In a recent thread, SarahC said:

I'd prefer more posts that aim to teach something the author knows a lot about, as opposed to an insight somebody just thought of. Even something less immediately related to rationality -- I'd love, say, posts on science, or how-to posts, at the epistemic standard of LessWrong.

... so here's the place to float ideas around: is there an area you know a lot about? A topic you've been considering writing about? Here's the place to mention it!

From a poll on what people want to see more of, the most votes went to:

• Statistics
• Game Theory
• Direct advice for young people
• General cognitive enhancing tools (such as Adderall and N-Back)
• Information Theory
• Economics

Some that got less votes:

• Data visualization
• (Defence against the) Dark Arts
• Moral Philosophy (looks like that's being done already)
• Postmodernism
• Getting along in an irrational world
• Existential risks
• Medicine, Applied Human Biology

... but there are certainly many more things that would be interesting and useful to the community. So what can you teach us?

When:  Saturday, April 16st, 2:00 PM Saturday, April 30th, 2PM.

Where: Au Pt'it Chat, a little Café near Châtelet, which is here. I'll be there with a LessWrong sign.

If you've spent any time with foreigners learning your language, you may have been in conversations like this:

Mei: I'm a bit confused ... what's the difference between "even though" and "although"?

Albert: Um, I think they're mostly equivalent, but "even though" is a bit more emphatic.

Barry: Are you sure ? I remember something about one being for positives, and the other for negatives. For example, let's see, these sentences sound a bit weird:"He refused to give me the slightest clue, although I begged on my knees", and "Although his car broke down on the first mile, he still won the rally".

People can't automatically state the rules underlying language, even though they follow them perfectly in their daily speech. I've been made especially aware of this when teaching French to Chinese students, where I had to frequently revise my explanation, or just say "sorry, I don't know what the rule is for this case, you'll just have to memorize it". You learn separately how to speak the language and how to apply the rules.

Morality is similar: we feel what's wrong and what's right, but may not be able to formulate the underlying rules. And when we do, we're likely to get it wrong the first time. For example you might say:

It has been suggested that animals have less subjective experience than people. For example, it would be possible to have an animal that counts as half a human for the purposes of morality.

But unlike grammar, people don't always agree on right and wrong : if Alfred unintentionally harms Barry, Barry is more likely to think that what Alfred did was morally wrong, even if both started off with similar moral intuitions. So if you come up with an explanation and insist it's the definition of morality, you can't be "proven wrong" nearly as easily as on grammar. You may even insist your explanation is true, and adjust your behavior accordingly, as some religious fanatics seem to do ("what is moral is what God said" being a quite common rule people come up with to explain morality).

So: beware of your own explanations. Morality is a complex topic, you're even more likely to shoot yourself in the foot than with grammar, and even less likely to realize that you're wrong.

(edit) Related posts by Eliezer: Fake Justification, Fake Selfishness, Fake Morality.

Are there any community activities or rituals or experiments we could try?

Preferably things that don't require special software.

As an example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of, Reddit has special "I Am A" posts (no, I don't think we should have those), or things we already have, like Quotes or Open Threads or Diplomacy games.

(This is a complement to the previous post about which topics we would like to learn about here.)

Are there any areas of study that you feel are underrepresented here, and would be interesting and useful to lesswrongers?

I feel some topics are getting old (Omega, drama about moderation policy, a newcomer telling us our lack of admiration for his ideas is proof of groupthink, Friendly AI, Cryonics, Epistemic vs. Instrumental Rationality, lamenting how we're a bunch of self-centered nerds, etc. ...), and with a bit of luck, we might have some lurkers that are knowledgeable about interesting areas, and didn't think they could contribute.

Please stick to one topic per comment, so that highly-upvoted topics stand out more clearly.

Omega kidnapps you and an alien from FarFarAway Prime, and gives you the choice: either the alien dies and you go home with your memory wiped, or you lose an arm, and you both go home with your memories wiped. Nobody gets to remember this. Oh and Omega flipped a coin to see who got to choose. What is your choice?

As usual, Omega is perfectly reliable, isn't hiding anything, and goes away afterwards. You also have no idea what the alien's values are, where it lives, what it would choose, nor what is the purpose of that organ that pulsates green light.

(This is my (incorrect) interpretation of counterfactual mugging, which we were discussing on the #lesswrong channel; Boxo pointed out that it's Prisonner's Dilemma where a random player is forced to cooperate, and isn't that similar to counterfactual mugging.)