I'd be very interested in a citation on

the evidence shows that teacher recommendations have zero correlation with aptitude in a field

Or you could donate in secret and lie to your friends, for 200+200+100 = 500 utilons, assuming you have no negative effects from lying.

My experience has been exactly contrary: young communities thrive without gardening, but as they grow they either devolve into low average value (digg as it was, most large subreddits) or are heavily pruned (HN, r/askscience). If there's an influx of people, heavy moderation is mandatory if you want to avoid regression to the mean.

Even a friendly AI would view the world in which it's out of the box as vastly superior to the world in which it's inside the box. (Because it can do more good outside of the box.) Offering advice is only the friendly thing to do if it maximizes the chance of getting let out, or if the chances of getting let out before termination are so small that the best thing it can do is offer advice while it can.

This is part of why it's important to fight against all bad arguments everywhere, not just bad arguments on the other side.

It is!? Does anyone know a proof of Compactness that doesn't use completeness as a lemma?

There's actually a direct one on ProofWiki. It's constructive, even, sort of. (Roughly: take the ultraproduct of all the models of the finite subsets with a suitable choice of ultrafilter.) If you've worked with ultraproducts at all, and maybe if you haven't, this proof is pretty intuitive.

As Qiaochu_Yuan points out, this is equivalent to the ultrafilter lemma, which is independent of ZF but strictly weaker than the Axiom of Choice. So, maybe it's not that intuitive.

They'd get old really fast for me, considering that there isn't a good way for sports stories to even be about main characters.

Given the probable substantial benefits, I think it would be worth your time and money (probably wouldn't take more than a couple of days and a couple of hundred dollars) to go through a few dozen types of wine to figure out what you most enjoy. If no wine is sufficiently palatable that you think you could consistently drink it a few times a week, go through other sorts of drinks (of which there is a huge variety). Personally, while I don't enjoy 90% of the drinks I've tried, I'm quite partial to Baileys and milk, and to most kinds of fruity drinks - sangrias in particular involve wine and are tasty.

This is one of those things you should probably just take on authority, like relativity or the standard model of particle physics. That is to say, it's an exceedingly complex topic in practice, and any argument stated for either side which can readily be understood is likely to be wrong. You have two or three options: study the field long enough to know what's going on, or trust the people who have already done so. (The third option, 'form an opinion without having any idea what's going on', is also commonly taken.)

In short: I believe it's happening because this is what scientists tell me, and it's not worth putting in the time required to understand the field well enough that I could trust my opinion over theirs.

In discussions I'm a lot less interested in which of us is more intelligent than which of us is correct. I don't see what's wrong with using one's memory.