I recently found something that may be of concern to some of the readers here.

On her blog, Melody Maxim, former employee of Suspended Animation, provider of "standby services" for Cryonics Institute customers, describes several examples of gross incompetence in providing those services. Specifically, spending large amounts of money on designing and manufacturing novel perfusion equipment when cheaper, more effective devices that could be adapted to serve their purposes already existed, hiring laymen to perform difficult medical procedures who then botched them, and even finding themselves unable to get their equipment loaded onto a plane because it exceeded the weight limit.

An excerpt from one of her posts, "Why I Believe Cryonics Should Be Regulated":

It is no longer possible for me to believe what I witnessed was an isolated bit of corruption, and the picture gets bigger, by the year...

For forty years, cryonics "research" has primarily consisted of laymen attempting to build equipment that already exists, and laymen trying to train other laymen how to perform the tasks of paramedics, perfusionists, and vascular surgeons...much of this time with the benefactors having ample funding to provide the real thing, in regard to both equipment and personnel. Organizations such as Alcor and Suspended Animation, which want to charge $60,000 to $150,000, (not to mention other extra charges, or years worth of membership dues), are not capable of preserving brains and/or bodies in a condition likely to be viable in the future. People associated with these companies, have been known to encourage people, not only to leave hefty life insurance policies with their organizations listed as the beneficiaries, to pay for these amateur surgical procedures, but to leave their estates and irrevocable trusts to cryonics organizations.

...

Again, I have no problem with people receiving their last wishes. If people want to be cryopreserved, I think they should have that right. BUT...companies should not be allowed to deceive people who wish to be cryopreserved. They should not be allowed to publish photos of what looks like medical professionals performing surgery, but in actuality, is a group of laymen playing doctor with a dead body...people whose incompetency will result in their clients being left warm (and decaying), for many hours while they struggle to perform a vascular cannulation, or people whose brains will be underperfused or turned to mush, by laymen who have no idea how to properly and safely operate a perfusion circuit. Cryonics companies should not be allowed to refer to laymen as "Chief Surgeon," "Surgeon," "Perfusionist," when these people hold no medical credentials.

Jerry Pournelle's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" implies that leaders of bureaucratic organizations will seek to maximize the power and influence of the organization at the expense of its stated goals - but is that true in the real world?

Julie Dolan of Macalester College examined surveys of government administrators and found that, surprisingly enough, high-ranking federal bureaucrats tended to prefer less government spending than the general public, even on issues that their own departments are responsible for.

Here is the abstract from her paper, "The budget-minimizing bureaucrat? Empirical evidence from the senior executive service" that was published in the journal Public Administration Review:

In a representative democracy, we assume the populace exerts some control over the actions and outputs of government officials, ensuring they comport with public preferences. However, the growth of the fourth branch of government has created a paradox: Unelected bureaucrats now have the power to affect government decisions (Meier 1993; Rourke 1984; Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). In this article, I rely on two competing theories of bureaucratic behavior-representative-bureaucracy theory and Niskanen's budget-maximization theory-to assess how well the top ranks of the federal government represent the demands of the citizenry. Focusing on federal-spending priorities, I assess whether Senior Executive Service (SES) members mirror the attitudes of the populace or are likely to inflate budgets for their own personal gain. Contrary to the popular portrayal of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat (Niskanen 1971), I find these federal administrators prefer less spending than the public on most broad spending categories, even on issues that fall within their own departments' jurisdictions. As such, it may be time to revise our theories about bureaucratic self-interest and spending priorities. [emphasis added]

I was able to read the paper here for free, but I had to register first.

See also: The Case FOR Bureaucracy

Thanks to David Brin, I've discovered a blogger, Michael Dobson, who has written, among other things, a fourteen-part series on cognitive biases. But that's not what I'm linking to today.

This is what I'm linking to:

You're Not Being Reasonable

I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve been getting myself into more online arguments about politics and religion lately, and I’m not happy with either my own behavior or others. All the cognitive biases are on display, and hardly anyone actually speaks to the other side. Unreasonableness is rampant.

The problem is that what’s reasonable tends to be subjective. Obviously, I’m going to be biased toward thinking people who agree with me are more reasonable than those lunkheads who don’t. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t objective standards for being reasonable.

...

I learned some of the following through observation, and most of it through the contrary experience of doing it wrong. You’ve heard some of the advice elsewhere, but a reminder every once in a while comes in handy.

Yes, much of it is pretty basic stuff, but as he says, a reminder every once in a while comes in handy, and this is as good a summary of the rules for having a reasonable discussion as I've seen anywhere.

And the rest of the blog seems pretty good, too. (Did I mention the fourteen-part series on cognitive biases?)

I'm going to test just how much the people here are committed to paying a Counterfactual Mugger, by playing Omega.

I'm going to roll a die. If it doesn't come up 5 or 6, I'm going to ask Eliezer Yudkowsky to reply to this article with the comment "I am a poopy head." If I roll a 5 or 6, I'm going to donate $20 to SIAI if I predict that Eliezer Yudkowsky will post the above comment.

Because Eliezer has indicated that he would pay up when counterfactually mugged, I do predict that, if I roll a 5 or 6, he'll respond.

::rolls die::

Darn it! It's a 5. Well, I'm a man of my word, so...

::donates::

Um, let's try that again. (At least I've proven my honesty!)

::rolls die::

Okay, this time it's a 1.

So, Eliezer, will you post a comment admitting that you're a poopy head?

This is an excerpt from an article George Orwell wrote in 1946. I will let the text speak for itself.

    Somewhere or other — I think it is in the preface to saint Joan — Bernard Shaw remarks that we are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and as an example of modern credulity he cites the widespread belief that the earth is round. The average man, says Shaw, can advance not a single reason for thinking that the earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth-century mentality.

I recently found an article in the New York Times that talks about a speed dating study that is going to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. Given the usual state of science journalism, the fact that the article includes links that let me find a press release about the upcoming paper and a 20-page PDF file containing the paper itself was very helpful.

According to most studies and in accordance with popular stereotypes, men are normally less selective than women when it comes to evaluating potential romantic partners - in general, it appears that men are more likely to want to date any given woman than women are to want to date any given man. In a typical speed dating experiment, men and women rate potential partners as either a "yes" or a "no" depending on whether or not they want to see that person again. Men almost always rate a larger percentage of women as a "yes" than women do men, and, according to this paper, this is a fairly robust finding that generalizes over many different contexts. The usual explanation of this phenomena is based on evolutionary psychology: a female has a lot more to lose from a bad mate choice than a male does. If there were a biological, genetic basis for this tendency, it should be difficult to come up with an experimental setup in which women are less selective and men are more selective.

However, that's not the case at all. This study demonstrates that a small, seemingly trivial change in the speed dating ritual results in a (partial) reversal of the normal results. You see, in practically every speed dating setup, when it is time to interact with a new partner, men physically leave their seat and move to the table where the next woman is sitting, while the women remain seated and wait for the men to approach them. The authors of this study had the men remain still and had the women change seats, and found that this was all it took to wipe away the usual pattern: when the women were required to physically approach while the men remained still, the women became less selective then the men, reporting greater romantic interest and "yes"ing partners at a higher rate. "Rotaters" also reported greater self-confidence than "sitters", regardless of gender.

I suggest that you go read the paper, or at least the press release, yourself; my summary doesn't really do it justice, and I'm leaving the implications for the evolutionary psychology-based analysis of gender as an exercise for the reader.

EDIT: Having had some more time to look over the study, I think I should point out that it wasn't a complete reversal of the usual gender behavior: female rotators were only moderately less selective than male sitters, while male rotators were significantly less selective than female sitters. (Sitters of both genders were equally selective.)

How well can we, at Less Wrong, tell the difference between truth and fiction? Let's play a little game, which I once saw in a movie. 

In this game, we each say five things about ourselves, four of which are true. We then try to guess which ones are true and which ones are lies. (Go ahead and use Google, if you like.) I'll start.

My five facts:

1) I have another LessWrong commenter's autograph.

2) I once received the first place prize in an (unsanctioned, online) Magic tournament that lasted a total of ten rounds (seven rounds of Swiss pairings, plus three single elimination rounds) but only beat an opponent at Magic during four of them.

3) I've beaten Battletoads, on an actual NES, without using a Game Genie or other cheat device.

4) Not too long ago, I made a $500 donation to Population Services International, using my debit card. Unfortunately, this overdrew my checking account. My parents were not pleased, not only because I overdrew my checking account, but also because they disapproved of my donating such a large amount of money.

5) My favorite Star Wars movie is "Attack of the Clones."

(Note: I used a random number generator to determine which position would contain the lie.)

The best theory of morality I've ever found is the one invented by Alonzo Fyfe, which he chose to call "desire utilitarianism."

This short e-book (warning: pdf), written by a commenter on Alonzo's blog, describes the theory very well. He also wrote a FAQ.

One great advantage of this theory is that what it describes actually exists even if you prefer to use the word "morality" to mean something else.  Even a community of paperclip maximizers may find something in it to be relevant, amazingly enough.