Name three.

You guessed the teacher's password!

How clever of you to share another one! A gold star for both of us! Can you now explain why trusting a sound rationalist's or specialist's conclusions based on their authority if one hasn't the time to investigate them oneself is wrong from a Bayesian perspective?

Now, can you recite (and criticize) his reasons?

I think it mattes for his arguments about us being the pattern in our brain rather than the meat of our brain. But again I haven't read all of the QM sequence, I don't recall claiming I was a particularly good rationalist, all I claimed was that: "It really really helps to be comfortable with math to do rationality, there is no way around it. "

You don't need to be a great rationalist to see that.

Why? There is very little math in the Sequences, and almost none beyond the American grade 10 equivalent. Most is simple arithmetic and an occasional simple equation.

Please tell me how many Americans with 10 grade equivalent can read and understand any of the statistics used in papers LWers cite. How much of a gwern do they have in them? Those who can't and don't read the studies cited are taking EY's or gwern's or lukeprogs conclusions on various topics as much on authority as I am the relevance of QM to rationality.

Actually the word race is about what part of your ancestry you identify with or society identifies you with. Obviously both culture and genetic diversity correlate strongly with ancestry. The word race was also used in a taxonomic sense in the early 20th century. Indeed racial classification is still used that way in say medicine though naturally euphemisms are gaining popularity.

not the Bantu and the Scot as haplogroup L3 and the San as L0. Why overload the word

You really miss the point here so I suspect you didn't read the article.

When you take a look at the entire genome of the person and look for clusters in thing space you find groupings that basically match old racial classifications. For all the number crunching gene analysis that went into it this map does not much differ the map Lothrop Stoddard would have presented when asked about the distribution of racial groups before the Age of Discovery. Clearly they are touching the same underlying reality.

Sure looking at one or two genes a Scott might be more similar to a San than a Sardinian, but as you increase the number genes you are looking at, the similarity more and more matches to the first approximation what you'd guess from looking at faces.

Why overload the word, if not to justify preexisting racism?

Creating two words for the basically the same cluster in thing space in order to diffuse "x-ism" will only makes the x-ists feel more clever than they are. This gives the ideologies they create a new source from which to pump warm fuzzies into believers and a hook with which to appeal to people who figure out it is the same cluster.

I don't. However EY keeps emphasizing how crucial the QM sequence is to the other material, so I take his word at it.

I do think probability theory and a lot of other math is a must.

Good point about the Weimar Republic as an example of failure mode of democracy. I'm not sure whether it's germaine that part of the failure was it ceasing to be a democracy. Any other examples?

Here you go:

To promote an informed population and democracy in Rwanda, international agencies had promoted development of the media during the years leading up to the genocide.[27] It appeared that promoting one aspect of democracy (in this case the media) may, in fact, negatively influence other aspects of democracy or human rights. After this experience it has been argued that international development agencies must be highly sensitive to the specific context of their programmes and the need for promotion of democracy in a holistic manner.[27]

My comment on it.

I would like to see more diversity. Not just in terms of demographics (though that too)

To take a stab at that applause light.

Ceteris paribus yes I can agree diverse contributors may be beneficial to our mission. Especially value diversity, since differences in desired conclusions may lead to motivated cognition being called out more. But I think when most people speak of diversity they don't have that kind of diversity in mind. So sticking to the other kinds, I have to note that I haven't seen a single data driven argument for this why this would be so in actual humans. It is simply assumed or asserted. I'm pretty sure this is so because it happens to be a sacred value of our society. While cyberspace is clearly different from meatspace, studies done in meatspace seem to show diversity has negative effects that are seldom talked about.

But leaving aside such undesired consequences let me just point out that the ceteris paribus in my first paragraph is also unlikely. Very small differences can result in almost complete homogenization. Not only has it proven difficult, expensive and perhaps mostly ineffective to do this in meatspace, you would actually need to keep a delicate balancing act to keep a certain heterogenus mix together if your goal isn't to simply swap one group for another. I think we already spend insufficient attention spent on gardening and this would be just one more difficult task to add to the list.

Once more I ask why no one ever subjects such proposals to explicit cost-benefit analysis?