Try to be objective and consider whether a donation to the Singularity Institute is the most efficient charitable "investment"? Here's a simple argument that it's most unlikely. What's the probability that posters would stumble on the very most efficient investment: it requires research. Rationalists don't accede this way to the representativeness heuristic, which leads the donor to choose the recipient readily accessible to consciousness.

Relying on heuristics where their deployment is irrational, however, isn't the main reason the Singularity Institute is an attractive recipient for posters to Less Wrong. The first clue is the celebration of persons who have made donations and the eagerness of the celebrated to disclose their contribution.

Donations are almost entirely signaling. The donations disclosed in comments here signal your values, or more precisely, what you want others to believe are your values. The Singularity Institute is hailed here; donations signal devotion to a common cause. Yes, even donating based on efficiency criteria is signaling and much as other donations. It signals that the donor is devoted to rationality.

The inconsistent over-valuation of the Singularity Institute might be part of the explanation for why rationality sometimes seems not to pay off: the "rational" analyze everyone's behavior but their own. When dealing with their own foibles, rationalists abdicate rationality when evaluating their own altruism,

Half the more "philosophical" posts on here seem like they're trying to reinvent the wheel. This issue has been discussed a lot by philosophers and there's already an extensive literature on it. Check out http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/ for starters. Nothing wrong with talking about things that have already talked about, of course, but it would probably be good at least to acknowledge that this is a well-established area of thought, with a known name, with a lot of sophisticated thinking already underway, rather than having the mindset that Less Wrong is single-handedly inventing Western philosophy from scratch.

The difficulty of answering this question suggests one possibility: pain might very well be the only intrinsically bad thing there is. Pain is bad simply because it is bad, in a way that nothing else is. It could be argued that the "goodness" or "badness" of everything else is reducible to how much pain qualia it causes or prevents.

Lots of great stuff in this post. Don't have time to comment on anything in particular, but just wanted to say: this is the best-written piece I've ever seen on lesswrong. Keep writing.

I have never understood the difference between weak and strong atheism. Either I think God probably exists or that he probably doesn't, but what's the difference between lack of belief in a proposition and a belief in its converse? Is it that, say, who thinks that God doesn't exist with p=0.8 is a weak atheist while with p=1-10^(-9) he would be a strong one? Or is a weak atheist only who has suspended judgement (what's the difference from an agnostic, then)?

I eat anything. Make a conscious choice to eat healthy stuff and avoid junk food and simple carbs when convenient. Preferred eating pattern is to basically graze all day long. That, as well as a general indifference toward food (I find eating to be a bit of an irritating necessity, and never have cravings for anything) are enough to keep me trim. Probably worth noting that I wasn't always this way; up through college, I loved eating crap foods, sweets, carbs, soda, etc. Permanent preference changes take time, but can happen.

Most vegetarians/vegans strike me as sanctimonious twits, who are more often than not no healthier than anyone else.

Suppose that I live on a holodeck but don't know it, such that anything I look at closely follows reductionist laws, but things farther away only follow high-level approximations, with some sort of intelligence checking the approximations to make sure I never notice an inconsistency. Call this the holodeck hypothesis. Suppose I assign this hypothesis probability 10^-4.

Now suppose I buy one lottery ticket, for the first time in my life, costing $1 with a potential payoff of $10^7 with probability 10^-8. If the holodeck hypothesis is false, then the expected value of this is $10^710^-8 - $1 = $-0.90. However, if the holodeck hypothesis is true, then someone outside the simulation might decide to be nice to me, so the probability that it will win is more like 10^-3. (This only applies to the first ticket, since someone who would rig the lottery in this way would be most likely to do so on their first chance, not a later chance.) In that case, the expected payoff is $10^710^-3 - $1 = $10^4. Combining these two cases, the expected payoff for buying a lottery ticket is +$0.10.

At some point in the future, if there is a singularity, it seems likely that people will be born for whom the holodeck hypothesis is true. If that happens, then the probability estimate will go way up, and so the expected payoff from buying lottery tickets will go up, too. This seems like a strong argument for buying exactly one lottery ticket in your lifetime.

Isn't there an equally well-known bias toward thinking we'll react differently to future events (or behave differently) than most people? That is, we observe that most people don't become happier when they become rich, but we convince ourselves that we're "different" enough that we nonetheless will? I think Dan Gilbert wrote pretty extensively on this in of those recent "happiness studies" books. Anyway, it seems like there's an obvious tension between the two tendencies.

The historical causes of the different kinds of worldviews held by different people may be similar, but it doesn't make the different worldviews themselves similar. The evolution was implemented on the same kind of physics that fires up the stars, yet a snail is nothing like a giant ball of plasma. The answer to "2+2=" doesn't depend on where you place your faith. Even if you zealously believe that the answer is 78, even if that's what you were taught in school, just like the other kids who were taught different answers, the answer is still 4.

And there is a rational reason to believe the global scientific community, once you grow strong enough to pose the question: they are often right, and they self-check their correctness.

Yes, this is the crux of the difference between the two scenarios. We accept many things from authority figures at face value, but they fall into two categories, testable and untestable, and we can easily figure out which is which.