Good, Evil, Morality, and Ethics

I’ve said a number of things about good and evil at Overcoming Bias, and I decided to gather my comments together in one place. I’ve extracted the following quotes out of their surrounding context. The full original discussion can be found in Rationality Quotes 7 and Morality Is Overrated. Arguments similar to mine appear in [...]

Agreeing to Disagree

Some people believe that, “In an ideal world, disagreements would not exist”, and that “‘agreeing to disagree’ is a sign of mutual disrespect and contempt.” Others disagree. I believe that agreeing to disagree is a sign of respect and a practical necessity.
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Comments

I have revised my blog comment policy. Here is the new item:
At any time, I may choose to limit the number of comments per reader per post to an arbitrary number, such as one or two. My intent is to maximize the diversity of comments. If you wish to have a discussion without my arbitrary [...]

Convergent Evolution and Multiple Discovery

Convergent evolution is “the development of similar structures in distantly related organisms as a result of adapting to similar environments and/or strategies of life”. I’ve talked before about multiple independent simultaneous discovery and invention in science, technology, and art. I’ve mentioned that multiple discovery supports an evolutionary view of culture, but I haven’t really discussed [...]

The Logic of Attributional and Relational Similarity

In a previous post, I discussed the distinction between attributes and relations:
An attribute is a characteristic of an entity, whereas a relation is a connection between two or more entities. In logic, we can define an attribute as a predicate with one argument and a relation as a predicate with two or more arguments. The [...]

Ockham versus Darwin

Contemplating the comments on my last post, I began thinking about Ockham’s Razor versus Darwinian Evolution. Both of them can be used as heuristics or algorithms for creation, invention, and discovery. In 1964, Ray Solomonoff proposed A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference (Parts I and II). His theory is an Ockhamian algorithm for searching through [...]

Ockham’s Razor is Dull

Ockham’s razor is the principle that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. There are many different interpretations of Ockham’s razor. For me, the idea that simplicity is a guide to truth is the core of Ockham’s razor.
For any set of observations, there are an infinite number of theories that can fit the observations, with [...]

Everything Evolves

What is evolution? There are three main components to evolution: variation, heredity, and differential fitness. The best definition I have seen is in Robert Brandon’s Concepts and Methods in Evolutionary Biology:
The following three statements are crucial components of the Darwinian (or neo-Darwinian) theory of evolution:

Variation: There is (significant) variation in morphological, physiological and behavioral traits [...]