The Wayward Axolotl

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. — Eleanor Roosevelt We can divide thought and discourse into three levels of abstraction that roughly correspond to the levels in that famous quote: Thought/discourse about people and ordinary events. Thought/discourse about entities and events that are beyond direct personal experience. Thought/discourse about abstract systems, processes and theories. At the first level, we think/talk about objects and events that we can directly engage with. At the second level, we think/talk about objects and events that are removed from personal experience, because they are too big, too small, too far away, etc. However, we are still talking about objects and events. At the third level, we think/talk about systems, processes and theories. We are either thinking/talking about abstract patterns that are divorced from any specific object or event, or we are think...

Discussion with Garrick about Adam Lanza, eulavism, primitivism, etc.

To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly. — Robert Nozick This essay is about how not to solve Newcomb’s paradox . I will not explain the paradox here. I will use the formulation from Wikipedia, but I have also presented my own version of the problem here . (In my version, the amounts and the labels are different.) The following table shows the relationship between the prediction and the outcome: Table 1 Prediction Choice Outcome A & B A & B $1,000 A & B B $0 B A & B $1,001,000 ...

Alex sent me some questions about dishonesty in the academy. I assume that they were inspired by the essay Why Most Academic Reasearch is Fake . In this post, I will answer his questions. What ‘big important problems’ are ignored by academic research? There are many examples of academic fields ignoring core issues so that they can focus on minutia. The notion of utility, which is widely used in philosophy and economics, is almost entirely taken for granted. Economists assume that utility can be measured with monetary metrics, such as GDP. Important questions, such as “What is utility?” and “Can we quantify utility?” are ignored, despite the notion of utility being essential to both moral philosophy and economics. Evolutionary theory is not well-defined in academic biology, despite being the core theory. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists spend their time contriving Rube Goldberg mechanisms to avoid the implications of evolutionary theory, rather than trying ...

This essay is a lightly reworked version of material from Debunking the Selfish Gene . Reproductive altruism can’t evolve, because it is less adaptive than reproductive selfishness. Suppose that a population contains organisms of both types. Some are reproductively altruistic toward other members of the population. The rest are reproductively selfish. The selfish organisms receive a benefit from the altruistic organisms, while the reverse is not true. So, on average, the selfish organisms will be more reproductively successful. The selfish trait will always be positively selected, while the altruistic trait will always be negatively selected. Eventually, the selfish trait will completely replace the altruistic trait. The selfish trait is selectively stable at 100% in the population. That is why group selection theory is wrong. Group selection does not exist, because the organism is the reproducing unit, and thus organisms are individually selfish reproducers. There are so...

The continuum fallacy is to deny the meaningfulness of discrete categories, just because they are a somewhat arbitrary partition of a continuum. More generally, it is to deny the meaningfulness of fuzzy and/or somewhat arbitrary categories, just because they cannot be precisely defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. The spectrum of visible light is a common example. There is a continuum of frequencies. Each frequency of light corresponds to a point on the spectrum. We (somewhat arbitrarily) partition the spectrum into discrete colors: red, yellow, green, blue, violet. This discretization is not random. Each color is an interval of the spectrum. It would be fallacious to claim that colors do not exist, just because they exist on a spectrum and the categories are somewhat arbitrary. The continuum fallacy is a type of representational nihilism. It rejects a representation of reality just because it isn’t exactly the same as reality. Of course, there is room to...

Responding to critics is an important part of rational thought and persuasion. Criticism is a way to test ideas. If an idea passes many tests, we develop confidence in it. Conversely, if an idea is held off-limits to criticism, we suspect it of being wrong. There are two requirements for substantive criticism: The critic must identify a specific claim or assumption in the content that the critic disagrees with. If it is a claim, then the critic should provide the quote where it is asserted. If it is an assumption, the critic should show where the author relies on it. The critic must present a rational argument against the claim or assumption. Disagreement without argument is not substantive criticism. If criticism satisfies those two requirements, it is a test of the content. It could still be wrong, but at least it has the right form. If it doesn’t satisfy those requirements, it is not a test of the content. There can be valid criticism that is not su...

Economists and other social theorists often take the concept of utility for granted. In theory, utility is a measure of value. I will denote the utility of X to Y as U(X, Y) or simply U(X) if Y is clear in the context. For a single individual, we can think of utility as a mathematical function that maps objects or outcomes to points on the continuum. This mapping is called a “utility function”. (In this context, “function” has its mathematical meaning, not its ordinary meaning.) To think about society, we might want to define utility for a group, not just a single individual. Collective utility is typically defined as the sum of individual utility over the collective. This assumes that utility is defined on the same scale for everyone. The concept of utility is used to model individual and social decision-making. It is used in game theory to define benefits and costs. It is often used in moral philosophy to define the “goodness” of actions and outcomes. In a utilitarian m...