I used to take peanuts to a nearby park to feed squirrels, in much the same spirit. It had the additional benefit that I could eat the peanuts myself if I wanted, and it caused passersby to look at me funny (as I would not-infrequently have squirrels sitting on my lap and rummaging curiously through my pockets).

Subskill: Maximize on big things, satisfice on small things.

I aspire to run and manage stuff. Yet I often find myself often using low-status communication methods even when medium to high-status communication methods are appropriate. I find it uncomfortable to express expectation that others should follow my lead or listen to me, and express thanks too much. I say, "is it okay if we go now" to a friend who gave me a ride instead of "Let's go?"

I thus devised the following plan and am in the process of executing it.

Skill: Become comfortable with expressing high-status behavior.

Exercise: Ask women that are older than me out on dates. I will be forced to act high-status or I will be shot down, either in the asking or during the date.

Scott Adams made this observation in a blog post:

Years ago I worked with a young intern at Crocker Bank who believed his first step toward success was to find a place to live in a prosperous suburb. His theory was that the external environment would program his brain for the sort of success that his neighbors would have already found. I remember mocking him for his offbeat and naive theory. Now I think he's a genius for understanding at such an early age that his environment was a tool for programming his brain. I lost touch with him, but 'll bet he's a millionaire now.

This is definitely one lesson I should have learned earlier than I did.

You talked about two issues that have little to do with each other: 1. What should the law be? (I didn't argue with your point here, so re-iterating it is useless?) 2. A statement that was misleading: apparently you meant that you're not a good torturer. That is not impossible. I think that given a short amount of time, with someone who knows something specific (where the bomb is hidden), my best chance (in effective, not moral, ordering) is to torture them. I'm not a professional torturer, I luckily never had to torture anyone, but like any human, I have an understanding in pain. I've watched movies about torture, and I've heard about waterboarding. If I decided that this was the ethical thing to do (which be both agree, in some cases is possible), and I was the only one around, I'd probably try waterboarding. It's risky, there's a chance the prisoner might die, but if I have one hour, and 50 million people will die otherwise, I don't see any better way. So let me ask you flat out -- I'm assuming you also read about waterboarding, and that when you need to, you have access to the WP article about waterboarding. What would you do in that situation? Ask nicely?

All that does not go to condone torture. I'm just saying, if a nation of Rationalists is fighting with the Barbarians, then it's not necessarily in their best interests to decide they will never torture no matter what.

I guess the big question here is why do you not believe it. Since you (and I!) would prefer to live in a world where torture is not effective, we must be aware that our biases is to believe it is not effective -- it makes the world nicer. Hence, we must conciously shift up our belief in the effectiveness of torture from our "gut feeling." Given that, what evidence have you seen that for the purposes of solving NP-like problems (meaning, a problem where a solution is hard to find but easy to verify like "where is the bomb hidden") is not effective. I would say that for me personally, the amount that my preferences shift in the presence of relatively mild pain ("I prefer not to medicate myself" vs. "Gimme that goddamn pill") is at least cause to suspect that someone who is an expert at causing vast amounts of pain would be able to make me do things I would normally prefer not to do (like tell them where I hid the bomb) to stop that pain.

Of course, torture used for unverifiable information is completely useless for exactly the same reason -- the prisoner will say anything they can get away with to make the pain stop.

To pick a 2 year old Nit:

That was what Nuremburg and Mi Lai were about, but that is not what Abu Ghraib was about. At Abu Ghraib most of the events and acts that were made public, and most of what people are upset about was done by people who were violating orders--with some exceptions, and from what I can tell most of the exceptions were from non-military organizations.

I'm not going to waste a lot more time going into detail, but the people who went to jail went there for violating orders, and the people who got "retired" got it because they were shitty leaders and didn't make sure their troops where well behaved.

In a "appeal to authority", I've been briefed several times over the last 20 years on the rules of land warfare, I've spent time in that area (in fact when the original article was posted I was about 30 miles from Abu Ghraib) and a very good friend of mine was called in to help investigate/document what happened there. When his NDA expires I intend to get him drunk and get the real skinny.

This doesn't change the thrust of your argument--which not only do I agree with, but is part and parcel of military training these days. It is hammered into each soldier, sailor, marine and airman that you do NOT have to follow illegal orders. Read "Lone Survivor", a book by Marcus Luttrell about his Seal Team going up against unwinnable odds in the mountains of Afghanistan--because they, as a team, decided not to commit a war crime. Yeah, they voted on it, and it was close. , but one of those things was not like the other and I felt I had to say something.

How to Buy Stocks

First Option:

1. Acquire at least $3,000 in a checking account, and grab your account number and routing number. (It's written on the bottom of your checks.)
2. Go to Vanguard.com and open an account.
3. Buy into VTSMX, the total market index fund, or VFINX, the S&P 500 index fund. If you have trouble picking, flip a coin; they're very similar funds.

Second Option:

1. Go to Sharebuilder.com and open an account. They shouldn't require a significant starting balance, but might.
2. Sign up for automatic investing to take advantage of dollar cost averaging.
3. Buy VFINX or VTSMX.

Third option:

1. List out what you know about a company.
2. List out what the market knows about that company.
3. If your knowledge is better than the market's, then proceed. Otherwise (including if you don't know how much the market knows), go to option 1.
4. Go to your bank and read about their brokerage accounts. If the fees aren't excessive (check Sharebuilder and other banks and stuff like etrade), open a brokerage account, or go to option 2 and open a Sharebuilder account.
5. Transfer money to your brokerage account.
6. Plan out your trades: under what conditions will you buy a stock? (not "the price now is ok" but "if it's less than $60 I think it's worthwhile.") Under what conditions will you sell a stock? This is mostly a restatement of steps 1 and 2, but it's nice to have these numbers for every individual stock.
7. Execute trades; the interface should be straightforward.

The last option is very rarely a good idea. You cannot pick good stocks- good stocks do not exist. What exists are good companies and good opportunities. Companies that everyone knows are good- like Apple- are rarely good opportunities, but sometimes the company is so good that it's worth buying at a premium. I'm up 9x on Netflix over 4 years, even though I bought it at a fairly high price, because I recognized that it was going to reshape its industry and eat Blockbuster's lunch. I'm up 50% on BP because I was able to identify the point of maximum pessimism and buy then. That's 2 significant winners over the last 4-5 years of active investing. I'm in the black overall only because of how awesome Netflix was; there's a lot of stocks I bought that lost a bunch or merely tread water. I now take the opportunity approach seriously.

The moral of the story is that you should hunt opportunities where you have something the market lacks, and then bet big on those opportunities. If you don't have any more knowledge than the market, bet on the market as a whole in an index fund. I had more foresight than the market as a whole when it came to Netflix (but not to many other things I bought) and a sterner stomach than the market when it came to BP, but without that edge I'm not comfortable betting on anything but that the general trend of the market is up.

(You can still lose when you've got an edge- one of my friends called the tech bubble and shorted the market, but was early by a few months and lost quite a bit of money- but it's the best and most consistent way to win.)

How about this: it doesn't matter.

If we want to build a device that only works if a certain theory is true, we can use it to test the theory. If not, you can do what you want either way, so what does it matter?

There's still similar useful problems. For instance: you can keep getting new data on economics, but there's no way anyone's going to let you do an experiment. In addition, the data you're getting is very bad if you're trying to eliminate bias. It can't be solved in that way, though.

Surely we constantly receive new data from the receding boundary of the observable universe?

Yes, but the effect is so small I didn't think it worth mentioning. Over the course of your natural lifetime, your past light-cone will extend by about 100 years. Since it already envelopes almost 14 billion years, you won't get much new information relative to what you already know. If you have reason to believe that your lifespan will exceed 5 billion years, the situation is very different.

When we really need these techniques is when we have all the evidence that is available at the moment, but it might make more predictions in the more distant future.

Looking back, I implicitly assumed (without justification) that improving our understanding of the universe always has a positive utility, regardless of currently known predictive power. You may disagree if your utility function differs from mine. But you are correct in that a new theory may make predictions that we will only be able to test in the distant future, so thanks for making my post more rigorous :)