Done! The length is fine; the questions are interesting and fun to consider.

EDIT: removed concerns about "cryivf" if. "srzhe" nf ynetrfg obar (znff if. yratgu); gur cryivf nccneragyl vfa'g n "fvatyr obar".

Well, I'm a little annoyed seeing in Main the results of a tournament that was announced in Discussion... (not that I probably would have entered, but...)

It definitely felt like the latter was not self-delusion (especially when Anki was asking me what the capital of the UK was, say). But I felt unable to communicate why it was not self-delusion,

Wild speculation: it's possible to notice that a node in a representational graph is well-connected and thus likely to be close to another node, without following any actual edges (this is very close to a general metric of familiarity but doesn't actually require representing that metric). Something similar might be going on in your head: you haven't retrieved what the capital of the UK is yet, but you know you know a lot about the UK.

That's not self-evident to me at all.

It's not self-evident, but the new atheists don't make a good argument that it has a high cost. Atheist scientists in good standing like Rob Baumeister say that being religious helps with will power.

Being a Mormon correlates with characteristics and therefore Mormon sometimes recognize other Mormons. Scientific investigation found that the use marker of being healthy for doing so and those markers can't be used for identifying Mormons.

There's some data that being religious correlates with longevity.

Of course those things aren't strong evidence that being religious is beneficial, but that's where Chesterton's fence comes into play for Taleb. He was born Christian so he stays Christian.

While my given name is Christian, I wasn't raised a Christian or believed in God at any point in my life and the evidence doesn't get my to start being a Christian but I do understand Taleb's position. Taleb doesn't argue that atheists should become Christians either.

A form like "the one who acts" sounds perfectly natural to me.

...I don't understand how that part is insulting. I don't use smart as a weak form of intelligent if that's what you mean, exactly the opposite in fact. I'm sorry maybe I'm losing some finer point of the English language as I'm not a native speaker, but I would really like you, or someone, to try to explain how that part could possibly be interpreted as insulting because I honestly don't see it.

Edit: I'm also not implying that it's work unworthy or anything at all, I'm honestly just genuinely curious why she chose that profession because where I'm from it's a respected job because people know (or imagine to know) how hard the work is, but simultaneously it's also a job that's very much at the bottom of the food chain in terms of pay and status. I'm simply curious why she chose it.

Even assuming that all this is accurate, why would Quirrell give Harry a third-person description of Harry, framed as if he was describing a third party?

Apart from the standalone ridiculousness of such behaviour, if Quirrell believed that Harry already had the stone, and knew that Harry was willing to use the stone for his benefit, then this sort of obfuscation would be the last thing he'd do.

Then, there was the thing where I would leave plastic syringe caps and bits of paper from wrappers in patients’ beds. This incurred approximately equal wrath to the med errors–in practice, a lot more, because she would catch me doing it around once a shift. I agreed with her on the possible bad consequences. Patients might get bedsores, and that was bad. But there were other problems I hadn’t solved, and they had worse consequences. I had, correctly I think, decided to focus on those first.

When I do this kind of triaging (the example that comes to mind first is learning competitive fighting games), I often (certainly not always) do end up trying to fix some of my lower-priority common mistakes at the same time, but just not caring about them as much. This often seems to make them easier to fix than if I had prioritized them, which seems related to the main point of your post.

Moral Philosopher: How would you characterize irrational behavior?

Economist: When someone acts counter to their preferences.

Moral Philosopher: Oh, that’s what we call virtue.

It's all well and good to say you don't maximize utility for one reason or another, but when somebody tells me that they actually maximize "minimum expected utility", my first inclination is to tell them that they've misplaced their "utility" label.

My first inclination when somebody says they don't maximize utility is that they've misplaced their "utility" label... can you give an example of a (reasonable?) agent which really couldn't be (reasonably?) reframed to some sort of utility maximizer?