This is all good information. One thing missing in the seat belt part. Everybody in the car needs to be buckled down and heavy cargo like your laptop should be stowed in the trunk. There is a great video they showed in my defensive driving class which was an Irish television public service advertisement with four people in a car and three of them were wearing their seat belts and they were in an accident and everybody got killed with the unbuckled passenger flopping around the inside of the passenger compartment like a billiard ball.

Anthropologist John Hawks (quoted in the Discover article) in this video (at the 9:23 mark) shows data on the shrinking human brain over 16000 years. On his display it looks to me like the scatter extrema for today are over twice as large as the decline in the linear regression line. The number of data points from 16000 years ago is not large.

From the article:

Some 30 animals have been domesticated, he notes, and in the process every one of them has lost brain volume—typically a 10 to 15 percent reduction compared with their wild progenitors.

A strong claim if true.

I found this book on google scholar and the parts of it I read supported this claim more than refuted it but were not so definitive and absolute.

Thanks for this valuable research! I read Kevin and Yvain's reports with my multivitamin's label at hand. From Yvain's report:

Because of the high potential for manganese toxicity, and continuining uncertainty over possible cover toxicity of relatively low manganese levels, manganese supplementation is probably a bad idea.

From the label:

Manganese 4mg 200%

Well, that's going straight in the trash and getting replaced with something different. Wtf?

The government security clearance manuals have documented what can be reduced to procedures and rules and whatnot. I know a guy who worked for the CIA a few years ago and he tells me the most trusted positions are the guys who do the security clearance evaluations. He said over half of them were Mormons. (Friend of a friend information is inherently untrustworthy.) One of the greatest spies in American history, James Angleton, was apparently paranoid to the brink of mental illness. It is generally a very difficult problem.

The gold standard of such institutions is The Royal Philosophical Society.

Perhaps some form of The __ Philosophical Society.

What goes in the blank I am drawing a blank on. The California or Silicon Valley P.S. would be fine. The opposite of Royal is Commoner so the Common P. S. might be OK. Or Common Sense P.S. Or Real or Reality P. S. I would not use Bayes as a bunch of physical scientists whose attention you might want to attract are nigh-dogmatic frequentists right now but could presumably be weaned from their dogma.

This is not likely to be implemented easily here. When I looked at the poll it was around 20 for and 20 against having a politics open thread.

What could be done easily is start a subreddit lesswrongpoliticsbeta and if there did happen to be a great discussion on some topic ongoing there then put a pointer to it in the discussion sections here.

This is a series of posts by a fellow who volunteered on a suicide hotline for a number of years which I found informative. It provides the straightest answers I have seen to the question: how do you talk a stranger off the ledge?

This is an aggregation of resources on another website which has discussed the issue in detail.

...throughout the sequences EY frequently presents himself as possessing the intellectual horsepower and insight to transform the world in "impossible" ways...

I cannot think of one example of a claim along those lines.

The closest I can think of right now is the following quote from Eliezer's January 2010 video Q&A:

So if I got hit by a meteor right now, what would happen is that Michael Vassar would take over responsibility for seeing the planet through to safety, and say ‘Yeah I’m personally just going to get this done, not going to rely on anyone else to do it for me, this is my problem, I have to handle it.’ And Marcello Herreshoff would be the one who would be tasked with recognizing another Eliezer Yudkowsky if one showed up and could take over the project, but at present I don’t know of any other person who could do that, or I’d be working with them. There’s not really much of a motive in a project like this one to have the project split into pieces; whoever can do work on it is likely to work on it together.

ETA

Skimming over the CEV document I see some hints that could explain where the idea comes from that Eliezer believes that he has the wisdom to transform the world:

This seems obvious, until you realize that only the Singularity Institute has even tried to address this issue. [...] Once I acknowledged the problem existed, I didn't waste time planning the New World Order.

I wasn't opening up discussion of the book so much as inquiring why you find the fact that you cite interesting.