I want to say that my own origin lies in having been raised Unitarian Universalist with the most amazing minister who never invoked "God" as anything more than the common good or interpersonal kindness. I want to believe that UU Sunday school attendance, or, more interesting to me even at that young age, ditching class and sticking through the "adult" section of the worship, where she would give the most awe-inspiringly inspirational sermons, would be enough to awaken any child as a rationalist. Alas, I am fairly certain I was prepared for rationalism even before my family moved to the church while I was in elementary school, and alas, that minister retired all too soon.

Another possibility is the fact that I was raised in a neighborhood co-op, where each afternoon I would spend at the home of a different friend, experiencing their family culture, and the diversity among those households—race, religion, nationality, economic status, orientation, language, profession—instilled an early understanding that any adherence to convention was a matter of choice.

There is one more influence, less grand, perhaps, than the others, but I think perhaps most concrete as an awakening "event". My grandfather used to visit often when I was young. He liked to play a game with my siblings and me where he would point at an aeroplane flying overhead and declare "there goes a bird!" and my sisters and I would reply "grandpa, that's a plane!", and he would point to a squirrel and say "look at that groundhog climbing the tree over there!" and my sisters and I would reply "grampa, that's a squirrel!", and so on for all manner of things.

My grandfather also smoked, and from everything I'd learned even at that early age, smoking was bad. One day, I decided to ask my grandfather to quit, because that was what you were supposed to do with bad habits. He told me that he would quit smoking if I would stop being silly and call those little feathery animals that flapped around in the air by their proper name: 'aeroplane', and those furry little critters that dug up the garden and left burrow holes all over the park 'squirrels'.

And I did.

It was a while before I saw my grandfather again, and eventually he came to stay with my family for his final years, but after I resolved to speak his language around him (even if I kept to the "real" terminology elsewhere), I never saw him light another cigarette. I don't know if he actually quit, and for the sake of the fable, it doesn't really matter. What I carried from then on was an understanding that there was a clear distinction between fact and fiction and that each has value, but as much as I might enjoy my conversations with my grandfather, and the benefit of humouring his fiction, I needed to place a filter between that and my true model of the world. That is, my curiousity in one (fact or fiction) wouldn't always suffice for an understanding of the other, but even the existence of a fiction had the potential to influence reality.

As an educator, I recognize this sort of potential in all young children, who create entire worlds of make-believe, complete with their own characters, societies, codes-of-conduct, and even laws of physics, each of which world is kept quite distinct from the others. The point where imagination becomes rationality is the point where the child can recognize, consciously, for any rule in their imagined world, "how is that different from the world we live in?", and "what else would be different if that were the rule?", and establish a curiousity about those sorts of inferences. That is, when the child's fiction genre of choice shifts from Adventure to Speculative.

The best way to get at the idea behind quantum immortality might be to explain that if the universe is infinite there must be in infinite number of yous because there are only so many ways of arranging the atoms in a galaxy so all possible galaxies exist in infinite number. No matter what happens there must always be galaxies in which a you somehow escapes death so there will always be a you that experiences life.

Pretend you undergo a dangerous operation in which you have a 99% chance of "dying". Before the operation you can correctly say to yourself that "I will wake up from this operation" because some versions of you will survive. Also, in some galaxies death will be cured before you age too much and therefore yous will be alive in 1,000 years.

I don't have any answers to you question, but I have my own questions. Maybe someone will answer them here.

Just yesterday I had a long discussion with wedrifid about quantum suicide. It came to a halt when wedrifid got very offended because I claimed that he misrepresented my position. Or something like that. I am still not sure. Anyway, in spite of this, I think it was an interesting discussion mostly relevant here. There I enumerated several reasons why committing quantum suicide is a bad idea. But I am still very confused about the real question: How would it feel to commit quantum suicide? I wrote:

My common sense tells me that if I put a (quantum or other) gun in my mouth right now, and pull the trigger many times, then the next thing I will feel is not that I am very lucky. Rather, I will not feel anything at all because I will be dead. I am quite sure about this instinct, and let us assume for a minute that it is indeed correct. This can mean two things. One possible conclusion is that MWI must be wrong. Another possible conclusion is that MWI is right but we make some error when we try to apply MWI to this situation. I give high probability to both of this possibilities, and I am very interested in any new insights.

On "having" children: should we be counting that as birth, raising, what you think of as "yours," something else? I am thinking of sperm donors, surrogate mothers, children given up for adoption, and adoptive parents. If I am the biological parent of X offspring and raise Y of them, should I be reporting X or X-Y? And if I have step/adopted/foster children, +Z? "Raise" might be bad too, as there are people who have (biological or not) children they think of as "theirs" without custody or visitation.

The count might be fuzzier than intended. I would expect upward bias.

Koan answers here for:

What rule could restrict our beliefs to just propositions that can be meaningful, without excluding a priori anything that could in principle be true?

Svsgl creprag punapr bs urnqnpurf qverpgyl nssrpgvat jbexvat ubhef frrzf vzcebonoyr tbvat ba gur fbeg bs nffhzcgvbaf V gnxr sebz gur cerzvfrf bs gur dhrfgvba. Vs jr nffhzr n sbegl ubhe jbex jrrx, gura nffhzvat gur urnqnpurf qba'g vagreehcg fyrrc, gung tvirf pybfre gb n bar va guerr punapr.

Gernqvat vagb ernyzf bs "cebonoyl bireguvaxvat guvatf," V fhccbfrq gung vs gur crefba jrer na hafxvyyrq, ybj jntr, shyy gvzr jbexre, naq gur urnqnpurf jrer frevbhfyl phggvat vagb gur gvzr gurl pbhyq fcraq jbexvat, naq gur zrqvpngvba abg pbirerq ol vafhenapr, gurve rzcyblre jbhyq cebonoyl whfg sver gurz. Bhe pheerag wbo znexrg urnivyl snibef rzcyblref, naq rzcyblref bs hafxvyyrq jbexref pna nssbeq gb or rkgerzryl cvpxl. Fb tvira gur nffhzcgvba gung gurl fgvyy unq n wbo ng nyy, V gubhtug vg jnf yvxryl gung vg jnf n cneg gvzr bar jurer gurve urnqnpur gvzr qvqa'g bireync zhpu jvgu jbexvat gvzr, naq/be gurl znantrq gb cbjre guebhtu gur urnqnpurf naq jbex naljnl gb nibvq trggvat sverq, fb vg jnfa'g ceriragvat gurz sebz jbexvat.

Last time, I figured it out by writing a script that went through my comments until it hit the earliest one, but that only worked because I made an account as soon as I got here. (I probably could have gone hunting for the results of that script, but I didn't care as much this time around.)

I imagine Yvain has mentioned LW on his blog enough times that it'd be difficult to do an automated solution (but you might be able to just make a list of links to LW from posts, then choose from those).

The redwood tree on the other hand was a geometry problem for me, more than anything else, and I misjudged its incline by half a degree.

What?

Sbe PSNE dhrfgvba sbhe, V'z fgnyyrq orpnhfr vg frrzf gb zr gung zl nafjre fubhyq qrcraq ba ubj ybj vapbzr gur cngvrag vf. Vs gur cngvrag vf rzcyblrq ng nyy, gur qvssrerapr bs fvkgl ubhef bs urnqnpurf vf cebonoyl jbegu zber guna n qvssrerapr bs gjb uhaqerq svsgl qbyynef. Vs gur cngvrag vf harzcyblrq, vg znl abg or.

Took the survey, did most of the extra questions. IQ 122 apparently. I'm sceptical of what that actually means but it sounds quite good so next time someone asks me, that's what I'll say :)

Didn't do Myers-Briggs because I'm pretty sure it's bullshit.

Not too surprised to find that my political views are measurably left libertarian. Wasn't happy with a lot of the political policy questions though - most of them were phrased in a way that I wanted to answer "it depends" or "yes, BUT...", or even "mu".