And since around 1980, there has been zero controversy on the subject, mostly because just about everyone is happy with things as they are.

Given the Swedish attitude towards free speech, are you sure that's a case of "just about everyone is happy with things as they are" and not, nobody dares challenge the consensus for fear of the "anti-fascist" thought police?

I'm from California, where it's legal to split lanes. Most places don't allow that.

I could just decide not to, but the ability to skip traffic that way is probably the single largest benefit of having a motorcycle.

Well, the journey of a thousand miles and all that... :-)

In LW it could be a rationalist dojo: "So you think you can rationally discuss what the government should do about late-term abortions? SHOW ME!" :-D

LW is already a step above the usual 'net forums. I haven't seen exhortations to think of the children, no one called anyone a traitor recently, direct personal attacks are strongly discouraged, etc.

Here's one example of a change I've made recently, which I think qualifies as x-rationality. When I need to make a decision that depends on a particular piece of data, I now commit to a decision threshold before I look at the data. (I feel like I took this strategy from a LW article, but I don't remember where now.)

For example, I recently had to decide whether it would be worth the potential savings in time and money to commute by motorcycle instead of by car. I set a threshold for what I considered an appropriate level of risk beforehand, and then looked up the accident statistics. The actual risk turned out to be several times larger than that.

Had I looked at the data first, I would have been tempted to find an excuse to go with my gut anyway, which simply says that motorcycles are cool. (I'm a 23-year-old guy, after all.) A high percentage of motorcyclists experience a serious or even fatal accident, so there's a decent chance that x-rationality saved me from that.

I have spent quite a lot of my life writing specifications for software. If you actually want sensible results, you need to be able to get across what goal you are trying to accomplish and why, then let the programmers figure out the how. Trying to specify the actual result in detail would mean writing the software outright. The only complete and unambigous specification for a program is its source.

This seems similar somehow.

This may be off topic, but I have never been entirely able to accept that politics is the mind-killer. I suspect that two party politics may be killing the mind while multi-party systems are merely mind-numbing.

Where I live, we currently have 8 parties in parliament, let's call them the infra-reds, reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, indigos and violets. Currently, the blues and violets are in charge, but they need support from either the oranges or the greens and indigos in order to actually pass any laws or regulations. Last year, we had the reds, oranges and yellows in charge. (Nobody ever cares about the infra-reds because they are old-school revolutionary communists, but for some reason they usually manage to grab a seat or two.) My point is that with every decision being an obvious compromise and usually with most of the negotiations between the interesting parties out in the public media, politics is a significantly more nuanced exercise.

One of the best example that I have for a rational plan is my attempt to gain weight by adding 800 kcal of maltodextrose to my daily tea consumption. It made so much sense.

On the other hand it didn't work and it took me 2 months to admit that my scale showed still the same weight. The planes didn't land.

However, there is still a risk that our understanding is imperfect, and taking ideas seriously will expose the imperfections.

I think it's pretty certain that our understanding isn't 100% perfect. We can run controlled trials to update our understanding of rationality and as far as I understand CFAR wants to does go that way.

Taking ideas overseriously is another way to see imperfections and gather knowledge. I think that when one tries to gather knowledge about a domain it's useful to use many different approaches to gather knowledge.

The recent events in the Ukraine seem important. Till now I haven't come across a good article that describes the background of the event in detail. Can anyone provide me a good link?

My following queries are addressed to those who have experience using nicotine as a nootropic and/or have learned much about what taking nicotine as a nootropic is like. If you yourself don't match either of these descriptions, but have gained information from those who do, also please feel free to answer my queries. However, references, or citations, backing up the information you provide would be appreciated. If you're aware of another thread, or post, where my concerns, or questions, have previously been addressed, please let me know.

Gwern, appreciated on Less Wrong for the caliber of his analysis, makes the case for experimenting with using nicotine as a nootropic on an occasional basis. For the use of nicotine as a nootropic within the community which is Less Wrong, the most recent date for which I could find data on usage rates was the 2012 Less Wrong survey results:

NICOTINE (OTHER THAN SMOKING): Never used: 916, 77.4% Rarely use: 82, 6.9% 1x/month: 32, 2.7% Every day: 14, 1.2% No answer: 139, 11.7%

I haven't used nootropics other than caffeine in the past, but when I was first reading about the promise they might hold for improving my cognition in various ways I was impressed. What was true in general of my impression of nootropics was also true for my impression of nicotine in particular. Upon reading Gwern's analysis, I was excited. However, based upon the survey results, I was surprised that there weren't more Less Wrong users using nicotine more frequently. This could be because P(Less Wrong user taking any uncommon nootropic), or P(Less Wrong user being aware of the uses of uncommon nootropics) might be lower than I would have expected, so P(Less Wrong user taking nicotine as a nootropic) would consequently be lower than I would expect as well.

I asked one of my friends from the rationality meetup I attend if he would use nicotine as a nootropic, and he told me he probably wouldn't. When I asked him the reason for this, he told me he feared the affects addiction of nicotine might have upon him.

Gwern's conclusion on trying nicotine as a nootropic is as follows:

So what’s the upshot? My reading has convinced me to at least give it a try and it has been useful (see the nicotine section of Nootropics). The negatives universally seem to be long-term negatives, and even if nicotine turns out to be something I haul out only in a crisis or every few weeks, it would still have been worth investigating.

It seems the stigma, perhaps quite justified, around any use of nicotine could be preventing more people from trying nicotine as a nootropic. The fact that the community of Less Wrong seemed less excited about trying nicotine as a nootropic than I used to be is a fact I took as a signal that I was missing something in the risk inherent in trying to take nicotine. That was almost a year ago. Since then, I haven't tried nicotine as a nootropic, or any others, except continued use of caffeine, for that matter.

I want to take another look at nicotine again. With the advent of electronic cigarettes, and their increasing ubiquity, it seems the risk of switching from nicotine patches, or gum, to tobacco products, is lessened. If one were to develop a dependency on nicotine, and then becomes addicted to the use of tobacco products for whatever reason, one could transition back to consuming only nicotine by using electronic cigarettes. So, for the user in question, the health risks associated with the habit could revert back to only those risks posed by the use of nicotine, unmixed with the other harmful ingredients of tobacco products.

Nevertheless, the use of only nicotine itself can pose health risks, which are outlined in the linked review written by Gwern.

So:

• if you have considered using nicotine as nootropic, but ultimately didn't pursue its use, what was the reason(s) why you didn't?

• if you have used nicotine as a nootropic, if you believe you did experience them, what were the dependency affects like? What impact did they have on your life?

• if you have previously used nicotine as a nootropic, but have ceased doing so, what were your reasons for doing so?

• if both you and someone else you know have used nicotine as a nootropic, and the quality of your respective experiences differed substantially, how? Why do you believe this was/is the case?

• for those in the know, are there any questions on this topic I'm not asking, but I should be asking?

Note: edited for formatting.

I would use "Do you prefer to explain everything you want to your partner explicitly, or do you prefer that they infer some of your desires from your implicit suggestions?" as well as "Is it OK to turn down an explicit request by your partner if you're capable of fulfilling it but you don't want to?"

I might also use the reversed versions: "Do you prefer to have everything explained to you explicitly, or do you prefer some things be left for you to infer from context?" and "Is it OK for your partner to turn down your explicit request if they're capable of fulfilling it but don't want to?"