simply stating I can mow or I can take a nap / procrastinate. However in real life everything has some kind of context to it. I do surrender to the idea that in the end in most contexts where these two actions would be pondered could be well described through economics i.e. opportunity cost etc.

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Jhai
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Let me refer you to my footnote again...

Economics, as a field, has been slowly creeping up & devouring the other social sciences because it has developed into being capable of describing pretty much any facet of human behavior you'd care to describe. There are significant problems with this, of course - the most philosophical of them being falsification - but to believe that economics strips away the context of issues is wrong.

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TomDavidson
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quote:
it has developed into being capable of describing pretty much any facet of human behavior you'd care to describe
So economists tell me. [Wink]
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Black Fox
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Economists do a great job of describing the past and falsely predicting the future [Smile] I just had to throw that jab in.

I certainly think there are contexts that economics does not take into account, do I actually "know" that. Of course not, as economics is not exactly my area of expertise. So you could certainly be right Jhai.

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rivka
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
quote:
it has developed into being capable of describing pretty much any facet of human behavior you'd care to describe
So economists tell me. [Wink]
I'm going to have to second that response.
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Raymond Arnold
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quote:
I certainly think there are contexts that economics does not take into account, do I actually "know" that
I just want to know why you think this. Do you actually have examples of contexts that economics wouldn't take into account, or does economics merely seem cold and heartless and your life isn't so clearly there must be something economics is missing? ('cause there's no rule that economics can't take things like the emotions of various people into account, even if that's so complex a system that it can only be talked about it hypothetic generalities)

(edit: I'm not actually 100% sure I subscribe to an economics model, but I think your reasoning for not doing so is faulty)

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TomDavidson
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I think economics certainly could take all contexts into account. Once it is able to, however, we will all recognize economists as the prophets of the world's first genuinely useful religion.
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Black Fox
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It has nothing to do with economics being heartless, if anything economics generally seems to try and figure out what drives people to make decisions, which would mean that economics would try and figure out the emotions of people. If economics did not do that then it would have a hard time figuring out why people do the things they do. Hence, full of life. If you really take a look at it any thought if full of life, of sorts.

Here is one for you: A guy goes up to a girl and tells her that he is a really cool guy. With that action he has very much made himself a not cool guy. I suppose you could try and say it has something to do with supply and demand. That and we could certainly talk about it in certain hypothetical generalities, but then you just end up abstracting. I suppose that is a sort of description, but not what I'm getting at.

Not to mention morality, you could certainly use economics to model and predict peoples moral decisions, or at least I could certainly see it being done. However, I don't see how economics would actually figure out what "is" moral. Not to mention effectively work in particular situations instead of general ones.

However, I could be very wrong. Like I said earlier I am rather sure that my imagination for applying economics is not nearly as great as that of others.

Also, just because a certain field of study attempts to take a certain context into account, say by ascribing it to a certain variable, does not mean it does so successfully.

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Raymond Arnold
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quote:
A guy goes up to a girl and tells her that he is a really cool guy
This is a case of someone NOT having used rationality, and thus making a bad decision. He still is trying to undertake an action with utility. The guy wants to get the girl (for now we'll call this a Desire, and is thus not really rational or irrational. A more in depth look might reveal otherwise).

He thinks being cool will accomplish that. He thinks telling her he's cool will make him cool. Both of his premises are wrong (well, the first one is only sorta wrong, and depends on your definition of cool). Depending on how experienced he is, he could be improving his chances in a few ways:

1) Observing the attempts of others to talk to girls and note what works and what doesn't
2) Introduce himself to a few girls and see what happens.
3) Reading books about how to date/talk-to-girls

Now, there's a few additional things to consider, which are A) he probably has a limited timeframe in which to get the optimal result here, B) treating girls like experimental subjects has its own form of detriment, both to the girls, to society in general, and eventually to him. C) Doing too much thinking while you're talking to girls is going to mess you up.

If he's in middle school and this is his first attempt, he's probably going to be horribly awkward no matter what, because there's no way he can get enough information and figure out how to apply it accurately in a useful timeframe. But the bottom line is that he has a desire, he's attempting to act on that desire, and while the amount of time to get a truly good results may be longer than he likes, doing some critical thinking before and afterwards is likely to improve his chances, at least somewhat.

[ August 25, 2010, 01:51 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]

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Jhai
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quote:
Originally posted by TomDavidson:
I think economics certainly could take all contexts into account. Once it is able to, however, we will all recognize economists as the prophets of the world's first genuinely useful religion.

I truly do not understand this sentence at all. Anyways, "taking all contexts into account" is not what I claimed. But... I'd rather not derail this thread, and this is not a particularly interesting conversation (for me, at least) to have with people who have not studied the particular concepts I'm discussing at the depth I am discussing.

In other words, carry on, but I'm sorry to have brought economics up, and won't be discussing this line of thought on this thread.

(Sorry if this sounds grouchy - I've billed about 250 hours of work over the past three weeks and am TIRED.)

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Black Fox
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You certainly lined up a fairly rational course of action to dating girls, although not exactly the way I would go about it, even rationally ; )

However, I was really just wondering how you would use economics to describe why he was "uncool". Not to mention it had nothing to do with dating, but you did fill in that context nicely using certain assumptions. Namely, why go up to a girl and tell her you're cool except for the purpose of getting her to date you etc.

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Raymond Arnold
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It's not about dating girls, just about talking to them without looking ridiculous. Dating is all sorts of kinds of more complicated.

I took a few looks at that post before I made it to try and figure out how creepy it sounded. I ended up deciding a) it was gonna sound at least a little creepy regardless, but b) honestly if you're not good at talking to girls I can't think of anything you'd try that wasn't covered there. (Note that I didn't say what the best way to improve was, just listed possible avenues).

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King of Men
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quote:
However, I was really just wondering how you would use economics to describe why he was "uncool".
Signalling; the branch of economics that deals with it is usually called game theory. He has made himself uncool because words are cheap. To say "I am cool" is something that anyone can do, no matter how uncool; therefore, if that's the best demonstration-of-coolness you can come up with, you must not be very cool at all - a really cool guy would have been able to do something better than the words. On the other hand, if it isn't the best thing you could have done, but you chose that method anyway, then you must not think the girl worth doing something that'll cost you a bit of effort; it follows that you won't be particularly committed even if she does respond.

Game theory formalises this sort of reasoning.

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Mucus
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That's cool.
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