I have plenty of money. If there's something I know I want that's easy to buy for a reasonable amount of money, I've already bought it. If someone gives me a gift that I wouldn't have thought to buy for myself (but which I do in fact want once I'm aware of it) or would be hard for me to buy myself (e.g. because choosing the right version of that product requires research that I lack the knowledge for) or where I have some mental block that prevents me from admitting to myself that I want it, that's significantly more valuable to me than cash would have been.

When I was a student and had very little money, I preferred cash.

What is there to lose by playing power games with people who think that roughly all communication is power games?

Well for one thing, it can get you dragged into negative-sum power games. Like with gambling, if you don't know what your edge is, you're better off not playing. If there isn't a clear way that getting into a Twitter argument about transgenderism helps you accomplish your goals, then in the typical case you waste your time, and you take on a tail risk of ruining your reputation. It's foolish to take that risk if it doesn't come with enough potential upside to make it +EV.

If you're already stuck in such a power game, then by all means play it as such, but don't go seeking them out.

What are the higher utility per unit effort things you could be doing instead during that time? Did you stop doing a gratitude journal? If so, did you do those other things instead?

I ask that because I have often found myself making the opposite mistake of one you describe: There's something I'm considering doing (usually because someone suggested it), and I think to myself that that's not the optimal thing for me to do, so I decide not to do it, but instead of doing something higher-value, I end up doing nothing in particular and would have been better off doing the moderate-value thing.

This is perhaps a bit off topic, but why translate using a general purpose LLM rather than a tool that's specifically for translation like Google Translate?

Take a fixed number of humans with a fixed intelligence (both average and outliers) then let mathematics advance. It will advance to the point that there is a vanishingly small number of people who can even understand the state of the art

This ignores the possibility of advances in the teaching of math (or physics, or any other discipline). If improved teaching methods lower the level of intelligence required to reach a given level of knowledge, then a field can advance considerably.

Not to mention that the human population has been growing, and average intelligence has been increasing.

Finally, there's specialization. It doesn't take much intelligence to know everything that was known about genetics when Darwin was alive, but probably nobody is smart enough to know everything that was known about it in 2000. But there have still been make advances since then thanks to people specialized in subfields like DNA sequencing.

if you think the plant manager should be exonerated because he folowed the rules, you are siding with deontology, whereas if you think he should be punished because a death occurred under his supervision, you are siding with consequentialism

This is missing the point. Consequentialism is about making decisions, not about judging past decisions. Consequentialism says that if punishing the manager would (in expectation) have better consequences than not punishing them, then they should be punished, and otherwise they shouldn't. Deontology says that if the rules say to punish the manager, they should be punished, and if the rules say not to punish the manager, they shouldn't be punished.

Does this still work? I've often heard it referred to as the "shit sandwich method" (by STEMish non-rationalists), so I wonder if people are sufficiently inoculated to it for it to no longer work

This whole time I thought it started with a capital I. TIL.

Border adjustment taxes generally consist of an X% tax on imports coupled with an X% subsidy on exports, so that would already increase exports.

Making the import tax and export subsidy the same is also more economically efficient, because it doesn't impose a net tax on cross border supply chains (imagine manufacturing a car in the US, attaching the wheels in Canada, and then selling it in the US)

Are those genuine flaws with the model, or is the terminology just suboptimal? Put another way, if you know someone's 5 factor conscientiousness and agreeableness scores, how useful is that for predicting their behavior?