Even if everyone's map is distorted, I think there is an important difference whether people try to update, or don't even try. Which is part of what this website is about.

In other words, I would be okay with an X-ist who says they could be convinced against X-ism by evidence, even if they obviously consider such evidence very unlikely.

(And I obviously wouldn't be okay with people suggesting that presenting an evidence against X-ism should be punished.)

We risk being an echo-chamber of people who aren't hurt by the problems we discuss.

I don't see this as a problem, really. The entire point is to have high-value discussions. Being inclusive isn't the point. It'd be nice, sure, and there's no reason to drive away minority groups for no reason.

I mean, I don't see us trying to spread internet access and English language instruction in Africa so that the inhabitants can help discuss how to solve their malaria problems. As long as we can get enough input about what the problem is actually like, we don't need to be inclusive in order to solve problems. And in the African malaria case, being inclusive would obviously hurt our problem-solving capability.

Through the quote threads and references elsewhere on the site, I find I enjoy LW's taste in (short-to-medium-length) poetry. Can I have recommendations for more?

I've started making heavy use of archive.is. You give them a link, or click their super-handy bookmarklet, and that page will be archived. I use it whenever I'm going to be saving a link, now, to ensure that there will be a copy if I go looking for it years later (archive.org is often missing things, as I'm sure we've all run in to).

Great post! For anyone reading this who isn't familiar with model theory, by the way, the bit about

sentence G ⇔ P('G')<1. Then

may not be obvious. That is, we want a sentence G which is true iff P('G') < 1 is true. The fact that you can do this is a consequence of the diagonal lemma, which says that for any reasonable predicate 'f' in a sufficiently powerful language, you can find a sentence G such that G is true iff f(G) is true. Hence, defining f(x) := P('x') < 1, the lemma gives us the existence of G such that G holds iff f(G) holds, ie, iff P('G') < 1 as desired.

Mostly I bring this up because the diagonal lemma is among the most interesting results in early model theory. It has a simple statement and is how self-reference is constructed, which is what gives us the incompleteness theorems. If anyone is interested in getting in to model theory, looking up the proof and background for the proof would be a great place to start.

PSA: If you want to get store-bought food (as opposed to eating out all the time or eating Soylent), but you don't want to have to go shopping all the time, check to see if there is a grocery delivery service in your area. At least where I live, the delivery fee is far outbalanced by the benefit of almost no shopping time, slightly cheaper food, and decreased cognitive load (I can just copy my previous order, and tweak it as desired).

I'm told, and quite willing to believe, that your salary has more to do with the five minutes of salary negotiation than the next several years of work. I am also told that salary negotiation is very much a skill.

As such, it seems it would be worth a fairly substantial amount of time and money to practice and/or get coaching in this skill. Is this done? That is, how likely am I to be able to find someone, preferably someone who has worked on the business end of salary negotiation at somewhere like Google, who I can pay to practice salary negotiation with?

ETA: I've read extensively about how to negotiate (though of course there's always something more). What I'm interested in is practice.

I've heard several stories in the last few months of former theists becoming atheists after reading The God Delusion or similar Four-Horsemen tract. This conflicts with my prior model of those books being mostly paper applause lights that couldn't possibly change anyone's mind.

Insofar as atheism seems like super-low-hanging fruit on the tree of increased sanity, having an accurate model for what gets people to take a bite might be useful.

Has anyone done any research on what makes former believers drop religion? More generally, any common triggers that lead people to try to get more sane?

Edit: Found a book: Deconversion: Qualitative and Quantitative Results from Cross-Cultural Research in Germany and the United States of America. It's recent (2011) and seems to be the best research on the subject available right now. Does anyone have access to a copy?

Short response: Check out the Cochrane Library on mental health. (Browse by Topics in the left-hand side, Expand, then click on Mental Health - as of just now there are 406 entries.)

Evaluating healthcare interventions is hard. The gold standard is a randomised controlled trial (RCT), published in a peer reviewed journal. But there are all sorts of problems with single trials, some of which you allude to here. It's a really great idea to do a systematic review of all published trials and combine the good ones to get the best evidence available.

Doing this well is really hard - you need specialist expertise in the specific area to correctly interpret the primary literature (the RCTs), and specialist skills in systematic reviewing (as with RCTs themselves, there are many obvious and subtle issues about how to do them well). And it takes ages.

Luckily, there's an international collaboration of people, called the Cochrane Collaboration who get together to do this sort of thing, and have been beavering away for 20 years.

Unless you have significant resources, you are unlikely to do better on any topic than the latest available Cochrane Review. And if you do have significant resources, you're likely to do well to start with it.

When a health issue pops up for me or someone I care about, I jump straight for the Cochrane review (and also any relevant guidelines and protocols, but that's a tier down the evidence quality pyramid), and it's like I'm getting a well thought-through briefing from the world's experts on what we currently know about what works and what doesn't.

I love it.

As a postscript, there is a whole field of healthcare informatics that looks at how to find good academic papers on a particular issue - I once ran a whole course on the topic (and related ones). The shortcut answer is 'use Cochrane'; the long spadework answer is 'search Medline'.

Good luck.

Something going from 0 to 10^-20 is behaving pretty close to continuously in one sense. It is clear that there are some configurations of matter I don't care about at all (like a paperclip), while I do care about other configurations (like twelve-year-old human children), so it is elementary that at some point my utility function must go from 0 to nonzero. The derivative, the second derivative, or even the function itself could easily be discontinuous at this point.