With all due respect, I feel like this subject is somewhat superfluous. It seems to be trying to chop part of a general concept off into its own discrete category.

This can all be simplified into accepting that Expert and Common majority opinion are both types of a posteriori evidence that can support an argument, but can be overturned by better a posteriori or a priori evidence.

In other words, they are pretty good heuristics, but like any heuristics, can fail. Making anything more out of it seems to just be artificial, and only necessary if the basic concept proves to difficult to understand.

I wonder. Perhaps that 98% of people are theists is better evidence that theism is useful than that it's correct. In fact, I think ihe 98%, or even an 80% figure, is pretty damn strong evidence that theism is useful; i.e. instrumentally rational. It's basic microeconomics: if people didn't derive value from religion, they'd stop doing it. To cite just one example, lukeprog has written previously about joining Scientology because they had best Toastmasters group. There are many other benefits to be had by professing theism.

However I'm not sure that this strong majority belief is particularly strong evidence that theism is correct, or epistemically rational. In particular if it were epistemically rational, I'd expect religions would be more similar than they are. To say that 98% of people believe in God, requires that one accept Allah, the Holy Trinity, and Hanuman as instances of "God". However, adherents of various religions routinely claim that others are not worshipping God at all (though admittedly this is less common than it used to be). Is there some common core nature of "God" that most theists believe in? Possibly, but it's a lot hazier. I've even heard some professed "theists" define God in such a way that it's no more than the physical universe, or even one small group of actual, currently living, not-believed-to-be-supernatural people. (This happens on occasion in Alcoholics Anonymous, for members who don't like accepting the "Higher Power".)

At the least, majority beliefs and practice are stronger evidence of instrumental rationality than epistemic rationality.

Are there other cases where we have evidence that epistemic and instrumental rationality diverge? Perhaps the various instances of Illusory Superiority; for instance where the vast majority of people think they're an above average driver or the Dunning-Krueger effect. Such beliefs may persist in the face of reality because they're useful to people who hold these beliefs.

If he counted them, then he could have given a better calculation than "2/11", since he had one additional prior that was unstated: the probability that he himself was (or was not) a male virtuist. In the same scenario, the best candidate would ask what the virtuist heresy was first, and then give an answer based on that additional information. (If the interrogator refused to answer, the answer might still be 2/11.)

I'm inclined to think that big companies and governments may already be doing this sort of thing, but since ROM is basically useless for consumers, we don't see any of it.

CDs and DVDs are ROMs. Not as robust as paper, but then, you can't usefully put audio or video recordings on paper anyway.

But a ROM that can't be read by the naked eye isn't a complete solution, as you have data formats and hardware readers to think of. There exists data that is fairly robustly stored, but no-one can read, because the support technology has moved on. Betamax tapes, Laserdiscs, Zip drives, floppies of various sizes. How many people can still read those? Even if you have the hardware, can you mount the file system and decode the documents?

Am I the only one that reacted to voluntarily chopping up books with shock and horror?

You make a good point; but one of the advantages of digital media is that it's so easy to translate it into other forms.

Yes, but this requires continual active maintenance.

If we assume Reductionism and Naturalism, the concept of the Zombie is a paradox.

I don't understand, unless by "paradox" you mean "contradiction" or "nonsense" or "impossible".

If we assume Reductionism and Naturalism, the concept of the Zombie is a paradox.

The two premises I have just outlined are mutually exclusive to the premise "beings that are atom-by-atom identical to us... except that they are not conscious."

That is like saying that there are two gears that mesh together, yet one one turns, the other does not. Paradox. There is no solving it. The only difference is the layers of complexity. We cannot, with only our own minds, find or prove prime numbers with many digits to them, but that doesn't mean that they do not exist.

If you truly believe that there is no external, supernatural cause to consciousness, then Zombies are a true paradox that cannot exist.

Since an argument like this rests on several necessary premises, one should really just attack the one with the least support.

I have noticed that Eliezer favors synthetic over analytic arguments, but sometimes, the later is much more efficient than the former.

I have two major entities in by mind, My Brain, and Me. My brain is heavily influenced by chemistry, such as tiredness, and blood sugar levels, and does all the thinking. Me is not affected so much by such things. However, Me has a very limited amount of control over my Brain. If Me forces my Brain to do somthing that it really does not want to do, then it will tire out Me and render it more difficult to force my Brain to do something, until Me's control is replenished, which is a slow process. Me has basically no cognitive faculties, and must make my Brain do the thinking, but talking is a free move, and Me is capable of recognizing and commenting on many cognitive biases as my brain thinks. My brain often will listen to these comments and stop following those faulty lines of thought, because my reword center gives it some dopamine when it makes its thoughts less wrong.

Possible causes for this lack of control:

1. Me is using its power for unnecessary thing all the time, and so when it is needed it is tiered.
2. I have a genetic lack of power for Me to control my Brain.

Solutions:

1. If problem 1, I could try to catch Me controlling my Brain unnecessarily, and stop it.
2. Training my inner rat. If problems 1 or 2, I could get the reward center to give my brain dopamine when it does what it should do, so that Me would not have to make it to do as much. Then Me to conserve its strength.
3. Practices. If 1 is true then this has been tried without success, but if not then it may allow Me to increase its strength of control over my Brain.

Additional thoughts:

My Brain, which I have been conspiring to subjugate to the will of Me, is what has been writing all this, with very little control from Me, probable because it gets dopamine for ‘making clover plan to defeat enemy’. My brain doesn't know that the enemy it is making the clever plan against is itself. Me knows that writing this it a good thing, and so encourages my brain to be happy when doing this, so that it will try to do it more.

This is false modesty. This is assuming the virtue of doubt when none ought exist. Mathematics is one of the few (if not the only) worthwhile thing(s) we have in life that is entirely a priori. We can genuinely achieve 100% certainty. Anything less is to suggest the impossible, or to redefine the world in a way that has no meaning or usefulness.

I could say that I'm not really sure 2+2=4, but it would not make me more intelligent for the doubt, but more foolish. I could say that I'm not sure that 5 is really prime, but it would hinge on redefining '5' or 'prime'. I could posit that if 2+3 reproducibly equaled 4, I would have to change my view of the universe and mathematics, but were I to suggest that argument held any weight, I might as well start believing in God. Define any paradox you like and there will never be a correct answer. The solution is not to accept doubt, but rather to ignore truly unsolvable paradoxes as foolish and useless.

The problem in creating the parallel probability statements is not in the surety, for they would all almost certainly be mathematical as well, but in the daunting task of finding and stating them. This is not reason, this is a threat! "If you assign X probability, are you willing to spend X hours finding parallels?" We react in the negative not due to the reasonability of the rebuttal but rather the daunting task saying yes would hypothetically place upon us. Our chance to perform the task correctly is likely significantly less than that of the probability we have assigned.