I have attempted this with my daughter. "Is Father Christmas real?" "Yes!" "How do you know?" "Because [best friend] saw him!" "How do you know [best friend] is right?" "'Cos she is!" At this point I had exhausted a 5yo's philosophical introspection.

I'm pretty sure "driving the largest car you can afford" is a textbook case of everyone defecting in a prisoners' dilemma.

No. Look at crash test data: big cars have more room to crumple, so the dummy is considerably less damaged.

I thought it was reasonably obvious enough from context.

That's specifically the religion exemption, yes.

This is the argument to adopt a religion even though you know it's epistemically irrational.

Your reply sounds like special pleading using the fallacy fallacy. Of course you can induce mental illness in yourself if you try hard enough.

Goodness yes. I favour my rant on the topic in the Procedural Knowledge Gaps post a couple of years ago.

I see you already have people replying that they are special snowflakes who don't need this despite spending their lives attached to a computer. They are wrong.

I would say QWERTY is still a vast improvement over not bothering at all, and setting one's keymap to Dvorak and remembering that the letters on one's keyboard are lies would count as a trivial inconvenience, which is why I didn't mention it. (And I'm still on QWERTY myself.)

Olaf Stapledon is little-known these days, but is a fine example of just how well-written British science fiction could be at the same time as Gernsback was just starting American science fiction. (Hence Aldiss in Billion Year Spree having a bit of a rant about how Gernsback ruined SF for decades, and it took until the New Wave for American SF to rediscover any sense of literary value.) Have you got to Odd John and Last Men In London yet?

The entire Flashman series. I was pointed at it by a Hitchens piece. It's historical adventure fiction potboilers about the British Army in the Victorian age; pretty lightweight, but the author has gone to some pains to make it as historically accurate as possible. I'm moving house at present and it's a nice diversion between packing boxes, and an easy way to learn a bit of history.

In my last bout of studentdom, when I found myself being a student politician at a bottom-end university, one of the others pretty much did this, camping out in the SRC offices for a month. We were seriously tempted to a blanket party for him. Don't be that guy.