epistemologue

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Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality I can't overstate how awesome and useful it is.

Still no responses

I'm not very patient, and I'm skeptical they are going to move this forward anytime soon...

I bought them and they shipped promptly to me. After having read the first five I really want the rest of them now.

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They said "by the end of June", maybe. And it sounded like a very vague "maybe".

You can message me on here or email me at [email protected]

I will pay nearly anything to get my hands on these lecture courses. Please let me know if you have them. I would be willing to buy them, borrow them, or come up with an arrangement that is most favorable to you. thanks.

He accepted unearned guilt. He was running a business, evidently on his own property, and doing very well. Why should he give a damn about some whiny mooching Lorax? His biggest mistake was letting that guy get to him, since apparently when his business closed he spent his years worrying and letting everything fall apart instead of reinvesting his gains into new opportunities and pursuing greater success. And to seal his total moral corruption, he righteously gives the seed to some stranger saying that they should be very diligent about doing everything they can do make the place more favorable for the Lorax and all his parasitic friends, at the expense of that stranger's own pursuit of success. He also charged too little if he had so many buyers that he burned through his supply like that.

Eiuol, I heartily second this request! Thanks for making this thread!

My copy is being shipped...

I completely disagree with everything you said here except your very last sentence. Just for the record

and often you also have the option to make tentative choices and continue to evaluate them as you go.

this is completely wrong and misguided. you've completely misunderstood and misrepresented the philosophical issues here suffice to say BC's philosophy is best characterized as deathist. personally I think deathism is obviously irrational (and horrifying), and I do not think objectivism is compatible with any sort of deathism. Barq, these kinds of issues that I raised with you (that is, the one's you're asking about in this thread) are addressed in The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand, so I would suggest you read that before proceeding.

I feel like I've studied the basics of logic a thousand times (propositional logic and first-order), but for some reason every resource I can find on advanced topics in logic leaves a huge unexplained gap from the basics, and it quickly all becomes incomprehensible. This is very frustrating.

you're life is not one big emergency or triviality. you have plenty of time to stop and deliberate for most of the important things in life to the point of being able to discriminate greater and lesser alternatives..

Please post anything you've got...

1. if you theoretically had infinite time to consider the issue, then every difference can play into your utility calculation. 2. But in limited time and other sorts of situations, the value of calculating utility is less than just picking a choice at random. 3. you can certainly invent situations where two actions have mathematically equal utility - although these are very contrived scenarios and the world usually doesn't work like that.

After further thought, I believe a proper induction of the concept of "value" answers this more effectively. Where do "values" come from? Where in the metaphysical *is* the epistemological *ought* originally comes from. First and foremost, on the perceptual level, is your own physical pleasure and pain. That's the only thing that can cause you to prefer one course of action over another at the level of an infant. As you gain further mental abilities, you're able to generalize and conceptualize these perceptions up to the level of a rational adult's knowledge, and thus form a conceptual hierarchy of value, an understanding of the virtues and character traits required, general principles of reality that impinge upon this pursuit, and so on. Ultimately it is all still just a pursuit of your own happiness - there's nothing else that CAN rationally motivate you to prefer one course of action over another, because all of your knowledge of value ultimately relies on those base concrete perceptions of your own pleasure and pain. Tried to re-write without any jargon: How do you figure out the true rules of right and wrong? As an infant, the only indication you have that your choice is right or wrong is the ability to feel pleasure and pain. As you grow up and learn more, you're able remember many repeated experiences of pleasure and pain, to learn the rules of what causes of pleasure and pain, to learn the rules of how the world works in general, and thus figure out how to live your life in accordance with those rules in order to pursue a life of pleasure, or happiness. Ultimately that means the pursuit of happiness is all there is to right and wrong, because the only effective rules about right and wrong that you can truly be said to know are those that you have learned throughout your life from your experiences of pleasure and pain.

Here's my answer: "The extent to which you support something else over supporting the source of your capability to value, is the extent to which you are sacrificing that source. Sacrificing the source of one's capability to value is to sacrifice one's ability to think, to act, to live, or to do anything at all for that matter, let alone help others. That's why the best course of action is to make yourself the ultimate beneficiary of your morality."

Why is it better for myself to be the beneficiary of morality instead of everyone?

of course without unlimited edit time I can't edit the OP... but check the link for the updated version...

I've also rescinded my semantic argument... after all there's nothing wrong with using the word "optional" to mean "optional depending on who is doing the choosing". It's when you start thinking of "optional" as something that describes the choices a given person can make that there's a problem.

"that there are plenty of times when it is clear that thing 1 gives more benefit than thing 2 and therefore one morally should pick thing 1. That sometimes you have equally valid options doesn't mean everything is equally valid as long as it isn't down and outright harmful." The problem is that often people do think things are equally valid when not harmful, or that it's okay to regard "unclear" choices as "optional" instead of "uncertain" - which is especially dangerous and harmful, and immoral, when applied to one's more important values .... desserts aside... Smith's equivocation on "optional" includes this meaning, and nowhere does she attempt to sharply draw the line as I am doing. To do so pretty much eliminates her point about choices about one's personal values as being "optional" except only in the most trivial examples - which are themselves more properly categorized as "uncertain"