I'm heavily constrained by what I can test/grade. Writing code to grade the correctness of my Mandarin pronunciation is hard.

Listening exercises are easier to grade and they are definitely on my TODO list.

3) Digital blueprints of preserved brains are made available for anyone to download. Large numbers of simulations are run by kids learning how to use the simulation APIs, folks testing poker bots, web search companies making me read every page on the Internet to generate a ranking signal, etc. etc.

Yes, dynamical collapse appears to make new falsifiable predictions. MWI doesn't, unless you take Deutsch's reversible quantum consciousness seriously.

It's not allowed to not like Breaking Bad.

I recently watched the first season of the show Homeland and really liked it. The drama and action were good, but what I liked in particular is that the situations had some moral depth to them, and it isn't perfectly clear who to like/what to root for. I don't want to give anything away, but basically the story line revolves around a recently rescued POW who may have been "turned". If you've seen the show and want to talk about it, message me!

Putin might rationally calculate that if he tried to conquer Finland (which used to be part of the Czarist Empire) there is only a 10% chance that the U.S. would put up serious resistance, and this was a gamble he would be willing to take.

Finland is an EU country. Even if the US doesn't care about defending EU territory the EU does.

I have a slate of questions that I often ask people to try and better understand them. Recently I realized that one of these questions may not be as open-ended as I'd thought, in the sense that it may actually have a proper answer according to Bayesian rationality. Though, I remain uncertain about this. The question is actually quite simple and so I offer it to the Less Wrong community to see what kind of answers people can come up with, as well as what the majority of Less Wrongers think. If you'd rather you can private message me your answer.

The question is:

Truth or Happiness? If you had to choose between one or the other, which would you pick?

I used to believe that Benzin (the German word for petrol/gasoline, with cognates in many continental European languages including my mother tongue) was named after Karl Benz.

Ability to solve the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom.

In case you care about that in order to know which respondents know what they're talking about when answering the MWI question, that's a very poor choice (as I mentioned two years ago IIRC). It basically mostly only checks whether people took QM classes (in many of which interpretational issues are discussed hardly at all) and can remember the tricks to solve second-order differential equations in spherical coordinates. Asking whether people can prove Bell's theorem would be a much better choice. (You should weigh Scott Aaronson's opinion about MWI over mine even though I'm a physicist and he isn't.) Having read How the Hippies Saved Physics, I'd guess that if anything ability to solve the SE for the H atom would anti-correlate with trustworthiness about interpretations of QM when controlling for work status, profession and degree.

OCEAN personality test results

Seconded.

Alien-wise, most of the probability-mass not in the "Great Filter" theory is in the "they're all hiding" theory, right? Are there any other big events in the outcome space?

I intuitively feel like the "they're all hiding" theories are weaker and more speculative than the Great Filter theories, perhaps because including agency as a "black box" within a theory is bad, as a rule of thumb.

But, if most of the proposed candidates for the GF look weak, how do the "they're all hiding" candidates stack up? What is there, besides the Planetarium Hypothesis and Simulationism? Are there any that don't require a strong Singleton?