[extropy-chat] Qualia Bet.

[Robin Hanson]

At 03:55 PM 11/28/2005, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>I had been surprised and slightly worried by people who don't grasp 
>this point.  It took me a while to realize that many people simply 
>haven't made the emotional connection between the word "causal" and 
>their everyday concept of things that make other things 
>happen.  Sort of like people who repeat phrases like "religion is 
>not a falsifiable hypothesis; it belongs to a separate magisterium" 
>and then in the next breath pray for a friend's welfare.  Or like 
>people who say that free will isn't "physical", and then decide what 
>to eat for breakfast.  They haven't made the connection between 
>highfalutin' words like "causal", "physical", "falsifiable" and the 
>underlying notions of things that make other things happen, things 
>that exist, and things they expect to happen.

This worries me too.  People in my classes often read the textbook 
chapter, listen to lecture, and think they understand.  They only 
find they don't understand when they try to do problems.  Which is 
why I assign concrete problems exercising the abstractions.   Alas 
when people read things for fun, they usually don't assign themselves problems.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323