If Al Qaeda ever seeks torture me, please don't tell them of my psychic experience when listening to William Drayton and Mark Leon Goldberg.

Sounds like a ponzi scheme for charity.
It just might work!

Amazing. Thank you for this great interview Mark and William.

I thought this was great stuff, albeit not to the tastes of some of Bloggingheads more hardboiled viewers. I see so many nonprofits and government programs spinning their wheels ineffectively, so it's good to have other models out there.

Quoting jonny goldstein: I thought this was great stuff, albeit not to the tastes of some of Bloggingheads more hardboiled viewers. I see so many nonprofits and government programs spinning their wheels ineffectively, so it's good to have other models out there.

That's a good way of putting it. I felt much the same way -- we have enough problems that aren't getting solved, or aren't getting solved quickly enough, and a persistent fraction of the world population that seems stuck no matter what we have done, that it's worth trying some other ideas in parallel. William did sound a little vague and hand-wavy about his program, and to the extent that I understood it, I'm dubious about how well it would scale, but there might be something to his approach. During this diavlog, I kept thinking of the old Margaret Mead line:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

For my first bloggingheads comment, I'd like to thank Curtis for darn near making me do just as he described.

falling over from laughing, that is. Not from dozing off. Dang, flubbed the first one

On Free Will this week Eliezer and Will discuss rationality and "overcoming bias" as values. Their criticism of Bush as "stupid" suggests that a more rational president would be better and that rationality trumps "feelings." Mark and William seem to suggest another POV -- that a) empathy is supremely important b) it can be taught and c) people who become more empathetic will solve our fundamental problems. Mark suggests nonviolence should be our core value, even though violence may appear "rational." To what extent do these core values of empathy and rationality complement or contradict each other? I'm cross-posting this on the Free Will discussion to see if anyone wants to pick it up there.

Quoting Wonderment: On Free Will this week Eliezer and Will discuss rationality and "overcoming bias" as values. Their criticism of Bush as "stupid" suggests that a more rational president would be better and that rationality trumps "feelings."

Mark and William seem to suggest another POV -- that a) empathy is supremely important b) it can be taught and c) people who become more empathetic will solve our fundamental problems. Mark suggests nonviolence should be our core value, even though violence may appear "rational."

To what extent do these core values of empathy and rationality complement or contradict each other?

I'm cross-posting this on the Free Will discussion to see if anyone wants to pick it up there.

Wonderment: see this. H/T Tyrrell McAllister.

Quoting Wonderment: To what extent do these core values of empathy and rationality complement or contradict each other?

I'd see no inherent reason why empathy and rationality can't complement each other highly. In this light, see Dennis Overbye's latest essay. Excerpts:

Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy