It would still be retrievable, but with considerably more difficulty.

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I think I’ve read bits and pieces of Mill, Bentham, Kant and maybe Hume before, but nothing of Smith except select excerpts. (Unlike some LW’ers,) I have nothing against reading philosophy. Heck I’m getting one of Singer’s books this Sunday. However, I’m *very* worried about the opportunity costs. Reading philosophy is unlikely to funge against my gameplaying, Facebook/Quora/SSC, socializing or fantasy novel-reading time, but much more like to funge against my non-work work, eg., Coursera, .impact work and the coupla minutes a week I spend on learning actually technically difficult stuff.

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For sensitive goals, if the above paragraph was not too reassuring, I’d suggest just obfuscating how you name things. Like have a goal to “eat fewer donuts” as a euphemism for consuming less porn. That sort of thing.

We don’t have an ETA for saner Google permissions (but hugely appreciate being reminded — even bugged — about such things if we’re taking too long). Now that you know the story though, could you just use another auth provider or use plain old password login?

Thanks again for the alert about the Google auth situation there! Delighted to chat about the kind of things you’re thinking about beeminding too. Looks like CAE_Jones, above, is not taking me up on that offer but if you’re an SSC nerd reading this deep in the comments the offer stands for you as well!

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Anyone else on how loyalty was or wasn’t built in you when you were a kid?

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If you can set up a “just kidding” structure for when you’re deceiving a child, fine. I’m squicked by the idea of telling a child things you know are false, and not correcting it in a fairly short period of time.

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If you were a scientists who wanted to tabulate a bunch of chemical masses, or fundamental particle masses or something, the frequentist guarantee that your confidence intervals contain the true value on X% of them is really useful.

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I presume this is hyperbole, but I’m not sure what the non-hyperbole charitable reading is supposed to be. Most contemporary anti-theistic arguments in the philosophy of religion, for example, do not argue that theism or particular forms thereof are contradictory; they argue that the evidence is against them.

I still have not seen an argument from anyone in this thread that every version of orthodox Christianity (including ones that deny Biblical inerrancy), much less other religions, contains contradictions (unless the quote from HARLIE is supposed to mean that the Christian ethic is contradictory, in which case I’d like to see an argument for that).

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Compared to what alternative?

I don’t know how much economic theory you know. The relevant bottom line is that in the simple perfect competition model in which there are no commons, no monopolies, no externalities, … money prices are a perfect measure of utility and market outcomes maximize utility, provided you are willing to do interpersonal utility comparisons by willingness to pay–something I’m willing to pay exactly a dollar for is considered worth just as much utility as something you are willing to pay exactly a dollar for.

That’s a very imperfect approximation to the real world and to utility. But there is no comparable simplified model of the political process that gives you anything like that close a result to what you want. A steel firm that pollutes the atmosphere has, say (I’m making up numbers, but I don’t think that matters much) private costs of $90/ton and external costs of $10/ton, so the market price of steel will understate its social cost by a bit—externality 10%. A random voter who bears the cost of figuring out which candidate for president is more in the interest of the nation and votes accordingly receives about one three hundred millionth of the benefit he produces–that’s an externality of about 99.9999996%.

You mention not rocking the boat. I recently heard a talk by a woman with a professional background in drug development (doctorate and past employment) who struck me as a pretty reasonable person. Her estimate of the mortality cost due to the FDA sharply reducing the number of new drugs brought to market, increasing the time to market, increasing the cost, was upwards of four million lives. Permitting a drug that has a side effect that kills a hundred people is a disaster for the agency. Preventing a drug that would have saved a thousand isn’t.

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I think this article might have some implications for the signaling theory of education. Essentially: military officers are typically required to have a bachelor’s degree and the hypothesis is that the expansion of of the pool of people with bachelor’s degrees has decreased performance in a pseudo IQ-test for officers that is highly correlated with performance.

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