I don't drink (and never have).

For (1), when asked why I don't drink, I say "I don't know. I don't smoke either." People seem to recognize that some people just don't like to smoke, and that this type of thing carries over to other voluntary activities.

When I get a disdainful look or am being chided for being a stick in the mud, I steel myself by remembering Richard Feynmann's wife's exhortation: "What do you care what other people think?"

It's been mentioned here on Less Wrong before, but I'll recommend it again - Project Euler. It's a set of 300+ math problems that are to be solved by designing an algorithm to run in under a minute.

Getting into Project Euler last summer is likely the best move I've ever made to improve my programming skills. I'm not a programmer, but coding skills come in handy in lots of places, so I started working through the PE problems as means of learning Python.

Since I started I've replaced almost all my casual reading with research into algorithms and math, and I've gone from a Python novice to a fairly advanced user without it ever seeming like work. Getting the right answer makes you feel smart, which is an ego-stroking way of making you continue.

I've got another one that's about to be relevant to me. What should you do in order to be an effective manager?

I am an engineer and will soon be "in charge" of another engineer. I have had a couple bosses with various good and bad qualities, and obviously I want to emulate the good qualities and avoid the bad ones.

Is there a good procedure to begin being an effective supervisor of technical people? There is a vast of array of books and websites on management, but I think there's a very low rationality quotient.

I recently found myself thinking about this same topic. I have figured some of these out by trial and error, but feel that some formal training would have been useful (others I have not encountered):

• How should you interact with a police officer - what are your obligations, your rights, and how should you conduct yourself?

• If you want to move from one residence to another, what steps should you take? If you are credentialed in one state and want to move to another, what do you do?

• If you get into a minor car accident, what should you do? What about a major one?

• What's the best way to quit your job?

• How do you vote in an election? A primary? What should you do if you want to run for office?

• If you find that someone has died of non-suspicious and natural causes, what steps should you take? Whom should you call?

Given that a human life can be saved for $1000 (this is a very conservative estimate, I understand the figure can get as low as $200 per life), this means that if Omega gave you the choice of one (presumably ideally altruistic) human getting a penny and saving 10,000 chickens who would otherwise live perfectly happy chicken lives, you'd take the penny. Now, this is a bit silly, but when you look at suffering rather than life it gets more serious. Humane treatment of animals costs money (to some extent though it's profitable). Should we not bother to waste money on experiments to determine which slaughtering procedures cause the least pain and distress? Should we allow wealthy gourmets to eat animals that were intentionally tortured before being slaughtered because they prefer the taste?

I think the numbers are large enough to make me suspicious of my own reasoning. Since I reason better about quality of life, let's talk about the break-even point where putting N chickens in factory-farming conditions are the moral equivalent of putting a single human in a factory-farming condition. A billion seems way too large. Maybe I'd say 100,000? A million? I hate chickens, but that seems like an awful lot of suffering. Like I said, I don't think my brain works on this level.

More importantly, you're presenting a false dichotomy. We aren't talking about killing people, or putting them into factory farming conditions. We're talking about eating hamburgers instead of eating fried zucchini. How many hamburgers would you replace with non-meat foods to save a human life? 10^9? If it's anywhere near the N you assigned earlier, you should seriously consider not eating chickens.

Disclaimer: While I don't eat pork or beef, I do eat chickens. Then again...this argument is making me rethink that decision.

Really? I have just the opposite intuition. (2) seems like a reason for not consuming too much meat rather than none. It seems like (3) is a lot of effort for very little improvement in the environment. (1) I do take seriously. We consume a lot of animals.

I eat meat only occasionally, giving weight to your reasons (2) and (3), but not (1). I think it takes quite a few farm animal deaths to add up to a papercut to a human, morality-wise.

I do find it quite interesting to see how people react when you say you don't eat meat. I'm from the midwest, and often get reactions like:

• "Wuss."

• "I am going to make you eat meat."

• "What about protein, huh?"

I don't quite understand why people are offended by my dietary choices that don't affect them at all, but I've come to think it's something like "You don't eat meat, so you must think it's better not to eat meat. I eat meat, so therefore you think you're better than me."

I get similar reactions when I say I don't drink.

As an atheist and a capitalist, I find it quite satisfying that capitalism has largely displaced religion in one of Christianity's most important holidays. I have no problem celebrating that!

I think the most extreme reaction I've had to stupidity was while reading Kent Hovind's "dissertation" and similar creationist work. That level of failure made me dig my fingernails into my arm like I was trying to cut myself.

This may be a similar phenomenon: really bad grammar, especially spoken, gives me a mild version of that sensation you get when you bring your teeth together wrong.