His early works, such as The Selfish Gene, were actually really good books for convincing somebody of an alternative to creationism or guided creation, however. (Which isn't the same as convincing somebody of atheism, but does give somebody paralyzed by the question of where complex life came from a much-needed line of retreat.)

Project Euler problem 384. I thought I'd be able to crack it in an afternoon, but a couple week's later I'm still stumped. I finally moved to another problem in the hopes of being able to return to 384 with fresh eyes, but no joy just yet.

I'm not sure if there's a lesson to learn from the failure, except that to do a good estimate about how much work something will take often itself requires a bit of work.

My Econ 101 class talked about this when they discussed comparative advantage and opportunity costs. Even if the other guy will do what you want done inefficiently (compared to you), what really matters is what each of you would be doing instead. If you have something better to do and they don't, then it's more efficient overall to let them go ahead and do something poorly than let that task take up your own, more productive time.

Delegating tasks. At work we're now short-staffed, and I've had to pick up work from a couple people.

Unfortunately, the principle of comparative advantage says that I should focus on the tasks where I'm most effective. Where I run into trouble is handing things off when I need to do just that. What if the other person screws it up, or worse, does it really inefficiently?

It makes my skin crawl to think of people bumbling around in Excel for 3 hours on a task I could complete in 1, so much so that I end up working on easy-but-time-consuming stuff when I should be at home looking at things on the Internet.

Physics and recreational mathematics + computer science improved my mental abilities.

I took Physics for Engineers as a freshman in college. It's clear in retrospect that this class was designed to accomplish several things:

• Force students who breezed through high school with little effort to work hard to maintain a good grade.

• Weed out the students who don't have the intellectual firepower or stamina for engineering.

• Teach a particular problem solving methodology. To get decent marks on a problem set, you had to always draw a diagram, always start with appropriate equations, always derive the answer correctly (no numbers, just algebra + calculus), line by line.

• Work quickly and accurately. Tests and problem sets were always difficult enough to require the full amount of time allotted.

• Teach physics. Only this goal was ever mentioned explicitly, of course.

This was a difficult class to do well in, and probably the class most responsible for people leaving the engineering program. The default schedule also had it co-requisite with Calculus II, another demanding class, and the two classes used each others' concepts - you'd have to understand one to do the other.

Going through this taught me all the intended lessons: I went through high school barely studying, but had to give up sleep to study and understand every homework problem to do well in this class. I wasn't sure I had an A in the course until after I got the final back.

Internalizing the lessons of that course set me up for success in later courses, and now professionally. Physics courses aren't about physics.

Project Euler is the other thing I think has changed my thought processes for the better. Being able to think of how to express an algorithm succinctly and correctly seems to help out in various situations, like training a new employee how to do a complex technical task.

I've always felt like Sagan and Dawkins have a certain talent for writing so far beyond my own that they're not even worth emulating. They write poetry. And in so doing, they manage to hide the process that created the work in the first place. That's the reason it's such a pleasure to read, but it doesn't help me get there, if you know what I mean.

An example of an excellently written pop-science book where I could glean the rules that were being followed was Stumbling Upon Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It's very readable, and doesn't feel "fake", yet he clearly follows a fairly rigid formula. Each chapter seems to go something like this: "So, here's a conundrum you can relate to. I'll give that conundrum a cutesy name. Here's a hard example where the conundrum is pretty easy to solve, after all, and an experiment to back up my reasoning, recounted in story form, not data form. The solution generalizes over <cutesy problem>. [then, the hard-hitting part] The conundrum, <cutesy name> is solved by <general solution, which probably also has a cutesy name>."

I have not tried writing a popular book, so I can't vouch for sure that the pattern I've noticed in Gilbert is all one would need to translate from science-speak to pop-speak... But it's something I couldn't help noticing when I read the book, such that your post made me think of it immediately. Maybe worth checking out.

The single most common mistake I have made, and that I have seen when tutoring others, is sloppiness. Especially losing track of a negative sign, either not noticing one in the original problem or forgetting it when writing out intermediate steps. That is why I have started a few years ago trying to be very careful when working things out. As I wrote in a comment a few years ago (I don't remember where, here or OB or HN, it was about math for engineering), when studying math or anything else that may be safety critical, don't settle for an A, do your best to get a perfect score, make it a regular habit. Even if someone else is checking your work when it is critical, don't trust them, they can make mistakes too.

As someone who has done more reading in this space than I should have, I recommend Loftus et al - The Christian Delusion or Ehrman - Jesus, Interrupted.

The real issue in the context of the plate seems to be a general heuristic that people aren't trying to deceive us.

Not surprisingly then, a key element of most magic tricks is misdirection, or outright lying. There was a discussion about this on LW a while back, but I can't find it. Someone mentioned how if you just boldly lie about key elements of the setup, people will form expectations that you can then easily surprise. The commenter then found that this skill at lying (and noticing how trusting people are) bled into the rest of his life, which led me to suggest people should be extra careful around magicians even when they're not on stage!

Voting for the Christian / "Christian" half is open - see Leah's site.

I had fun figuring these out. Once it's done I'd be interested to see what criteria LW users used to determine someone's real beliefs...