Unlike Odin, Gwern has plucked out both his eyes for wisdom, knowing the value of double blindness.

Technically, we don't have incontrovertible proof that Gwern isn't a mostly-friendly AI that consumes a lot of anime.

I went on an interview with Google. They told me that if I was hired, I'd be working on a unique innovation. When I asked what it was, they told me "We want to make an app that will search this guy named Gwern."

Gwern's reality marble, Unlimited Essay Works, is the original, of which Unlimited Blade Works is a mere copy.

I went to the library and it was empty. They said Gwern stopped by for a quick lookup.

Come on, Gwern deserves more than a favorable comparison to the FDA.

I know several people who have more credibility than the "FDA and the entire decision-making apparatus of the United States government", at least when it comes to drugs. Not because I know so many cool folks, but because drug regulation is a paramount example of government irrationality.

They went to upload Gwern's brain. They said they couldn't do it, but they were glad that someone had made most of the internet redundant.

What are the people you like like?

You say you're becoming more misanthropic; did you use to like more people? What were those people like? Do you have an internal narrative about why you don't like them anymore?

On Enjoying Disagreeable Company is my post on liking people on purpose.

I had very few (physical) friends in college and even fewer now. I find that I get enough social interaction online and with my family (I'm married). Of course everyone is different but you may not need as many friends as you currently seem to think.

If I may offer some advice: Be careful not to rationalize social anxiety with "they are homogeneous, they dehumanize women, they aren't as original as I am, they bore me". That's externalizing an internal problem.

There are people of considerable intellectual caliber who have no qualms engaging in random small talk (a required skill in many career paths), and you'll only find out who they are once you get past that barrier.

No simple solution, but nosce te ipsum applies.

The people who like drinking and sports are the most prominent in many colleges, but it doesn't mean that they're the only ones around.

I had the same problem as you my first year at college, and mainly solved it through three factors, in order of importance:

1. Making friends in math classes.

2. Going to a few student-organized clubs.

3. Blind luck.

Whatever strategy you decide, if you happen to find just one or two friends that also don't have too many friends, you can then try everything you try together and it will be much easier. I realize this might be terribly unhelpful advice.

You need to find a (physical world) subculture to get involved in.

I don't mean this snarkily, but have you considered drinking or taking up a sport?

Low level sport (where everyone's a bit rubbish and no-one takes it seriously) is superb fun. Obviously, you'll be terrible at it, but if you find a club that's short of people and loses all the time anyway you'll probably be more welcome than you think. And just by taking part you'll get much better at it. It might change your life.

And if you're embedded in a society where social life revolves around alcohol you'll miss out on a vast amount of the fun and happiness that comes with being human if you don't join in. You don't have to overdo it. Just try having a glass of wine with someone you like one day and see how it goes.

I am a pretty nerdy guy, but if I had to relive my life without ever drinking alcohol or playing cricket or rowing or playing rugby I just think I'd probably not want to bother. ( I am unbelievably bad at rugby. )

If it helps encourage you, for a long time I coached novice rowers for King's College (part of the University of Cambridge). Occasionally we'd get a hopelessly non-sporty introvert turning up wanting a go. Some of these guys were so shy they could hardly speak. And they were often the people who enjoyed it the most, and became most committed and most likely to come back year after year.

I'm not going to lie to you, with one exception they never became any good. But they all became much better than they had been, and seemed to enjoy the process, and are some of the people that I most enjoyed coaching.

It helps of course that rowing is actually technically complex and I could talk to these people about how best to turn energy into momentum and how it is that a boat can balance even though its centre of gravity is above its centre of flotation and so on.

I think one of the reasons that rowing is so popular amongst the sciency types at Cambridge is that it is a sport that you can think about in terms of physics.

But it really doesn't matter what the sport is. Just go and find a small club doing something where they have trouble getting enough people together to make a team, and where there's someone nice who knows how to teach it, explain that you've not done anything like this before and ask if they could use you. Stick with it for a month, and if you really hate it give up.

One nice thing about sports is that the skills are easily measurable. Working out what to do in order to make your scores better is part of the fun. Don't miss out. It will teach you so much about life.

Most people are terrible. It's a lot of work to sort the awesome people from the terrible people. I've had good luck using "gamer" "geek", "queer", and "kinky" as labels that tend to more reliably apply to interesting people or people I'm happy to get along with, but your mileage may vary. Every single one of my room-mates plays or used to play Magic the Gathering, for example.

Not making friends with the random people around you in college who are into drinking, sports, and dehumanizing women is, in my mind, a good sign. You shouldn't force yourself to try and make friends with people who don't share interests with you, or at least are interesting to talk to. Try talking to the people you see who are actively weird.

This is how I feel when parties are going on: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-going-to-sit-quietly-in-darkened-bedroom,29831/ . There's one going on tonight, so this is particularly apt.

I take it you don't have a LW meetup near by. Do you think you could start one?

The drama caused in other sciences due to not sorting authors alphabetically is truly depressing.

You deserve at least 24 upvotes for pointing this out.

Strictly speaking it's not precisely the same font size. A few, such as "rationality" and "meta" appear to be one size bigger.

Incest among adults is also sex between consenting adults.

True, but that's largely a noncentral fallacy.

Most arguments against incest are arguments where the bottom line is already written since they are made by people who just don't want to admit they are plain grossed out by it.

If I'm grossed out by it, why am I watching lesbian incest hentai? :-)

Not only the motivation, but many of the arguments are basically the same as arguments in favour of homophobia. If the person's has an identity centred on fighting "bigotry" cognitive dissonance hilarity ensues.

Agreed. But not all the arguments are basically the same. Some of the arguments are more like the "teachers shouldn't date their students" argument and the "psychologists shouldn't date their patients" or even "50-year olds shouldn't date 20-year olds" argument, and reflect on the likely unhealthy effects of power-imbalance.

The power-imbalance in intergenerational incest is obvious. In intragenerational incest it can of course be significantly less clear; especially in cases like the German couple where the siblings only met during adulthood.

Bonus round: Arguments against incestuous couples having children is a fundamentally eugenicist argument.

That's a plus to those arguments, not a minus -- because we're moving to a consequentialist perspective from an arbitrary deontologist one.

Applying it like a consequentalist results in concluding many other kinds of couples should be discouraged just as much

Perhaps they should -- but keep in mind that banning incest bars any one person from a very small subset of potentially desirable sex partners -- much like barring psychiatrists from sexing their patients. On the other hand barring e.g. old people from having sex, or gay people having sex, pretty much precludes them from having pleasurable sex altogether. The cost of such a policy seems higher in such a case.

That having been said, I'd have been all in favour of applauding the German couple (especially since they didn't grow up together) if they had only made sure they didn't have children via e.g. vasectomy, getting tubes tied, etc...

Whenever I want to trigger a moral intuition that can't be justified by any moral system that doesn't just expressly prohibit it by fiat, I use an example that triggers incest avoidance.

Most arguments against incest are arguments where the bottom line is already written since they are made by people who just don't want to admit they are plain grossed out by it.

The most common intelligent argument I've seen against incest is "power imbalance!" which in the case of your news story looks like a case of the noncentral fallacy.

Has anyone tried this?Is anyone interested in this?

Yes, I've been looking into it in relation to this project. If you'd like to join our little informal research group feel free to contact me via PM and share your email address. :)

Are there other easy ways to make and publish online lessons without paying money?

A few but they seem kind of sketchyware and I haven't tried them.

Less-than-sincere modesty is probably the culprit for missing the interval.

Not inordinately.

A main point is that you're bigoted if you only listen to critiques of people you disagree with (or set critique on authomatic as you read or listen to them) rather than paying attention to their words with attention to those people intend.

I think the LW consensus is that the copy is also you, and personal identity as we think of it today will have to undergo significant change once uploads and copies become a thing.

Contemporary people are more or less completely bamboozled by the whole topic of minds, brains, and computers. It's like in the early days of language, when some people thought that reality was created by a divine breath speaking the true names of things, or that the alphabet existed before the universe alongside God, and so on. Language was the original information technology that was made into an idol and treated like magic because it seemed like magic. The current attitudes to computers and computation are analogous, except that we really can culture neurons and simulate them, so we are going to be creating hybrid entities even more novel, in evolutionary terms, than a primate with a verbalizing stream of consciousness (which was a hybrid of biology and language).

What is the computational paradigm of mind? Often this paradigm floats free of any material description at all, focusing solely on algorithms and information. But if we ask for a physical description of computation, it is as follows: There is an intricate physical object - a brain, a computer. Mostly it is scaffolding. There are also non-computational processes happening in it - blood circulating, fan spinning. But among all the physical events which happen inside this object, there are special localized events which are the elementary computations. A wave of depolarization travels along a cell membrane. The electrons in a transistor rearrange themselves in response to small voltages. In the intricate physical object, billions of these special events occur, in intricate trains of cause and effect. The computational paradigm of mind is that thought, self, experience, identity are all, in some sense, nothing but the pattern of these events.

These days it is commonly acknowledged that this supposed identity is somewhat mysterious or unobvious. I would go much further and say that almost everything that is believed and said about this topic is wrong, just like the language mysticism of an earlier age, but it has a hold on people's minds because the facts seem so obvious and they don't have any other way of conceiving of their own relationship to those facts. Yes, it's mysterious that mere ink on a page has such power over our minds and such practical utility, but the reality of that power and that utility are self-evident, therefore, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Yes, it's mysterious that a billion separate little events of particles in motion could feel like being a person and being alive, but we know that the brain is made of neural circuitry and that we could in principle simulate it on any computing mechanism, therefore you are a program in your brain, and if we ran that program somewhere new, you would live again.

People try with varying degrees of self-awareness and epistemic modesty to be rational about their beliefs here, but mostly it's the equivalent of different schools of language mysticism, clashing over whether the meaning-essence only inhabits the voice, or whether it can be found in the written word too. In my estimation, what people say about consciousness, uploads, and personal identity, is similarly far from the reality of how anything works and of what we really are.

If we ever extend human understanding far enough to grasp the truth, it's going to be something bizarre - that you are a perspective vortex in your cortical quantum fields, something like that, something strange and hardly expressible with our current concepts. And meanwhile, we continue to develop our abilities to analyze the brain materially, to shape it and modify it, and to make computer hardware and software. Those abilities are like riding a bicycle, we can pick them up without really knowing what we are doing or why it works, and we're in a hurry to use those abilities too.

So most likely, that biolinguistic hybrid, the primate who thinks in words, is going to create its evolutionary successor without really understanding what it's doing, and perhaps even while it is possessed with a false understanding of what it is doing, a fundamentally untrue image of reality. That's what I see at work in these discussions of mind uploading and artificial intelligence: computational superstition coupled to material power. The power means that something will be done, this isn't just talk, there will be new beings; but the superstition means that there will be a false image of what is happening as it happens.

If you use the concepts of "dying" or "personal identity" in this context, you risk committing the noncentral fallacy, since uploading is an atypical case of their application, and their standard properties won't automatically carry over.

For example, concluding that an instance of you "actually dies" when there is also a recent copy doesn't necessarily imply that something bad took place, since even if you do in some sense decide that this event is an example of the concept of "dying", this is such an atypical example that its membership in that concept provides only very weak evidence for sharing the property of being bad with the more typical examples. Locating this example in the standard concepts is both difficult and useless, a wrong question.

The only way out seems to be to taboo the ideas of "dying", "personal identity", etc., and fall back on the arguments that show in what way typical dying is bad, and non-dying is good, by generalizing these arguments about badness of typical destruction of a person to badness of the less typical destruction of a copy, and goodness of not destroying a person to goodness of having a spare copy when another copy is destroyed.

It seems to me that the valuable things about a living person (we've tabooed the "essence of personal identity", and are only talking about value) are all about their abstract properties, their mind, their algorithm of cognition, and not about the low-level details of how these abstract properties are implemented. Since destruction of a copied person preserves these properties (implemented in the copy), the value implemented by them is retained. Similarly, one of the bad things about typical dying (apart from the loss of a mind discussed above) seems to be the event of terminating a mind. To the extent this event is bad in itself, copying and later destroying the original will be bad. If this is so, destructive uploading will be better than uploading followed by destruction of the conscious original, but possibly worse than pure copying without any destruction.

Almost everybody starts with the intuitive notion that uploading will kill the "real you". The discussion seems to have been treading the same ground since at least the 1990s, so I don't really expect anything new to come out of yet another armchair rehash.

Chapters 9 and 10 in David Chalmers' singularity paper are a resonably good overview of the discussion. Chalmers end up finding both stances convincing given different setups for a thought experiment, and remains puzzled about the question.

Agreed. I have no beef with the term 'complex' for the complex numbers. It's the 'real' for the others, and the 'imaginary' for the new stuff, that I mind.

I wonder if a very short treatment of abstract algebra should be given in high school, right before you get to complex numbers. Might reduce the number chauvinism and help with the illusion of number realism.

I've never thought of real numbers as any more real (in the non-mathematical sense of the word) than other numbers, and I've been peeved by popularizations which use “real” and “imaginary” without making it clear that they're using them with a specific technical meaning (e.g. stuff like “special relativity has shown that if space is real time must be imaginary, and vice versa” -- yeah, they do have squares with opposite signs (though modern notation uses real 4-vectors and a non-positive-definite metric), but that's not how a reader would be most likely to interpret that sentence).

I've taught a few people about the complex numbers, by stepping through expanding the naturals with the introduction of negatives to make integers, fractions to make rationals, irrationals to make reals, and finally (the 'novel' stage for my audience) imaginary numbers to make the complex numbers.

I emphasise the point that the new system always seems weird and confusing at first to the people who aren't used to it, and sometimes gets given a nasty name in contrast to the nice name of the old system (especially 'imaginary' vs 'real' and 'irrational' vs 'rational') but the new numbers are never more or less worthwhile than the old system - they're just different, and useful in new ways.

Seconding this. You can get around it by clicking the permalink button to the topmost comment and traveling up further from that but it's still anoying

And I'd like "context" to show (or perhaps have an option to show) the whole tree which includes a comment rather than a single thread.

Yes, and here's another. On the page of all that user's posts, it does appear, at -4. But the permalink to the post shows it as hidden.

Is this a bug or a new feature?

Huh, ditto, and un-downvoting it didn't make it stop being hidden.

I saw this pop on arXiv, but I doubt it will be very useful to anyone who doesn't know most of the stuff in it beforehand. The exposition is pretty terse, and there are well over 1000 stated theorems.

What is his main proposition? He has a model of the world in which enormous amounts of energy and money are being spent running a rat race where the satisfaction only comes from winning it, not from running it, and meanwhile there are numerous places where just a small fraction of that energy and money could be spent, creating great and lasting benefits. His proposition is that in the current situation, modafinil is known mostly to a minority which includes people working on some of those important neglected matters, but if modafinil becomes as well known as Prozac or Viagra, its main consequence will be that the rats in the rat race will all run faster, with no net benefit.

Your comments imply that you disagree with this model, but you need to say where and why.

That's a very long winded way of objecting to Yvain's model of the American economy as largely zero-sum games (eg. poker). If the village is a static economy with fixed output... Then sure, modafinil is fairly questionable. But this story is a way of asserting it is not with hypothetical examples.

Of course, it's not obvious that iodine is necessarily a good thing. Malthusian models come to mind: if intelligence has no effect on subsistence wage, then it can have no effect on per capita wealth and so any effects are redistributional, and if you want to argue it's a good thing you need to appeal to extra things like quality of life... which actually probably would affect subsistence wage since now you don't need so much wages, your quality of life has been improved. Intelligence might come with a one-time increase in wealth, which of course simply causes the population to expand and that the temporarily-increased-per-capita-wealth will eventually fall back down to equilibrium as people reproduce more. :)

"It was a bit sloppy essay of Yvain - cool idea, kinda weak execution" is what I might say if he had posted it to Main instead of his blog.

Although I'm unsure of the etiquette of posting about personal blogs on other sites, I was also disappointed with the blog post in question. It was the first time that Yvain wrote something I disagreed with after reading his post in full and digesting in. I've often disagreed with him before reading it, but he usually persuades me.

This post seemed to rely on the principle that having more spare time is a positional good, with which I disagree strongly. Essentially, giving everyone another four hours of awake, productive time, is the same as extending your life by four hours for each day you are alive [and you do so in good health - extending the human lifespan from 80 to 95 might or might not be a good thing, but adding years to your healthy, productive life, seems a good thing]

Yvain's claim seems to be that 100% of the extra four hours will be diverted into work, but to me that's a) almost certainly not true [the figure would be more than 0% and less than 100%], b) not a bad thing.

a) It seems very likely that, given that our day is > 0% work and > 0% leisure, an extra four hours a day will add more than 0 hours of leisure.

b) If all med students get more studying done, it's far from obvious that the net result is a bad one. I assume that there is some value to med students' knowledge of medicine [okay, for anatomy courses this might not hold]. If, say, Apple workers work 50% more, then we stand to get better and faster Macs]

Yvain has seen the misery of Haiti and India firsthand; but it seems only with his eyes.

I very specifically mentioned potential First World outlays to Third World countries as exceptions to my point. For example, I said:

There may be useful indirect actions, like advancing technology, increasing tax revenue that can be spent on useful absolute goods, and increasing the amount that flows as charity to the Third World (emphasis added)

Other than that, my entire argument was based on the "happiness follows economic growth up to a certain point, then stops" argument that has been mentioned here so many times before. That means a parable talking about how great certain interventions could be for the Third World is irrelevant; the post was very specifically and explicitly aimed at the First.

(I also think the benefits from lack of iodine deficiency are a lot less siphon-away-able)

The "60% serious" number may indeed be too high, though. I meant it to signal that I thought the argument was correct in all of its main points, but probably falls apart because the increase in productivity would produce very small benefits rather than no benefits, and "very small benefits" multiplied by the entire economy still end out pretty huge, especially if some of them end out in the Third World through the indirect methods I mentioned earlier.

if modafinil were legal, it would become expected, and everything would be harder to match the increased ability of humans to be productive.

I tend to agree that this is a silly argument, especially given that it can be applied to coffee as much as to modafinil, so we better ban coffee, lest those allergic to it be at a disadvantage.

It bothers me that no one is applying a reversal test here. The paper even calls out intelligence augmentation as the prime example!

I'm inclined to trust Bostrom's well thought out paper on the matter, but I'd be curious to hear opposing views.

I disapprove of this thread on the principle that people should be able to idly speculate on their own blog without being harangued elsewhere.

I disapprove of your use of parables to smuggle in your economic hypotheses, rather than arguing for them competently and clearly.

I disapprove of your commentary, because I agree with wedrifid here:

(Claiming to have) mind read negative beliefs and motives in others then declaring them publicly tends to be frowned upon. Certainly it is frowned upon me.

The base rate fallacy seems like an appropriate name, but in practice it seems like that's reserved specifically for confusing Pr[A|B] with Pr[B|A] in the way outlined in the Wikipedia article.

The way I see it is this: We consider A likely, but B unlikely. Say P(A)=1-a and P(B)=b, where a and b are small. A and B are currently independent. Then we observe that A implies B (i.e. "¬A v B"). We get probabilities

P(A|A=>B) = P(A=>B|A)P(A)/P(A=>B) = P(B)P(A)/[P(B)P(A)+P(B)P(¬A)+P(¬B)P(¬A)] = [b-ab]/[b+a-ab] or approximately P(A|A=>B) = b/[a+b]

P(B|A=>B) = P(A=>B|B)P(B)/P(A=>B) = 1.P(B)/[P(B)P(A)+P(B)P(¬A)+P(¬B)P(¬A)] = b/[b+a-ab] or approximately P(B|A=>B) = b/[a+b].

So (to first order) we have that observing "A implies B" gives a probability of b/[a+b] for both A and B. So if we're more sure that A is true than that B is false we have a<b so b/[a+b] > 0.5; both A and B are likely (Modus Ponens). But if we're more sure that B is false than that A is true we have b<a so b/[a+b] < 0.5; both A and B are unlikely (Modus Tollens).

To summarise: "one man's modus tollens is another man's modus ponens" occurs when two beliefs that we strongly believe come into conflict. In this situation our final beliefs depend on our relative confidences in our two beliefs. We keep the one we are more confident in, and discard the one we are less confident in. This means that two people who both strongly held those two beliefs could suddenly find themselves in disagreement; this happens when one of them thought that a<b and the other one thought that b<a.

EDIT: Note that I used A likely and B unlikely because the standard phrasing of MP is A and A=>B together give B. If we had taken ¬A instead of A we would have the situation where we have two unlikely beliefs, and we suddenly learn that one or the other has to be true. Similarly, if we had had ¬B instead of B we would have had the situation where we have two stong beliefs, and we suddenly learn that they conflict with each other. All these situations are equivalent.

I think the best move would be to back off. They'd be unsure whether to pursue you or to defend themselves against the person closest to them. Mutual uncertainty on their part means they'll attack each other first, instead of pursuing you. Whoever won would get the pool stick, but they'd also be tired and you'd have an advantage. You also would have had the opportunity to observe their fighting style.

Needless to say in real life I would just die.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truel

It depends on your ability to come up with an alternate force-multiplier to the offered weapon to establish some kind of tactical superiority. If you quickly come up with one, or are at least confident of your ability to do so, the smart move is to induce the others to deal with each other first, then attack the winner from a position of strength after he has been weakened by the initial exchange with his first opponent. Otherwise, pick up the offered weapon; then the ideal strategy is still probably to see if you can get the other two to attack each other before coming after you, perhaps acting as though your only reason for picking up the weapon is to be a "coward" who wishes to avoid a fight altogether -- because, of course, the other two are unlikely to go after the more dangerous opponent first, even though collaborating to eliminate the primary threat before attempting to finish off a (hopefully) weakened remaining foe is probably the winning strategy for them.

Of course, the real smart move, if you can get everyone in on it, might be to ensure that all three of you collaborate in a surprise attack on the Joker after giving him the impression he's safe by pretending to initially target each other. That's pretty damned unlikely to happen, though, given the level of trust most likely needed to achieve that kind of alliance without cluing in the Joker and getting yourself killed by him instead of the other two.

Yes you should be as confident as possible.

In interview, you can admit that you used to have flaws, which you identified and corrected, but this is as close as you can get.

As a first approximation, assume everyone you're dealing with is default-level irrational and incapable of recognizing or appreciating rationality. This is true > 98% of the time.

Also be aware that even a rationalist in a hiring situation might just interpret your "self skepticism" as attempted tribal-affilation signalling. They are hiring, not looking for beer buddies. Very different thought process.

I've heard that cover letters are not very popular these days, some people are doing away with them and viewing them as just another thing that can get you rejected.

Before you put a lot of effort into this, you might want to check around and see if anyone even wants cover letters anymore. I know at least one significant company that does not even accept them.

I don't know anything about the politics of slavery in the US at the time, but in general, a relevant question is: how strongly did the non-slaveholders desire slavery to be outlawed, as compared to their desires with regard to other issues?

In general, in politics it's quite common that the majority of the populace has a moderate preference to do X, a much smaller fraction of the populace has a very strong preference to not do X, and the desires of the minority win out. For the majority, the issue might not be important enough that they'd change their vote because of it, especially if the politician in question supports other issues who the people feel are more important. For the minority, however, the issue may be important enough to be the deciding factor in whom they vote. So the politican will maximize their votes by doing what the minority wants with regard to issue X, and what the majority wants with regard to everything else. At the same time, if the minority and majority vote for different politicians, then it's beneficial for the elected politicians to barter votes, so that the majority "buys" the minority's support for laws that they might not be able to pass otherwise, in exchange for giving the minority what they want on an issue that feels less important for the majority.

Of course, all of this presumes that the voters act "rationally", and give their support to the candidates who most accurately match the desires of the voters. Pretty much everything that we know about voter behavior says that this isn't the case. (Rationally was in scare quotes because, given how little influence a single vote actually has on an election, not bothering to figure out what your candidate actually does may in fact be the most rational use of your time.)

Why not also vote to prohibit holding capital? People get rich by owning capital, and it's hard to compete with them if you don't. What's the difference?

I think you're conflating your ethical views on slavery with what you wish other people would decide for consequential reasons.

For one thing, one of the main groups suporting seperating from Great Britain (especially in the southern colonies) were slaveholders who were scared that the British were going to outlaw slavery (something that they had threatened to do in response to the revolution).

In addition to the other points made in response to your question, a national law abolishing slavery would have needed to pass the US Senate, where each state got two votes, regardless of population. By the time abolition was something that might plausibly have passed the popular vote, the Southern states had formed a unified bloc on the issue. Admission of new states into the Union was explicitly evaluated on the basis of the balance of the Senate until this principle came into too much conflict with the principle of popular sovereignty.

As I understand it, people suspected something like the Civil War would happen if they tried that.

A lot of compromises were made to forge a single country out of this mess.

What is the most effective chain of thoughts that a theist can make, that will make him realise that there is no God?

"People not in my tribe are sexy and cool. I want to be like and/or mate with those people. I believe I have a sufficient chance of successfully joining and gaining status within the tribe with sexy and cool people in it. I will now change my signalling beliefs."

I think a chain of feelings would be much more useful. As they say, you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into.

Effectiveness should be measured by results. So you would have to look at deconversion stories.

The problem of evil witnessed on a personal and intense level has done it for some. Historical scholarship on the origins of their religion has done it for others. For others again, materialist science leaving ever-shrinking gaps for God to be in.

Funny pictures. Other than that, it looks like a viable case study for Yvain's meditation on superweapons and bingo.

I think he's more of a legendary monster than a species of any ordinary troll, though he probably fits best as one of the scientists.