I personally think that the Buddha had some really interesting things to say and that >his ideas about ethics are no exception (though I suspect he may have had pain >asymbolia, which totally deserves its own post soon).

Do you think he had pain asymbolia from birth or developed it over the course of his life? Also, what do you think is the importance of this?

I've been practicing vipassana meditation daily for about 3 years and over this time period I think I've developed pain asymbolia to some degree. I've felt pain asymbolia was just one aspect of a more extensive change in the nature of mental reactions to mental phenomena.

Wonderful. Are you aware of the Tuesday Boy problem? I think it could have been a more impressive second example.

"I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?"

(The intended interpretation is that I have two children, and at least one of them is a boy-born-on-a-Tuesday.)

I found it here: Magic numbers: A meeting of mathemagical tricksters

Great visualizations.

In fact, this (only without triangles, squares,...) is how I've been intuitively calculating Bayesian probabilities in "everyday" life problems since I was young. But you managed to make it even clearer for me. Good to see it applied to Monty Hall.

John:

Do you suggest any practical way to calculate how steep is my discounting curve, in real life?

That was helpful insight, thanks.

For those who missed the chance to buy it: we can perform intra-LW arbitrage to ensure an efficient allocation of test kits!

Simply reply with a price you'd be happy to pay (so below its marginal utility) and we can see if anyone who did order would like to sell on. As people didn't buy when it cost $500, it seems likely there are some pareto improvements here.

A feature I'd love to see implemented is a Q&A section. Let's say that this would be to Yahoo! Answers as LessWrongWiki is to Wikipedia.

The idea is that people can ask questions -- any questions -- related to rationality and whoever wants it can jump in trying to answer them. Good answers gain karma. And whoever asked the question selects the best answer.

The question could be made looking for qualitative answers (as with Yahoo! Answers) or quantitatively, as a poll (such as here, but much more seriously...)

Ironically, I can't stop wondering how many people are procrastinating by reading this post.

Starting often is a major point. No more reminiscing about lost time. Just experiencing the now, and the next half hour. It seems like the bigger picture of a project disappears and I only notice what is right around me. Its a lot easier to commit to the next unit of work when its only 30min, than to think about entire 8 hour days in front of me.

Your impressions here match mine (see Eluding Attention Hijacks).

I have also noticed that the anxiety that arises from having too many things to do, distributed in lots of hours ahead, might be closely related to Schwartz's Paradox of Choice -- whenever you chose to do something now, you know you are choosing not to do hundreds of other possible tasks, and it seems that the only way around is to put blinders and forget you have other stuff. And then, looking back, you'll have accomplished a lot.

And for those who find earplugs uncomfortable after a while, there are white-noise machines like this.