Tell me what I don't know about life insurance.
Please share your personal experience, if any, with me.
Thoughts that have occurred to me:
What are the odds that that company will be around in 38 years? I mean, both World Wars fit in that time span.
What is the probability distribution over how much the Euro will have inflated by then? Does that even matter?
Good Quality Heuristics
We use heuristics when we don't have the time to think more, which is almost all the time. So why don't we compile a big list of good quality heuristics that we can trust? (Insert eloquent analogy with mathematical theorems and proofs.) Here are some heuristics to kick things off:
Make important decisions in a quiet, featureless room. [1]
Apply deodorant before going to bed rather than any other time. [1]
Avoid counterfactuals and thought experiments in when talking to other people. [Because they don't happen in real life. Not in mine at least (anecdotal evidence). For example with the trolley, I would not push the fat man because I'd be frozen in horror. But what if you wouldn't be? But I would! And all too often the teller of a counterfactual abuses it by crafting it so that the other person has to give either an inconsistent or unsavory answer. (This proof is a stub. You can improve it by commenting.)]
If presented with a Monty Hall problem, switch. [1]
Sign up for cryonics. [There are so many. Which ones to link? Wait, didn't Eliezer promise us some cryonics articles here in LW?]
In chit-chat, ask questions and avoid assertions. [How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie]
When in doubt, think what your past and future selves would say. [1, also there was an LW article with the prince with multiple personality disorder chaining himself to his throne that I can't find. Also, I'm not sure if I should include this because it's almost Think More.]
I urge you to comment my heuristics and add your own. One heuristic per comment. Hopefully this takes off and turns into a series if wiki pages. Edit: We should concentrate on heuristics that save time, effort, and thought.
Evangelical Rationality
Spreading the Word prompted me to report back as promised.
I have two sisters aged 17 and 14, and mom and dad aged 40-something. I'm 22, male. We're all white and Latvian. I translated the articles as I read them.
I read Never Leave Your Room to the oldest sister and she expressed great interest in it.
I read Cached Selves to them all. When I got to the part about Greenskyers the older sister asserted "the sky is green" for fun. Later in the conversation I asked her, "Is the sky blue?", and her answer was "No. I mean, yes! Gah!" They all found real life examples of this quickly - it turns out this is how the older sister schmoozes money and stuff out of dad ("Can I have this discount cereal?" followed by "Can I have this expensive yogurt to go with my cereal?").
I started reading The Apologist and the Revolutionary to them but halfway through the article they asked "what's the practical application for us?", and I realized that I couldn't answer that question - it's just a piece of trivia. So I moved on.
I tried reading about near-far thing to them, but couldn't find a single good article that describes it concisely. Thus I stumbled around, and failed to convey the idea properly.
In the end I asked whether they'd like to hear similar stuff in the future, and the reply was an unanimous yes. I asked them why, in their opinion, haven't they found this stuff by themselves and the reason seems to be that they have have no paths that lead to rationality stuff in their lives. Indeed, I found OB through Dresden Codak, which I found through Minus, which I found through some other webcomic forum. Nobody in my family reads webcomics not to mention frequenting their forums.
The takeaway, I think, is this: We must establish non-geeky paths to rationality. Go and tell people how to not be suckers. Start with people who would listen to you. You don't have to advertise LW - just be +5 informative. Rationality stuff must enter the mass media: radio, TV, newspapers. If you are in a position to make that happen, act!
I would also like to see more articles like this one on LW - go, do something, report back.
E-Prime
I found this and thought we could find a use for it.
Wikipedia describes E-Prime, short for English-Prime, as a modified form of English. E-Prime uses very slightly simplified syntax and vocabulary, eliminating all forms of the verb to be.
Some people use E-Prime as a mental discipline to filter speech and translate the speech of others. For example, the sentence "the movie was good", translated into E-Prime, could become "I liked the movie". The translation communicates the speaker's subjective experience of the movie rather than the speaker's judgment of the movie. In this example, using E-Prime makes it harder for the writer or reader to confuse a statement of opinion with a statement of fact.
Discuss! In E-Prime!
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