Good question. I assume you ask because conscientiousness is highly correlated with a number of positive life outcomes?

1. Conscientiousness is temporally stable, that is, in the average individual, it does not much change over time.
2. Conscientiousness is linked to a number of other personality traits - e.g. self-regulation, perseverance, etc.... These traits can be trained; and according to a quick skim of the study below, training those traits in turn effects conscientiousness, at least in children.

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/publications/EisenbergDuckworth_ConscientiousnessOriginsinChildhood_2012.pdf

1. In adults, the trait is more temporally stable (sorry, no citation off hand), but there are hacks - e.g. self-control strategies like mental contrasting, implementation intentions, learned industriousness, etc... can partially achieve the same effect as having more conscientiousness.

This is a good question though... I will investigate some more.

Conscientiousness is fairly rigid; it is, however, about as hereditable as IQ or less, from the 2 studies I have on hand:

• "Genetic and environmental effects on openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness: An adoption/twin study", Bergeman et al 1993: 29% of variance
• "Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study", Jang et al 1996: 44%

This is my own thought and not backed up by any citations, but ...

Since Concientiousness is usually measured by self-reporting, you could find a Concientiousness survey and turn all the questions into affirmations, and recite these affirmations daily. "How often do you forget important deadlines?" -> "I rarely forget important deadlines." I would hypothesize that eventually you might come to believe these discrete facts about yourself. Directly, this would lead to much higher scores on future Concientiousness surveys.

I've read that the only "cure" for true personality disorders is to fake it until faking it becomes second nature. For example, narcissists pretend to care about the needs of others until they sort of start to automatically care about them. So my idea here is that by pretending to have higher Concientiousness, you might actually change.

Heckman and Tough just wrote a whole book claiming that there are cheap ways to increase conscientiousness of children, though probably only at the low end.

I have very slowly become a lot more conscientious over the course of my life. It feels like I made a deliberate effort to do so by eg leaning hard on calendars, todo lists and such, but it may simply be ageing.

I think there are a couple ways to go about answering this question. If you go about it by seeing whether people who are related and people with a few life experiences that you want to track score high on a conscientiousness test, you're not really answering the question "what training would work?"

I don't have a direct answer to that, but I do have several bits of information that would be very useful for a person who would like to try and solve this:

Dabrowski did research on morality also. His theory is that there are certain traits called "super sensitivities" that predict moral behavior. There may be a way to increase these - perhaps with drugs or life experiences designed to make your nervous system more excitable.

See also Jane Elliot's brown eyes, blue eyes experiment. I don't know whether they did these formally, but they observed that when the situation was reversed (the situation was that kids with a certain eye color were told they were better and became abusive) the children who had experience being second class were much less abusive when put into the "better than" role, as if the experience of being second class had inoculated them against some amount of the bad behavior.

I researched violent crime one day and discovered that the main thing that was connected with violent crime was high testosterone. In theory, treatment using existing drugs could make a very big difference. That would probably require some kind of training intended to explain to the violent criminals that their problem was chemical, and convince them to take the drugs. This would be difficult because if they're chemically imbalanced it may not be easy to get that through to them. To an ordinary person, it's a no-brainer, but to them, it's probably not. Some type of educational program designed to get them to wake up and realize they need testosterone reduction treatment may go a long way.

This doesn't exactly qualify as training, as I've gone up to a meta level, but this kind of thinking could potentially make a very big difference:

We need to consider the role of perverse incentives. There are a lot of perverse incentives in life, and a lot of them are improperly checked and balanced. For instance, diagnosing a person with a mental disorder can be devastating to that person and to come up with an accurate diagnosis can take some time. However, psychologists are pressured to diagnose on the first visit because they can't get paid by the insurance company without it. Take a good person and put them into a bad situation, and they may react as if they were a bad person because they need to in order to survive. Identifying and changing perverse incentives might really change not only the way that a large number of people behave, but would also redirect the selection pressure on humans such that the good ones are more likely to survive and reproduce, helping to "train" our genes in the right direction, rather than just our behavior.

Long underwear is great for being warm without wearing a jacket or bulky sweaters all the time. I live in DC, and, last winter, my basement bedroom was unheated. Long underwear + lots of blankets meant I didn't care too much. Flannel sheets may also be your friend.

driving slowly

When there's snow or ice on the roads, there's really no speed slow enough that you can count on never losing traction. After the first heavy snow, you might want to practice in a low-traffic area until you get the hang of recovering from a slide. Also practice driving as if there's a full glass of water on your dashboard that you don't want to spill.

Do I need snow shoes? Spikes?

Nobody uses those for day-to-day walking, but you might want a pair of insulated boots depending on how much time you plan to spend outside. These are pretty convenient if you want to walk on ice.

Can I expect to safely walk on the sidewalk in the winter without slipping and hurting my everything?

As long as you're careful.

Do I need more/better coats than what I have now? (A duster and leather jacket, both fairly thick.)

Maybe. Again, it depends on how much you'll be outside. You'll probably want gloves.

Will I need to get a sun lamp/UV lights for the middle of the winter when the sun is up for a shorter time?

I guess, if you want to give yourself an artificial tan at home. Or are you talking about light therapy for depression? Those aren't designed to emit UV.

If you don't care about walking on ice, get a nice pair of some lined duck boots (Sorbel, LL Bean). Expensive but totally worth it I think.

I recently found out about the disposable hand and foot warmers. Not perfect but they do a decent job for being so inexpensive (around $1-2).

Do I need snow shoes?

Unlikely. However, depending on average snowfall and where you walk, you'll may want waterproof boots that come up to at least your ankle (Gortex or equivalent). This also depends on how much time you plan to spend outside.

Do I need more/better coats than what I have now? (A duster and leather jacket, both fairly thick.)

Depends entirely on how much time you're outside. I tended to walk everywhere in my college days, so I wore an insulated coat. You'll probably want gloves, even if you stay inside your car most of the time. If you're outside a lot, consider a knit hat, especially if there's a lot of wind where you live.

Other things:

• Thick socks are awesome for wearing around your house.
• I like having really cheap fingerless knit gloves for typing inside.
• If you do spend time outside, look into flannel lined jeans or khakis. Thermal underwear works too.
• Heating can cost quite a bit of money; set your thermostat lower in the evenings and load up on blankets.
• At home, drafts are your enemy. If you're in a newer place, I'd assume this shouldn't be as much of a problem. If you're in a place with single pane windows, think about doing putting up window insulation film. In college, this helped with heating costs, but they have the downside of clouding the view.
• If you have your own driveway, you need a snow-shovel. Even if you theoretically have someone paid to shovel the snow.

Please, let me know winter life hacks/survival tips/things a Texan would not know about cold weather.

The first thing to keep in mind is that winter weather is quite variable. Where I live (MA), the temperature (in Fahrenheit) in the winter ranges from around -10 to +50. It's good to have ways to keep yourself warm at various points in that range.

Going down human anatomy, I would recommend:

Head

• A warm hat that covers your ears
• If you are into outdoor exercise, a headband to keep your ears warm; they can get very cold even if you're producing enough heat to keep the rest of your body warm
• Sunglasses; snow can cause a lot of glare. Make sure they have full UV protection (most do).
• Optional: scarf and/or ski mask; on the very cold days, especially if it's also windy, it can be helpful to keep your face covered.
• Chapstick; the air is pretty dry in the winter.

Torso:

• A moderately warm jacket and a very warm jacket, for varying temperatures; I use a modular ski jacket, which has an outer shell and an inner lining. The lining can be easily detached and used as a stand-alone jacket on less cold days.
• Sweater: depending on the temperature at work, you may feel you need one. Also, at home, wearing a sweater is a lot cheaper than cranking the heat up high.

Hands: * Get a good pair of gloves. I cannot emphasize this enough. Preferably get gloves with some grip to them, to make things like opening doors easier. * Moisturizing lotion; as mentioned before, winter air is very dry.

Legs:

• Most people don't really do much differently here.
• Optional: Long underwear can be helpful, depending on how easily you get cold.
• If you will be getting exercise outdoors and are male, wear an extra pair of underwear, ideally not very breathable. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.

Feet:

• Insulated boots are very useful, though not absolutely necessary. In urban areas, there are often a lot of puddles from melting snow, so make sure they're very waterproof, too.
• In a less urban area or on a large college campus where you may have to trudge through deep-ish snow, I would also recommend gators to keep the snow from getting inside your shoes.
• Snowshoes and spikes are unnecessary.
• Wool socks are helpful, depending on how easily you get cold.

Other things:

• I find a sun lamp helpful; YMMV.
• People spend more time indoors with less ventilation, so diseases spread more easily. Take precautions as appropriate.

My mom broke her ankle when she slipped on some ice that was covered with snow (so that it looked safe to step on). 99.9% of the time this is not an issue though (and the snow is safe to step on...

Having been depressed before and having recently read "The Mood Cure" by Julia Ross, I think I'm going to be ordering a lamp soon.

Earning less money than my partner would (in general) mean I could take of children more often with less economic cost to the family.

I am mostly indifferent. I can imagine a situation in which each of those circumstances would be comfortable, given the ideal spouse. My first reaction to this prompt was to consider in what ways the difference would affect my ego: Would I feel inferior to my spouse if I earned less? Or uncomfortable? Would I like to feel dominant over my spouse if I earned more? However, I realize that salary is not an indicator of intellectual capability or compatibility. This is, I believe, a more important determinant in the ideal spouse. I have my preference, which I will not disclose, as to whether or not I like to be the "less wrong" or more knowledgable partner. Since I cannot be perfectly indifferent, I choose to earn $80k/year simply because that is the relatively-better choice for me as an individual, not because it is relatively-better than my spouse's earnings.

If you were married, would you rather:

Is all else equal? In particular, do I have to do any more work to earn the $80k than the $40k?

Is my spouse as gung-ho regarding effective altruism as I am?

It seems as though this poll breaks the comment RSS feed.

Don't care too much. $40k/yr seems to imply lesser working hours, which I would probably prefer.

I trust myself to spend the money on things I value more than I trust her to. This is a no brainer.

A better question would be 80k/40k or 80k/120k

I envision any spouse I end up with as someone that I am entirely comfortable sharing finances with.

Also when I think about people that I have dated and possible career futures for myself, lower earnings for me would likely mean that I'm spending more time on personal projects rather than being less successful in my career, but the opposite is true for any person I've been in a relationship with for over a year.

I would want the 80k, given I've not met anyone who trusted my idea I got from an article at Cracked - that you're supposed to help each other, and not be in debt to them, and therefore contribute the percentage you can, so if you make 20 % of the income, you're responsible for 20 % of expenses - since I've yet to make more money than any potential partners. I basically only want to feel like I'm not freeloading on anyone, including my spouse.

In my preferences, I have the option "Don't show me comments with a score less than (Blank for none)" blanked out, because I wanted to see all comments. Despite that, the site seems to hide comments from me. For instance, goplat's comment in this article.

The new change that hides entire subthreads of a downvoted comment from view in the comment streams possibly overrides that old preference system.

You can also go for a cheap non-convertible standing desk and a tall stool.

My wall mounte monitor Arms do not have the vertical range to go from comfortable sitting to standing. Make sure to check the flexibility and correct mounting height.

For your keyboard: get a laptop stand? (something like this: http://www.amazon.com/On-Stage-LPT5000-Laptop-Computer-Stand/dp/B001AYONXU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1350523707&sr=8-3&keywords=laptop+stand)

Or the DIY route: make a stand out of PVC or balsa wood. Or the ghetto college-student route: cardboard box.

In a more general effort to improve my health, or at least slowing its deterioration, I am thinking about constructing a hybrid standing desk.

Prolonged standing appears to increase the risk of varicose veins. (References: Google search of /varicose standing/.) Are you sure that replacing sitting by standing will actually benefit you?

Confirmation bias, the triplet number test where the rule is “Any triplet where the second number is greater than the first and the third greatet than the second”. Original credit (edit:for my exposure)to Eliezer in HPmoR but I thought of it because that was what Yvain did at a meetup I was at.

The Wason selection task is a good go-to example of confirmation bias.

Get people to give 90% confidence intervals on 10 questions, and then at the end ask

"Ok, so who got all 10 within their intervals. 9? That's what you should have got... ok, 8? Still no-one? Ok, how about 7?"

For something very brief, anchoring bias is easy to demonstrate and fairly dramatic. I tried this on a friend a couple weeks ago, anchoring her on 1 million people as the population of Ghana; she guessed 900,000. Turned out to be 25 million.

I've done this in a few small groups, using:

• the "this is an attention test" video (aka "how many passes does the team in white make") - always a hit
• a calibration exercise just as Larks suggests below, which works pretty well
• the Wason card task - some people find it unconvincing "because it's logic" (!)
• a "learned helplessness" experiment using impossible anagrams - works so-so
• a "priming" experiment where two groups have a phrase-building task with different priming words - my version of that sucks, need to rework it
• I also show the Spinning Dancer often

Aye. I'd be keen to join some sort of book club for smart people, where you could see others' bookshelves a la LibraryThing, but on top of that also have very short reviews letting you know what to expect from each book.

Most books tend to fall into two broad categories: things you already mostly know, and things you care little about. The rare high-value book is one that has just enough connection to what you already know, and makes you care about a whole new domain. (An exceptional book, like GEB, will make you care about many new domains at once.)

One recently read book that was very high value because it covered ground that was totally new to me: Abbott's System of Professions. Typically books in the sociology of professions had focused on the "trappings", professional societies, regulation and so on. Abbott pointed out that professions were the emergent result of a complex system of jurisdictional disputes, and the only way you can understand a profession is by looking at the others that compete with it for dominion over its topics. Abbot's analysis is so wide-ranging that it connects in several places with topics I care about; for instance when he analyzes "the construction of the 'personal problems' jurisdiction", a tug-of-war between the clergy, the (early) "neurologists", and psychiatry; or when he sketches the early history of the information professions - I hadn't realized that librarians were among the first such.

The only reason that I still read most books is that it is very low cost for me.

I think I get some benefit from reading through things I already know, though. It's going to help me remember it and the explanations are going to be somewhat different and so I'm going to get a better understanding of it overall.

I would join the group. We could do it through goodreads or a similar, better designed, site if you know of one.

I have the exact same problem. You forgot about Phineus Gage and getting a pole stuck through your head.

I think one way of solving this would be to use something like workflowy to make the entire book a zoomable/compressible bullet list. That way, the book would have a section heading like "explanation of Chomsky's theory of Universal grammer" you could literally just skip that entire branch of the book (and if any part of it were referenced, you could jump back to it (because it's digital) ) .

Also, a lot of LWers (myself included) are looking to build better argument mapping software for a wikipedia of arguments type resource (though that's a bit simplified).

EDIT:

Also, you could compile all the different 1 sentence, 1 page, 5 page, 1 chapter, explanations from several different authors. for any particular bullet point.

I can't speak for his blog writings (since I have only read a few articles), but I have read his book on Nozick and am almost done with his book on Aquinas.

• Show that some medieval philosopher said the jargon claim was nonsense.

• Accuse the original atheist of spewing nonsense and being unaware of the true philosophical underpinnings of Christianity.

I have no reason to doubt your claim, but it seems plausible that he is right in this case (if, in fact, he does so accuse atheists in this way). Why? Because I had 4 years of Bible class in high school and studied philosophy of religion at university and yet still only understood the straw man versions (most likely unintentional straw men, mind you) of the arguments made by "some medieval philosopher", or had any idea about the philosophical "underpinnings of Christianity".

It wasn't until I got interested enough in the history of science to actually bother to read primary texts (in astronomy, alchemy, and "physics") that I was able to get my mind situated in such a way that I could look around at the world from within these alien Medieval paradigms and see that some of these claims weren't just silly bullshit.

Anyway, if it takes such a roundabout sequence of obscure studies to even begin to make sense of this stuff, it is no wonder that modern atheists (or virtually all Christians, for that matter) have trouble getting it right.

Subset of utility monster, I think.

It seems like the sort of thing that one would accuse another of, in order to score political points by making others feel ashamed to have sympathized with the person so accused. IOW, making the accusation is a much cheaper form of manipulation than actually doing the self-modification — and can be used to undermine many claims that one person is harming another. Thus, we should expect to hear the accusation from people who would like to go on harming others and getting away with it.

"Utility martyr"?

Does anyone have any good brief ways of describing LW to outsiders that have been effective? This comes up quite a bit for me with friends and family.

I think the most effective rhetorical technique would be very sensitive to the kind of person you are describing it to. I don't know if it is good, but I once said something like "it is about how you can avoid certain kinds of errors in your thinking, so that you can make better decisions".

I just call it a cult

"Computer programmers trying to do philosophy" is how I describe LW to myself, but I don't know how effective that'd be for outsiders.

"It's a guy, pretty much as intelligent as, and at least twice as effective as a dozen Ph.D's in philosophy examining and discussing how to think better. Look, just... Here, The Simple Truth. Read this. It's basically this kind of thinking applied to everything."

Not that brief, but it's gotten at least a few interested in LW.

HPMOR for everything

The effect size of the higher level of CO2 on some of the tests is ridiculous. Reminds me of Cochran's speculation on nitrogen content.

PM'd a bunch of ideas, but I dunno why you don't want them public.

This is going to be really difficult to execute. If anyone else wants this basic premise, please take it. I'd love to read someone else's take on these ideas or ideas like this.

Also, don't take this outline as a promise. I reserve the right to completely change the story's meaning and plot as I wish.

I don't know what to do with Ursula. It's tempting to make her into the overzealous feminist strawman, but that seems like a weak fight, ideologically, and that's not a message that I really want to send out. Ursula needs to stand in clear contrast to both Ariel and the patriarchal society which rejects her. It would also be nice if Ursula was relatable.

The best idea I've had so far is to make Ursula an extremely jaded and manipulative and pragmatic woman, who neglects what's good in relationships and focuses but this conflict with the Eldritch horror awesomeness that I had planned. I've got vague ideas of how to reconcile the two, but input on this would help a lot.

Having Ursula's default state be an even more powerful version of her boss form was one of the main inspirations for this fiction. Ursula has the potential to be a really cool character, and she's shaping the way that I approach my ideas about the mermaid culture and Ariel's character. I love villains, so I would really appreciate it if people helped me to not screw this one up.

EDIT: Removed faulty link.

Incidentally, there was a TV cartoon series based on the movie, which takes place when Ariel was younger and hadn't yet developed her humanity obsession.

Is this going to be based of the Disney film or the Hans Christian Andersen story?

I've wondered the same thing.

Some of it might be that no two agents will have the same experiences, and so they will not have the same probabilities assigned to particular propositions even if they started with the same priors, has identical sense-receptors, and are both perfect Bayesians.

But it seems misleading to use the label "subjectively objective" for that phenomena. And I might be totally off track, in which case I am totally confused about what "subjectively objective" is supposed to be about.

Maybe this is how "being a member of a group which slowly shifts towards evil" feels from inside: Increasingly realizing the importance of loyalty, and that fairness is not as important as it seemed once.

So when you notice yourself thinking: "well, technically this is not completely fair, but our group is good and we do many good things, so in the long term I can do more good by sticking to my group than by needlessly opposing it on a minor issue", you have an evidence of your group becoming just a little bit more evil.

(To be precise, "a little bit more evil" can still be predominantly good, and can still be your best available choice. It's just good to notice this feeling, especially if it starts happening rather frequently.)

In gist, if your ingroup does things that harm others, you are likely to subsequently shift your moral attitudes away from principles that tell you that harming others is wrong, and towards principles that value loyalty and obedience.

A more generalized version of this would read: "if your ingroup does [x], you are likely to subsequently shift your moral attitudes away from principles that tell you that [x is bad], and towards principles that [tell you that x is good as long as it's your ingroup doing it]." The chapter's from Cialdini's Influence social proof and identity self-modification seem relevent.

As far as I can tell, any decision theory that disagrees with CDT in this case is mistaken. The author (or you) need to sweeten the deal; either the benefits need to be better, or the cost needs to be lower. Typical ways to improve the benefit are to attach status or other goods to the donation- whenever I talk about the Kickstarter projects I back, I make sure to mention that, you know, I backed them.

Fuzzies?

Apologies if sidetracking a hypothetical into the real world: kickstarter attempts to solve this problem.

TDT has to say that if the scenario where everyone donates you win, and you know that everyone else is using TDT or that the distribution of decision algorithms is likely to give sufficient "donate" outputs to make it better expected utility, then you should donate. Of course, if you have reliable data on others' decision algorithms, I'm pretty sure CDT and EDT and any other decision theory I've read about will boil down to an expected utility calculation or something pretty close.

Basically, as Vaniver says, all good DTs pretty much agree on this. TDT, CDT and EDT all agree that if you have common knowledge of a sufficient number of other people using the same decision theory (or, with more complicated calculations, various possible theories including those three) are interested in the book, you should all donate. This common knowledge, however, is usually the extremely costly, high-information-value part - the part about figuring out whether to donate or not seems trivial by comparison.

Suppose an author I like says she'll write a new work if she gets enough donations. Under CDT, it's clear to me that it can't make sense for me to donate - my donation can't increase the probability of me reading the book enough to pay for the cost, and there are much more efficient ways for me to give altruistically. What do other decision theories have to say about this?

Short answer: CDT doesn't donate. EDT, TDT and UDT all donate (assuming enough others are mutually known to be like you).

TDT was literally made for this kind of situation (because it's just a Newcomblike problem). UDT differs from TDT only in areas a bit more obscure than this. EDT is also designed to handle this perfectly too (ie. to get you the book for minimal price). If you donate evidence does suggest that enough people will donate to get you the book but if you don't donate evidence suggests that you will not.

• DRM issues: download an unencrypted backup copy, or de-RM your own.
• Search: use desktop search that indexes unencrypted books.
• Flip through, multi-open: yeah, it's a problem. Especially for scientific papers.
• Visual bandwidth: I cannot relate, I read just as fast on any screen as on paper, with no noticeable eye strain. Also, audiobooks for driving.
• Compatibility: how many old books you own are not available in digital form? Presumably, as formats change, the books get converted.

Personally, I don't buy physical books anymore, though I so have a (small) library where some old books would be hard to find online.

I keep all of my books as PDFs on Mendeley. If a PDF is not available, I buy a hard copy through Amazon and send it to 1DollarScan to be converted to a scanned PDF.

I can't easily consult half a dozen [e]books at once.

In terms of screen estate, I agree, but in terms of looking for something in textbooks, I find it much easier to consult multiple ebooks at once, since I can easily search through tens of them in a second.

Does the LessWrong community have a consensus on the subject of moral accountability, to the same extent that it has a consensus on things like free will and reductionism?

I don't know if this is a matter of consensus, but I generally see it as a matter of translating from third-person deontology to consequentialism by way of third-person virtue ethics and game theory: rather than work with concepts like "culpability" directly, I ask first whether an act is evidence that someone's likely to do other bad acts, and how well that risk can be mitigated, and second whether punishing that sort of act would make it rarer by enough to outweigh the cost and damage of punishing.

Moral Accountability is a lot like justice: It has a lot of psychological hooks in the human mind that make it very useful for enforcing how you want your society to be, and in the ancestral environment was probably linked far more closely to utility than it is today. The on margin effects of either cultural edifice might be good or bad but we should be careful about trying to dismantle either one.

There is actually an article here titled Causality and Moral Responsibility. You may want to read the linked prerequisites first.

What you say is true to some extent, but there's also the fact that holding people morally responsible actually changes their behavior, and if we didn't hold anyone morally responsible for anything, people would behave worse.

their behavior is completely contingent upon their neurochemistry, which they have no control over.

People do have control over their neurochemistry. Invoking the classic compatabilist conception of free will, if they wanted to have different neurochemistry they would.

I think you left something out of this comment. Probably most of it.

added: In the likely event that Arundelo is correct, the broken code will appear when you click the edit button and you can clean it up.

Disappearing link?

Is it useful to learn to REM-nap even though I don't plan to sleep polyphasically? Is it worth going through adaptation?

I don't entirely follow... Is there such a thing as 'learning to REM-nap' without the proposed mechanism of the pressure of sleep rebound forcing a REM rebound during the space of a nap?

I made an outline of polyphasic sleep recently. Feel free to read it or contribute stuff that hasn't been added yet.

https://workflowy.com/shared/5c919540-f8e7-a677-bbf9-e4ebe18b2948/

I propose that we continue to call them koans, on the grounds that changing involves a number of small costs, and it really, fundamentally, does not matter in any meaningful sense.

I've once been told the keys were an arcane ritual called "taking good notes" combined with the Level 5 Bayesjutsu called "Condense your probability mass" and "Test your predictions".

Attempts at piercing the veil of secrecy and/or locating a tutor or manual on these rituals and techniques have proven fruitless to date. Reports of such findings have all turned out to be hoaxes or were never confirmed, potentially as the finders became part of the group which maintains the secrecy.

Making good cards for spaced repetition may help.

This stuff takes practice in general. Note-taking and spaced repetition help. Maybe don't worry about best practices or "the right way" to do it at first -- anything's probably better than nothing.

One thing that can help is to always read with a goal in mind. Reflect on what you really want to get out of whatever it is you're reading. Maybe don't just "take notes" but try to build a concise summary, map out the main argument, or write a review. Look for something to bring up in conversation with a friend, or come up with three questions to ask the author. Always be noticing your confusion. Read the end-of-chapter problems before reading the chapter. (Of course it could be bad to read with the specific goal of answering a single narrow question, if you end up just scanning for the answer and missing out on other value.)

I'm reminded of an OB post from a couple years ago: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/chase-your-reading.html

The fact that government isn't as good as it says it is, or that progressive ideas aren't fully consistent doesn't mean that either are fully dispensable, nor is it particularly clear that people who want to eliminate government have to stop any minor involvement they have (like voting) in order to achieve that goal.

He's reminding me of Michael Vassar's observation that geeks want explicit language in a way that most people don't. The fact that what government is and does isn't a good match for the way government is usually described isn't a good reason for eliminating government.

His point that people generally don't know anything about governing is salient, but does he have any experience running something more challenging than a solo blog?

To my mind, democracy still has the advantage that it makes it clear to politicians that there's a limit to how badly they can get away with treating the public.

He cheats a little on the the communists vs. Nazis numbers-- 6 million is just the Jews murdered by Nazis. Another five or six million Roma, homosexuals, criminals, etc. were killed in the death camps, and some 25 million (very rough estimate) were killed as a result of the Nazi side of WWII. I have no idea whether Japan would have started its war if Germany hadn't been its ally.

This being said, I agree that communism has a worse record than Nazism, but a better reputation. However, in the US and Europe, there are violent neo-Nazis but (unless I've missed something) little or nothing in the way of violent communists, so it makes sense to be more concerned about Nazis.

My problem with him is the general problem with radicals-- he needs to offer better arguments that what he's suggesting will be reliably better than the current set-up. Speaking of Nazis and Communists, it's possible to make things a lot worse because your theory sounds so attractive.

It was amusing to see that Mencius Moldbug, Dark Lord of the Convoluted Sentence, is a pretty average speaker.