AAAAAIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE

BOOM

It would have been even more frustrating had the protagonist not also been guessing the teacher's password. It seemed that the protagonist just had a better memory of what more authoritative teachers had said.

The protagonist was closer to being able to derive π himself, but that played no part in his argument.

Quite depressing. Makes me even less likely to have my kids educated in the states. I wonder how bad Europe is on that count? Is it really better here? It can be hard to tell from inside; correcting for the fact that most info I get is biased one way or the other leaves me with pretty wide confidence intervals.

I took it for at least 8 weeks, primarily on weekdays. I found after a while that I was waking up at 4am, sometimes unable to get back to sleep. I had some night sweats too. May not be a normal response, but I found that if I take it in moderation it does not have these effects.

I've been trying it as well for ~2 months (with some gaps).

Normally I have trouble falling asleep, but have no problem staying asleep, so the main reason I take melatonin is to help fall asleep.

Currently, I take 2 5mg pills. Taking 1 doesn't have a very noticeable effect on my ability to fall asleep, but 2 seems to do the trick. However, I have to be sure that I give myself 7-8 hours for sleep, otherwise getting up is more difficult and I may be very groggy the next day. This can be problematic because sometimes I just have to stay up slightly later doing homework and because I can't take the melatonin I end up barely getting any sleep at all.

I haven't noticed any habit forming effects, though some slight effects might be welcome if it helped me to remember to take the supplement every night ;)

edit: its actually two 3mg pills, not 5mg. I googled the brand walmart carries since that's where I bought mine from, and it said 5mg on the bottle. Now that I'm home, I see that my bottle is actually 3mg.

I also tried it out after reading that LW post. At first it was fantastic at getting me to fall asleep within 30 minutes (I'm a good sleeper, it would only take me 30 minutes because I would be going to sleep not tired in order to wake up earlier) and I would wake up feeling alert.

Now unfortunately I wake up feeling the same and basically have stopped noticing its effects. The only time I take it is when I want to go to sleep and I'm not tired.

Also: During the initial 1-2 week period of effectiveness, I had intense and vivid and stressful dreams (or maybe I simply remembered my normal dreams better).

The easily available product for me is a blend of 3mg melatonin/25mg theanine. 25mg is a heavy tea-drinker's dose, and I see no reason to consume theanine at all (even dividing the pills in half), so I haven't bought any.

Does anyone have some evidence recommending for/against taking theanine? In my view, the health benefits of tea drinking are negligible, and theanine is just one of many compounds in tea.

My fellow Earthicans, as I discuss in my book Earth In The Balance and the much more popular Harry Potter And The Balance Of Earth, we need to defend our planet against pollution. As well as dark wizards.

-- Al Gore on Futurama

Harry Potter as a boy genius smart-aleck aspiring rationalist works surprisingly well. And the idea of extending the pull of rationalism a bit beyond its standard sci-fi hunting grounds using Harry Potter fanfiction is brilliant.

Magnificent. (I've sent it to some of my friends, most of whom are thoroughly enjoying it too; many of them are into Harry Potter but not advanced rationalism, so maybe it will turn some of them on to the MAGIC OF RATIONALITY!)

Edit: Sequel idea which probably only works as a title: "Harry Potter and the Prisoner's Dilemma of Azkaban". Ohoho!

Edit 2: Also on my wishlist: Potter-Evans-Verres Puppet Pals.

I'm 98% confident it's Eliezer. He's been taunting us about a piece of fanfiction under a different name on fanfiction.net for some time. I guess this means I don't have to bribe him with mashed potatoes to get the URL after all.

Edit: Apparently, instead, I will have to bribe him with mashed potatoes for spoilers. Goddamn WIPs.

For the record, it's currently the first Google autocomplete result for "harry potter and the me", with apparently multiple pages of forum posts and such about it.

Fb, sebz gur cbvag bs ivrj bs na Nygreangr-Uvfgbel, V nffhzr gur CBQ vf Yvyyl tvivat va naq svkvat Crghavn'f jrvtug ceboyrz. Gung jbhyq graq gb vzcebir Crghavn'f ivrj bs ure zntvpny eryngvirf, naq V nffhzr gur ohggresyvrf nera'g rabhtu gb fnir Wnzrf naq Yvyyl sebz Ibyqrzbeg. Tvira gur infgyl vapernfrq vagryyvtrapr bs Uneel, V nffhzr ur vf abg trargvpnyyl gur fnzr puvyq jr fnj va gur obbxf, nygubhtu vzcebirq puvyqubbq ahgevgvba pbhyq nyfb or n snpgbe.

The probability of magic should make any effort on testing the hypothesis unjustified. Testing theories no matter how improbable is generally incorrect dogma. (One should distinguish improbable from silly though.)

An annoying thing about the RQ test (rot13'd):

Jura V gbbx gur ED grfg gurer jnf n flfgrzngvp ovnf gbjneqf jung jbhyq pbzzbayl or pnyyrq vagrerfgvat snpgf orvat zber cebonoyr naq zhaqnar/obevat snpgf orvat yrff cebonoyr. fgrira0461 nyfb abgvprq guvf. Guvf jnf nobhg 1 zbagu ntb. ebg13'q fb nf abg gb shegure ovnf crbcyrf' erfhygf.

Cool. Since a handful of studies suggest a narrow majority believe moral responsibility and determinism to be incompatible this shouldn't actually be that surprising. I want to know how people act after being exposed to statements in favor of compatibilism.

Why does the universe that we live in look like a giant computer? What about uncomputable physics?

Consider "syntactic preference" as an order on agent's strategies (externally observable possible behaviors, but in mathematical sense, independently on what we can actually arrange to observe), where the agent is software running on an ordinary computer. This is "ontological boxing", a way of abstracting away any unknown physics. Then, this syntactic order can be given interpretation, as in logic/model theory, for example by placing the "agent program" in environment of all possible "world programs", and restating the order on possible agent's strategies in terms of possible outcomes for the world programs (as an order on sets of outcomes for all world programs), depending on the agent.

This way, we first factor out the real world from the problem, leaving only the syntactic backbone of preference, and then reintroduce a controllable version of the world, in a form of any convenient mathematical structure, an interpretation of syntactic preference. The question of whether the model world is "actually the real world", and whether it reflects all possible features of the real world, is sidestepped.

You can do better than frequentist approach without using the "magic" universal prior. You can just use a prior that represents initial ignorance of the frequency at which the machine produces head-biased and tail-biased coins. (dP(f) = 1df). If you want to look for repeating patterns, you can assign probability (1/2)(1/2^n) to the theory that the machine produces each type of coin on a frequency depending on the last n coins it produced. This requires treating a probability as a strength of belief, and not the frequency of anything, which is what (as I understand it) frequentists are not willing to do.

Note the universal prior, if you can pull it off, is still better than what I described. The repeating pattern seeking prior will not notice, for example, if the machine makes head biased coins on prime-numbered trials, but tailbiased coins on composite-numbered trials. This is because it implicitly assigns probability 0 to that type of machine, which takes infinite evidence to update.

BTW, I wish there is a "public drafts" feature on LessWrong, where I can make a draft accessible to others by URL, but not show up in recent posts, so I don't have to post a draft elsewhere to get feedback before I officially publish it.

I second this feature request.

ETA: I did not notice earlier Steve Rayhawk made the same comment.

I wish there is a "public drafts" feature on LessWrong

Seconded. See also JenniferRM on editorial-level versus object-level comments.

I've been trying to do this since November for a close family member. So far the reaction has been fairly positive, but she has still not decided to go for it.

The only way I know to track karma changes is having an old tab with my Recent Comments visible and comparing it to the new one. That captures a lot of the change - >90% - but not the old threads.

I would love to know how hard it would be to have a "Recent Karma Changes" feed.

My take on capital punishment is that it's not actually that important an issue. With pretty much anything that you can say about the death penalty, you can say something similar about life imprisonment without parole (especially with the way that the death penalty is actually practiced in the United States). Would you lock an innocent man in a cell for the rest of his life to keep 19 bad ones locked up?

Virtually zero chance of recidivism? True for both. Very expensive? Check. Wrongly convicted innocent people get screwed? Check - though in both cases they have a decent chance of being exonerated after conviction before getting totally screwed (and thus only being partially screwed). Could be considered immoral to do something so severe to a person? Check. Deprives people of an "inalienable" right? Check (life/liberty). Strongly demonstrates society's disapproval of a crime? Check (slight edge to capital punishment, though life sentences would be better at this if the death penalty wasn't an option). Applied disproportionately to certain groups? I think so, though I don't know the research. Strong deterrent? It seems like the death penalty should be a bit stronger, but the evidence is unclear on that. Provides closure to the victim's family? Execution seems like more definitive closure, but they have to wait until years after sentencing to get it.

The criminal justice system is a big important topic, and I think it's too bad that this little piece of it (capital punishment) soaks up so much of our attention to it. Overall, my stance on capital punishment is ambivalent, leaning against it because it's not worth the trouble, though in some cases (like McVeigh) it's nice to have around and I could be swayed by a big deterrent effect. I'd prefer for more of the focus to be on this sort of thing (pdf).

The more judicious question, I am coming to realize, isn't so much "Which of these two Standard Positions should I stand firmly on".

The more useful question is, why do the positions matter? Why is the discussion currently crystallized around these standard positions important to me, and how should I fluidly allow whatever evidence I can find to move me toward some position, which is rather unlikely (given that the debate has been so long crystallized in this particular way) to be among the standard ones. And I shouldn't necessarily expect to stay at that position forever, once I have admitted in principle that new evidence, or changes in other beliefs of mine, must commit me to a change in position on that particular issue.

In the death-penalty debate I identify more strongly with the "abolitionist" standard position because I was brought up in an abolitionist country by left-wing parents. That is, I find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum from you. And yet, perhaps we are closer than is apparent at first glance, if we are both of us committed primarily to investigating the questions of values, the questions of fact, and the questions of process that might leave either or both of us, at the end of the inquiry, in a different position than we started from.

• Would I revise my "in principle" opposition to the death penalty if, for instance, the means of "execution" were modified to cryonic preservation? Would I then support cryonic preservation as a "punishment" for lesser crimes such as would currently result in lifetime imprisonment?

• Would I still oppose the death penalty if we had a Truth Machine? Or if we could press Omega into service to give us a negligible probability of wrongful conviction? Or otherwise rely on a (putatively) impartial means of judgment which didn't involve fallible humans? Is that even desirable, if it was at all possible?

• Would I support the death penalty if I found out it was an effective deterrent, or would I oppose it only if I found that it didn't deter? Does deterrence matter? Why, or why not?

• How does economics enter into such a decision? How much, whatever position I arrive at, should I consider myself obligated to actively try to ensure that the society I live in espouses that position? For what scope of "the society I live in" - how local or global?

Those are topics and questions I encounter in the process of thinking about things other than the death penalty; practically every important topic has repercussions on this one.

There's an old systems science saying that I think applies to rational discussions about Big Questions such as this one: "you can't change just one thing". You can't decide on just one belief, and as I have argued before, it serves no useful purpose to call an isolated belief "irrational". It seems more appropriate to examine the processes whereby we adjust networks of beliefs, how thoroughly we propagate evidence and argument among those networks.

There is currently something of a meta-debate on LW regarding how best to reflect this networked structure of adjusting our beliefs based on evidence and reasoning, with approaches such as TakeOnIt competing against more individual debate modeling tools, with LessWrong itself, not so much the blog but perhaps the community and its norms, having some potential to serve as such a process for arbitrating claims.

But all these prior discussions seem to take as a starting point that "you can't change just one belief". That's among the consequences of embracing uncertainty, I think.

Standard response: politics is the mind-killer.

Personal response: I'm opposed to the death penalty because it costs more than putting them in prison for life due to the huge number of appeals they're allowed (vaguely recall hearing in newspapers / reports). I feel the US has become so risk-averse and egalitarian that it cannot properly implement a death penalty. This is reflected in the back-and-forth questions you ask.

I also oppose it on the grounds that it is often used as a tool of vengeance rather than justice. Nitrogen poisoning (I think that was the gas they were talking about) is a safe, highly reliable, and euphoric means of death, but the US still prefers electrocution (can take minutes), injection (can feel like the veins are burning from the inside out while the body is paralyzed), etc.

That said, I don't care enough about the topic to try and alter its use, whether through voting, polling, letters, etc, nor do I desire to put much thought into it. Best to let hot topics alone.

And after asking about Bayes, you should ask for math rather than opinions.

There is strong Bayesian evidence that the USA has executed one innocent man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham By that I mean that an Amanda Knox test type analysis would clearly show that Willingham is innocent, probably with greater certainty than when the Amanda Knox case was analyzed. Does knowing that the USA has indeed provably executed an innocent person change your opinion?

What are the practical advantages of death over life in prison? US law allows for true life without parole. Life in an isolated cell in a Supermax prison is continual torture -- it is not a light punishment by any means. Without a single advantage given for the death penalty over life in prison without parole, I think that ~100% certainty is needed for execution.

I am against the death penalty for regular murder and mass murder and aggravated rape. I am indifferent with regards to the death penalty for crimes against humanity as I recognize that symbolic execution could be appropriate for grave enough crimes.

Found this entirely by chance - do a top level post?

Available without the paywall from the author's home page.

It's also an argument in favor of using checklists.

The causes of "too big to fail" are:

1. Corporate personhood laws makes it harder to punish the actual people in charge.

2. Problems in tort law (in the US) make it difficult to sue corporations for certain kinds of damages.

3. A large government (territorial monopoly of jurisdiction) makes it more profitable for any sufficiently large company to use the state as a bludgeon against its competitors (lobbying, bribes, friends in high places) instead of competing directly on the market.

4. Letting companies that waste resources go bankrupt causes short-term damage to the economy, but it is healthy in the long term because it allows more efficient companies to take over the tied-up talent and resources. Politicians care more about the short term than the long term.

5. For pharmaceutical companies there is an additional embiggening factor. Testing for FDA drug approval costs millions of dollars, which constitutes a huge barrier to entry for smaller companies. Hence the large companies can grow larger with little competition. This is amplified by 1 and 2, and 3 suggests that most of the competition among Big Pharma is over legislators and regulators, not market competition.

Disclosure: I am a "common law" libertarian (I find all monopolies counterproductive, including state governments).

Be careful about making assumptions about the intelligence of cows. I used to think sheep were stupid, then I read that sheep can tell humans apart by sight (which is more than I can do for them!), and I realized on reflection I never had any actual reason to believe sheep were stupid, it was just an idea I'd picked up and not had any reason to examine.

Also, be careful about extrapolating from the intelligence of domestic cows (which have lived for the last few thousand years with little evolutionary pressure to get the most out of their brain tissue) to the intelligence of their wild relatives.

At the risk of repeating the same mistake as my previous comment, I'll do armchair genetics this time:

Perhaps genes controlling the size of various mammalian organs and body regions tend to grow or shrink uniformly, and only become disproportionate when there is a stronger evolutionary pressure. When there is a mutation leading to more growth, all the organs tend to grow more.

(I now see this answered in the first few comments on the link eliezer posted.)

Purely armchair neurology: To answer the question of why cow brains would need to be bigger than rat brains, I asked what would go wrong if we put a rat brain into a cow. (Ignoring organ rejection and cheese crazed, wall-eating cows)

We would need to connect the rat brain to the cow body, but there would not be a 1 to 1 correspondence of connections. I suspect that a cow has many more nerve endings throughout it's body. At least some of the brain/body correlation must be related to servicing the body nerves. (both sensory and motor)

I hope this isn't a vegatarianism argument, but remember that you have to rehabilitate both killing and cruelty to justify eating most meat, even if killing alone has held you back so far.

Do you want to eat meat?

Or do you just want to have a good reason for not wanting to eat meat?

It's... y'know... food. I don't have an ethical objection to peppermint but I don't eat it because I don't want to.

I don't know exactly what the prior on "killing animals is wrong" is, but I think it has a reasonable size (certainly larger than that for god), and I feel more justified in being vegetarian because of this.

Is it meaningful to put a probability on 'killing animals is wrong' and absolute moral statements like that? Feels like trying to put a probability on 'abortion is wrong' or 'gun control is wrong' or '(insert your pet issue here) is wrong/right' or...

Voted up for having jokes with cautionary power, and not just amusement value.

I wouldn't proselytize too directly - you want to stay on their (and their mother's) good side, and I doubt it would be very effective anyways. You're better off trying to instill good values - open-mindedness, curiosity, ability to think for oneself, and other elements of rationality & morality - rather than focusing on religion directly. Just knowing an atheist (you) and being on good terms with him could help lead them to consider atheism down the road at some point, which is another reason why it's important to maintain a good relationship. Think about the parallel case of religious relatives who interfere with parents who are raising their kids non-religiously - there are a lot of similarities between their situation and yours (even though you really are right and they just think they are) and you could run into a lot of the same problems that they do.

I haven't had the chance to try it out personally, but Dale McGowan's blog seems useful for this sort of thing, and his books might be even more useful.

Dangerous situation!

How do the parents feel about science and science fiction? I believe that stuff has good effects.

One thing to do is make sure the kids understand that the Bible is just a bunch of stories. My mom teaches Reform Jewish Sunday school and makes this clear to her students. I make fun of her for cranking out little atheists.

Teaching that the bible is a bunch of stories written by multiple humans over time is not nearly as offensive as preaching atheism. Start there. This bit of knowledge should be enough to get your young relatives thinking about religion, if they want to start thinking about it.

I'm not speaking from experience here, but that doesn't stop me from having opinions.

I don't believe this is an emergency. Are the kid's lives being affected negatively by the religion? What do they think of what they're being taught?

Actually, this could be an emergency if they're being taught about Hell. Are they? Is it haunting them?

Their minds aren't a battlefield between you and religious school-- what they believe is, well not exactly their choice because people aren't very good at choosing, but more their choice than yours.

I recommend teaching them a little thoughtful cynicism, with advertisements as the subject matter.

Introduce them to really cool, socially near, atheists. In particular, provide contact with attractive opposite-gender children who are a couple of years older and are atheists.

Teach them the basis of bayesian reasoning without any connection to religion. This will help them in more ways and will lay the foundation for later when they naturally start questioning religion. Also their parents wont have anything against it you merely introduce it as a method for physics or chemistry or with the standard medical examples.

Possibly introducing them to some of the content in A Human's Guide to Words, such as dissolving the question, would lead them to theological noncognitivism. The nice thing about that as opposed to direct atheism is it's more "insidious" because instead of saying, "I don't believe" the kids would end up making more subtle points, like, "What do you even mean by omnipotent?" This somehow seems a lot less alarming to people, so it might bother the parents much less, or even seem like "innocent" questioning.

Rather sad to see Chalmers embracing the dopey "singularity" terminology.

He seems to have toned down his ideas about development under conditions of isolation:

"Confining a superintelligence to a virtual world is almost certainly impossible: if it wants to escape, it almost certainly will."

Still, the ideas he expresses here are not very realistic, IMO. People want machine intelligence to help them to attain their goals. Machines can't do that if they are isolated off in virtual worlds. Sure there will be test harnesses - but of course we won't keep these things permanently restrained on grounds of sheer paranoia - that would stop us from using them.

53 pages with only 2 mentions of zombies - yay.

This might be interesting in combination with the a "balanced drive". They were invented by science fiction author Charles Sheffield who attributed them his character Arthur Morton McAndrew so they are sometimes also called a "McAndrew Drive" or a "Sheffield Drive".

The basic trick is to put an incredibly dense mass at the end of a giant pole such that the inverse square law of gravity is significant along the length of the pole. The ship flies "mass forward" through space. Then the crew cabin (and anything else incapable of surviving enormous acceleration) is set up on the pole so that the faster the acceleration the closer it is to the mass. The cabin, flying "floor forward", changes its position while the floor flexes as needed so that the net effect of the ship's acceleration plus the force of gravity balance out to something tolerable. When not under acceleration you still get gravity in the cabin by pushing it out to very tip of the pole.

The literary value of the system is that you can do reasonably hard science fiction and still have characters jaunt from star to star so long as they are willing to put up with the social isolation because of time dilation, but the hard part is explaining what the mass at the end of the pole is, and where you'd get the energy to move it.

If you could feed a black hole enough to serve as the mass while retaining the ability to generate Hawking radiation, that might do it. Or perhaps simply postulating technological control of quantum black holes and then use two in your ship: a big one to counteract acceleration and a small one to get energy from a "Crane-Westmoreland Generator".

I prefer links to the abstract, when possible.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803

I value empathy. Unfortunately, it's a highly packed word in the way I use it.

Attempting a definition, I'd say it involves creating the most accurate mental models of what people want, including oneself, and trying to satisfy those wants. This makes it a recursive and recursively self-improving model (I think), since one thing I want is to know what else I, and others, want. To satisfy that want, I have to constantly get better at want-knowing.

The best way to determine and to satisfy these preferences appears to be through the use of rationality and future prediction, creating maps of minds and chains of causality, so I place high value on those skills. Without the ability to predict the future or map out minds, "what people want" becomes far too close to wireheading or pure selfishness.

Empathy, to me, involves trying to figure out what the person would truly want, given as much understanding and knowledge of the consequences as possible, contrasting with what they say they want.

Take a wild, wild guess.

No rush -- I'll wait.

How do you evaluate your actions as proper or improper, good or bad, right or wrong?

I don't fully understand how I tell good from bad. A query goes in, an answer pops out in the form of a feeling. Many of the criteria probably come from my parents, from reading books, and from pleasant/unpleasant interactions with other people. I can't boil it down to any small set of rules that would answer every moral question without applying actual moral sense, and I don't believe anyone else can.

It's easier to give a diff, to specify how my moral sense differs from that of other people I know. The main difference I see is that some years ago I deeply internalized the content of Games People Play and as a result I never demonstrate to anyone that I feel bad about something - I now consider this a grossly immoral act. On the other hand, I cheat on women a lot and don't care too much about that. In other respects I see myself as morally average.

You try frantically to tell people about this, and it always seems to go badly for you.

Telling people frantically about problems that are not on a very short list of "approved emergencies" like fire, angry mobs, and snakes is a good way to get people to ignore you, or, failing that, to dislike you.

It is only very recently (in evolutionary time) that ordinary people are likely to find important solutions to important social problems in a context where those solutions have a realistic chance of being implemented. In the past, (a) people were relatively uneducated, (b) society was relatively simpler, and (c) arbitrary power was held and wielded relatively more openly.

Thus, in the past, anyone who was talking frantically about social reform was either hopelessly naive, hopelessly insane, or hopelessly self-promoting. There's a reason we're hardwired to instinctively discount that kind of talk.

You should present the easily implemented, obviously better solution at the same time as the problem.

If the solution isn't easy to implement by the person you're talking to, then cost/benefit analysis may be in favor of the status quo or you might be talking to the wrong person. If the solution isn't obviously better, then it won't be very convincing as a solution or you might not have considered all opinions on the problem. And if there is no solution, then why complain?

Melatonin. Also, getting my housemates to harass me if I don't go to bed.

I've been struggling with this for years, and the only thing I've found that works when nothing else does is hard exercise. The other two things that I've found help the most:

• Let the sun hit your eyelids first thing in the morning (to halt melatonin production)
• F.lux, a program that auto-adjusts your monitor's light levels (and keep your room lights low at night; otherwise melatonin production will be delayed)

EDIT: Apparently keeping your room lights at a low color temperature (incandescent/halogen instead of fluorescent) is better than keeping them at low intensity:

"...we surmise that the effect of color temperature is greater than that of illuminance in an ordinary residential bedroom or similar environment where a lowering of physiological activity is desirable, and we therefore find the use of low color temperature illumination more important than the reduction of illuminance. Subjective drowsiness results also indicate that reduction of illuminance without reduction of color temperature should be avoided." —Noguchi and Sakaguchi, 1999 (note that these are commercial researchers at Matsushita, which makes low-color-temperature fluorescents)

What do you do instead of going to bed? I notice myself spending time on the Internet.

There are lots of studies on the issue, and as usual most of them are bad and disagree with each other.

I tend to trust the one by the UK Food Standards Association because it's big and government-funded. Mayo Clinic agrees. I think there are a few studies that show organic foods do have lower pesticide levels than normal, but nothing showing that it actually leads to health benefits. Pesticides can cause some health problems in farmers, but they're receiving a bajillion times the dose of someone who just eats the occasional carrot. And some "organic pesticides" are just as bad as any synthetic ones. There's also a higher risk of getting bacterial infections from organic food.

Tastewise, a lot of organics people cite some studies showing that organic apples and other fruit taste better than conventional - I can't find the originals of these and there are equally questionable studies that say the opposite. Organic vegetables taste somewhere between the same and worse, even by organic peoples' admission. There's a pretty believable study showing conventional chicken tastes better than organic, and a more pop-sci study claiming the same thing about almost everything. I've seen some evidence that locally grown produce tastes better than imported, but that's a different issue than organic vs. non-organic and you have to make sure people aren't conflating them.

They do produce less environmental damage per unit land, but they produce much less food per unit land and so require more land to be devoted to agriculture. How exactly that works out in the end is complex economics that I can't navigate.

My current belief is that organics have a few more nutrients here and there but not enough to matter, are probably less healthy overall when you consider infection risk, and taste is anywhere from no difference to worse except maybe on a few limited fruits.

The famous metaanalyses which has shown that vitamin supplementation is essentially useless, or possibly even harmful totally destroys the basic argument ("oh look, more vitamins!" - not that it's usually even true) that organic is good for your health.

It might still be tastier. Or not.

People have been worrying about that one since Malthus. Turns out, production capacity can increase exponentially too, and when any given child has a high enough chance of survival, the strategy shifts from spamming lots of low-investment kids (for farm labor) to having one or two children and lavishing resources on them, which is why birthrates in the developed world are dropping below replacement.