An organization calling itself the Brain Preservation Foundation is offering a cash prize, currently worth about $100,000, to anyone who can demonstrate the successful preservation of the connectome of a large mammalian brain. They also have an impressive web page. Does anyone here know anything else about them? Might they be worth donating to?

(Via David Brin.)

There's probably a better place to ask this question, but I don't know what it is. That being said...

Which will go further if a batter manages to hit it with a baseball bat: a baseball thrown to the batter at 90 miles per hour or one thrown at 60 miles per hour?

I just found a link to a paper written in 2003 by Geoffrey L. Cohen of Yale University.

"Party over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs"

Abstract:

Four studies demonstrated both the power of group influence in persuasion and people’s blindness to it. Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one’s political party. This effect overwhelmed the impact of both the policy’s objective content and participants’ ideological beliefs (Studies 1–3), and it was driven by a shift in the assumed factual qualities of the policy and in its perceived moral connotations (Study 4). Nevertheless, participants denied having been influenced by their political group, although they believed that other individuals, especially their ideological adversaries, would be so influenced. The underappreciated role of social identity in persuasion is discussed.

That's written in journal-ese, so I'll post a translation from the article I found that contained the link:

My favorite study (pdf) in this space was by Yale’s Geoffrey Cohen. He had a control group of liberals and conservatives look at a generous welfare reform proposal and a harsh welfare reform proposal. As expected, liberals preferred the generous plan and conservatives favored the more stringent option. Then he had another group of liberals and conservatives look at the same plans, but this time, the plans were associated with parties.

Both liberals and conservatives followed their parties, even when their parties disagreed with their preferences. So when Democrats were said to favor the stringent welfare reform, for example, liberals went right along. Three scary sentences from the piece: “When reference group information was available, participants gave no weight to objective policy content, and instead assumed the position of their group as their own. This effect was as strong among people who were knowledgeable about welfare as it was among people who were not. Finally, participants persisted in the belief that they had formed their attitude autonomously even in the two group information conditions where they had not.”

Also, the final study conducted had subjects write editorials either in support of or against a single policy proposal. The differences in how people responded in the "no group information" condition and the "my political party supports / opposes" conditions are also illuminating...

(Why? Because it's fun.)

1) Do paperclip maximizers care about paperclip mass, paperclip count, or both? More concretely, if you have a large, finite amount of metal, you can make it into N paperclips or N+1 smaller paperclips. If all that matters is paperclip mass, then it doesn't matter what size the paperclips are, as long as they can still hold paper. If all that matters is paperclip count, then, all else being equal, it seems better to prefer smaller paperclips.

2) It's not hard to understand how to maximize the number of paperclips in space, but how about in time? Once it's made, does it matter how long a paperclip continues to exist? Is it better to have one paperclip that lasts for 10,000 years and is then destroyed, or 10,000 paperclips that are all destroyed after 1 year? Do discount rates apply to paperclip maximization? In other words, is it better to make a paperclip now than it is to make it ten years from now?

3) Some paperclip maximizers claim want to maximize paperclip <i>production</i>. This is not the same as maximizing paperclip count. Given a fixed amount of metal, a paperclip count maximizer would make the maximum number of paperclips possible, and then stop. A paperclip production maximizer that didn't care about paperclip count would find it useful to recycle existing paperclips, melting them down so that new ones could be made. Which approach is better?

4) More generally, are there any conditions under which the paperclip-maximizing thing to do involves destroying existing paperclips? It's easy to imagine scenarios in which destroying some paperclips causes there to be more paperclips in the future. (For example, one could melt down existing paperclips and use the metal to make smaller ones.)

I found this one because I'm on Sam Harris's email list.

Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives by Dean Buonomano

(Amazon.com link)

The preview didn't really give me all that good an impression... it mostly seemed to be stuff I already knew or sort-of knew. It feels easy to read; not dense like a textbook or GEB, but sort of information-light. Anyone else have any impressions?

I saw some discussion posts earlier talking about a LessWrong redesign, and now that things look different, I guess that it's been implemented. I'm always slightly annoyed for a while when a site I use gets redesigned because I have to relearn where everything is, but it eventually wears off once I'm used to the changes.

My initial impressions:

"Hmmm... it seems like the category menus have been replaced by dropdown menus. It's not like I used many of them anyway."

"Okay, I've clicked my name to see my recently posted comments. Now, where's the link to see it in context? Oh, I guess I have to click that icon in the lower right corner. For some reason I was looking for something at the upper right of the comment box."

"Well, that worked. Now how do I click to the parent comment? Oh, wait, it's probably one of those new icons in the lower right corner. I'll just mouseover them to see what they do..."

::realization sets in::

"AAUGH! LESSWRONG IS USING MYSTERY MEAT NAVIGATION!!!"

So, what does everyone else think of the new redesign?

Today's Poll of the Day at gamefaqs.com poses an "interesting" question...

Which poll answer do you think will be the most popular today?

1. The third one
2. The first one
3. The last one
4. The second one
5. The fourth one

I guess it's sort of like the minority game? Anyone want to try to analyze this?

It looks like, this month, I get to be the one to start the quotes thread.

• Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately.  (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments.  If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
• Do not quote yourself.
• Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
• No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

A feature in Scientific American magazine casts some light on the troubled state of modern medicine.

Health Care Myth Busters: Is There a High Degree of Scientific Certainty in Modern Medicine?

Short excerpt:

We could accurately say, "Half of what physicians do is wrong," or "Less than 20 percent of what physicians do has solid research to support it." Although these claims sound absurd, they are solidly supported by research that is largely agreed upon by experts.

Scientific American often gates its online articles after some time has passed, so I don't know how long it will be available.

My grandmother just died.

I need sympathy.