Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
This personal post is not part of the competition, as my intent is not to produce an original constructive response to cluelessness. However, Toby Tremlett encouraged me to share it insofar as it contributes to this week's conversation.
TL; DR: I work in animal welfare and am clueless....
Not sure if this is the best forum for feedback, so please direct me elsewhere and happy to delete my comment if not.
A few suggestions on the explanation of EV. While the examples are clear, I found the definition of expected value confusing.
It is written as "expected value = likelihood of option x value of option", and "The expected value is the probability multiplied by the value of each outcome".
I read this as: E[X]=xP(x), which doesn't capture the need to sum across outcomes.
Pitched at the same level of technicality, I think a clearer definition is: "The expected value of an uncertain decision is the sum across all outcomes of the value of each outcome multiplied by its probability."
Or some other wording that captures that this is a weighted average. This properly implies the necessary summation across outcomes: E[X]=∑xP(x).
It might also be worth:
Hi John, your revised version of definition helps me greatly.