Rationality

Jonathan Wallace suggested that “God!” functions as a semantic stopsign—that it isn’t a propositional assertion, so much as a cognitive traffic signal: do not think past this point. Saying “God!” doesn’t so much resolve the paradox, as put up a cognitive traffic signal to halt the obvious continuation of the question-and-answer chain.

If you argue that God, to test humanity’s faith, refuses to reveal His existence, then the miracles described in the Bible must argue against the existence of God.

You should be extremely suspicious if you have many ideas suggested by a source that you now know to be untrustworthy, but by golly, it seems that all the ideas still ended up being right—the Bible being the obvious archetypal example.

Indeed, we overestimate how likely others are to respond the same way we do—the “false consensus effect.”

But a human brain is a flawed lens that can understand its own flaws—its systematic errors, its biases—and apply second-order corrections to them.

So it’s better to view our taste buds as an adaptation fitted to ancestral conditions that included near-starvation and apples and roast rabbit, which modern humans execute in a new context that includes cheap chocolate and constant bombardment by advertisements.

A thousand delicious tastes, matched to ancient reinforcers that once correlated with reproductive fitness—now sought whether or not they enhance reproduction. Sex with birth control, chocolate, the music of long-dead Bach on a CD.

Natural selection isn’t about groups, or species, or even individuals. In a sexual species, an individual organism doesn’t evolve; it keeps whatever genes it’s born with. An individual is a once-off collection of genes that will never reappear; how can you select on that? When you consider that nearly all of your ancestors are dead, it’s clear that

Kahneman et al. presented 867 jury-eligible subjects with descriptions of legal cases (e.g., a child whose clothes caught on fire) and asked them to either Rate the outrageousness of the defendant’s actions, on a bounded scale, Rate the degree to which the defendant should be punished, on a bounded scale, or Assign a dollar value to punitive damage