Upvoted for introducing the very useful term "effective belief".

That's true. Arbitrary means different things, from "not chosen by nature", to "not chosen by an outside standard".

That's precisely why it is arbitrary -- it's a cultural artifact, not an inherently meaningful level.

A 50% marginal tax rate would be a dramatic improvement on existing programs; at present, it is not uncommon for getting a job to reduce the net income of someone previously depending on government assistance. And yet most people try very hard to get off government assistance as soon as they can (don't tell me about your worthless cousin who hasn't worked in their adult life; I have one of those, too. But the statistics show them to be much rarer than they appear). The problem with this program isn't that there's a bunch of lazy poor people who would choose not to work and take the smaller income, the problem is that our political system is in the grip of vicious stereotypes about lazy poor people that make it impossible for any program like this to gain widespread support, because of irrational fears that it will end up rewarding lazy poor people.

A basic income is, of course, an alternative which would eliminate the 50% marginal tax rate problem. It would obviously be more expensive, if you wished people with no other income to be at the same level as on your proposal, but if we're floating crazy utopian schemes, a wealth tax would be a very promising way to raise quite a lot of additional revenue while having some beneficial incentives. It would encourage wealthy people to sell non-productive or insufficiently productive assets to those who would get more use from them, instead of hoarding them out of laziness or tradition; while there are not a lot of rural aristocrats inefficiently farming vast estates because they like being local lords these days, there do seem to be modern phenomena with some similar features to Adam Smith's favorite example of massive, widespread inefficiency.

Agreed. But does this problem not exist in even bigger measure when you have min wage and social security for those unemployed as a result of minimum wage. The social security cannot be equal to the min wage, since otherwise no one would work at min wage. However the social security would presumably be something like 2/3 of min wage to ensure that those who are unemployed are able to have some decent standard of living. And this per your argument would put the implicit tax rate of those earning minimum wage at 67%!

Interesting idea. It's in the same family as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Negative Income Tax.

The immediate potential downside I see is that this would effectively institute a very high marginal tax rate on income below 'x'. For every additional dollar that someone who makes less than x earns, they lose 0.5 dollars of social security. That's a 50% implicit marginal tax rate, on top of whatever the official marginal tax rate is. By comparison, the highest marginal tax rate for federal income taxes in the United States is 35%, which is only applied to household earnings beyond $370,000 (source). The implication of standard economic theory is that many people would simply choose not to work and earn .75x.

Long-time reader, only occasional commenter. I've been following LW since it was on Overcoming Bias, which I found via Marginal Revolution, which I found via the Freakonomics Blog, which I found when I read and was fascinated by Freakonomics in high school. Reading the sequences, it all clicked and struck me as intuitively true. Although my "mistrust intuition" instinct is a little uncomfortable with that, it all seems to hold up so far.

In the spirit of keeping my identity small I don't strongly identify with too many groups or adjectives. However, I've always self-identified as "smart" (whatever that means). If you were modeling my utility function using one variable, I'm most motivated by a desire to learn and know more (like Tsuyoku Naritai, except without the fetish for unnecessary Japanese). I've spent most of my life alternately trying to become the smartest person in the room and looking for a smarter room.

I just graduated from college and am starting work at a consulting firm in Chicago soon, which I anticipate will be the next step in my search for a smarter room. My degree is in economics, a discipline I enjoy because it is pretty good at translating incorrect premises into useful conclusions. I also dabbled fairly widely, realizing spring of my senior year that I should have started taking computer science earlier.

I've been a competitive debater since high school, which has helped me develop many useful skills (public speaking, analyzing arguments, brainstorming pros/cons rapidly, etc.). I was also exposed to some bad habits (you can believe whatever you want if no one can beat your arguments, the tendency to come to genuinely believe that your arbitrarily assigned side is correct). Reading some of the posts here, especially your strength as a rationalist, helped me crystallize some of these downsides, though I still rate the experience as strongly positive.

I am a male and a non-theist, although I've grown up in an area where many of my family members and acquaintances have real and powerful Christian beliefs (not belief in belief, the real deal). This has left me with a measure of reverence for the psychological and rhetorical power of religion. I don't have particularly strong feelings on cryonics or the singularity, probably because I just don't find them that interesting. Perhaps I should care about them more, given how important they could be, but I haven't displayed any effort to do so thus far. It makes me wonder if "interestingness bias" is a real phenomenon.

My participation here over the years has been limited to reading, lurking, and an infrequent comment here and there. I've had a couple ideas for top level posts (including one on my half-baked notion that "rationalists" should consider following virtue ethics), but I have not yet overcome my akrasia and written them. Just recently, I have started using Anki to really learn the sequences. I am also using it to memorize basically useless facts that I can pull out in pub trivia contests, which I enjoy probably more than I should.

Is this why you do this?

Partially perhaps, but it's hardly the main reason. Language nearly always carries with it a frequency that conveys social status and a lot of talk and argument isn't much more than a renegotiation or affirmation of the social contract between people. So quite a lot of the actual content of any given typical conversation you're likely to hear is quite braindead and only superficially appears to be civilized. That kind of smalltalk is boring if it's transparent to you, and controversy spices things up for sure - so yes, there may be something to it...

But I think the ultimate reason for being provocative is because "the truth" simply is quite provoking and startling by itself, given the typical nonrational worldviews people hold. If people were rational by nature and roughly on the same page as most lesswrongers, I certainly wouldn't feel like making an effort to provoke or piss people off just for the sake of disagreement. I simply care a lot about the truth and I care comparatively less about what people think (in general and also about me), so I'm often not terribly concerned about sounding agreeable. Sometimes I make an effort if I find it important to actually convince someone, but naturally I just feel like censoring my opinions as little as necessary. (Which is not to say that my approach is in any way all that commendable, it just simple feels natural to me - it's in a way my mental pathway of least resistance and conscious effort.)

I'm not doing it all the time of course, I can be quite agreeable when I happen to feel like it - but overall it's just not my regular state of being.

"...as if a pastor or bishop actually knows anything about anything. (Let alone something about morality and ethics)."

I disagree.

You can't be serious, how dare you trample on my beliefs and hurt my feelings like that? ;)

...well, maybe know more about morality isn't the right phrase, but they've [theologans] thought about it more.

Sure, and conspiracy theorists think a lot about 9/11 as well. The amount of thought people spend on any conceivable subject is at best very dimly (and usually not at all) correlated with the quality/truthfulness of their conclusions, if the "mental algorithm" by which they structure their thoughts is semi-worthless by virtue of being irrational (aka. out of step with reality).

Trying to think about morality without the concept that morality must exclusively relate to the neurological makeup of conscious brains is damn close to a waste of time. It's like trying to wrap your head around biology without the concept of evolution - it cannot be done. You may learn certain things nonetheless, but whatever model you come up with - it will be a completely confused mess. Whatever theology may come up with on the subject of morality is at best right by accident and frequently enough it's positively primitive, wrong and harmful - either way it's a complete waste of time and thought given the rational alternatives (neurology,psychology) we can employ to discover true concepts about morality.

What religion has to say about morality is in the same category as what science and philosophy had to say about life and biology before Darwin and Wallace came along - which in retrospect amounts pretty much to "next to nothing of interest".

So are all those Anglican priests nice and moral people? Sure, whatever. But do they have any real competence whatsoever to make decisions about moral issues (let alone things like nuclear power)? Hell no.

Downloaded and set up with a couple of Divia's decks. How many decks do you recommend working through at one time? For reference, I'm currently doing one deck on the default settings, which works out to ~40 cards a day (20 new, ~20 review) and takes 5-7 minutes.

I haven't read the post yet, but the title is awesome.