If you can't accurately quantify all the concurrent things you're hypothesizing about (like: values as practiced from values as professed) then your "experiments" just show correlation and not causation.
You can't "accurately quantify" anything significant in human affairs. This is why history is an art, not a science. So is government. (So is running a startup.)
This is pretty much the ideology of the folks over at lesswrong.com.
The folks over at lesswrong.com seem to exist in a bizarre philosophical and historical vacuum in which they're the only intelligent people who ever lived. All of them, Eliezer not at all excepted, could benefit greatly from exposure to the thought of other times and places. Especially Victorian thought, which has the great advantage that (a) it's written in English and (b) universally available for free.
Part of the problem is that the contemporary "humanities" are so empty, sterile, and meretricious that it's really tempting to behave as if no one else has ever had anything interesting to say, ever. But this is a disorder of the present, not the past.
You can't "accurately quantify" anything significant in human affairs. This is why history is an art, not a science. So is government. (So is running a startup.)
This is pretty much the ideology of the folks over at lesswrong.com.
The folks over at lesswrong.com seem to exist in a bizarre philosophical and historical vacuum in which they're the only intelligent people who ever lived. All of them, Eliezer not at all excepted, could benefit greatly from exposure to the thought of other times and places. Especially Victorian thought, which has the great advantage that (a) it's written in English and (b) universally available for free.
Part of the problem is that the contemporary "humanities" are so empty, sterile, and meretricious that it's really tempting to behave as if no one else has ever had anything interesting to say, ever. But this is a disorder of the present, not the past.