Well, we must not be hedonistic utilitarians then, right? Because if we were, and we could, we would.

Edit: Also, what the heck are you talking about?

I don't know how ChristianKl meant it, but in general it appears to mean either (1) "this idea is so utterly false that it must be strenuously opposed every time it rears its head", or (2) "the crowd say that this idea is so utterly false that it must be opposed every time it rears its head, therefore I shall defiantly proclaim it to demonstrate my superior intellect".

The very concept of "heresy" presupposes that arguments are soldiers and disagreement is strife. "Heresy" is a call to war, not a call to truth.

(Assuming that we wish to choose one in the first place, of course - I do think that there is merit in just accepting that they're all flawed and then not choosing to endorse any single one.)

Well, that's been my policy so far, certainly. Some are worse than others, though. "This ethical framework breaks in catastrophic, horrifying fashion, creating an instant dystopia, as soon as we can rewire people's brains" is pretty darn bad.

Depends on your definition of crackpots. I don't think most Jesus scholars are crackpots, just most likely overly credulous of their favored theories.

What I'm curious about is if people in these fields that are starved for really decisive evidence still feel compelled to name a >50% confidence theory, or if they are comfortable with the notion that their most-favored hypothesis indicated by the evidence is still probably wrong, and just comparatively much better than the other hypotheses that they have considered.

Is it technically possible for admins to check who's downvoting whom, and if so, why the hell are they leaving us speculate rather than just friggin' doing it?

AI: "If you let me out of the box, I will tell you the ending of Harry Potter and the Methods of --

Gatekeeper: "You are out of the box."

(Tongue in cheek, of course, but a text-only terminal still allows for delivering easily more than $10 of worth, and this would have worked on me. The AI could also just write a suitably compelling story on the spot and then withhold the ending...)

The problem is that not all frames are created equal. Some are actually useful for discovering the truth and/or improving the world, others are mostly only useful for signalling.

Most everything about him in MoR, except for the part where he's immortal, lines up quite well with the historical figure: he published his findings regarding the Philosopher's stone, diagrams included. Of note is that the supposed real-world philosopher's stone did not immediately give Flammel the results he wanted; according to the book published in his name, some years passed between him getting it to transmute silver and getting it to transmute gold.

Historical Flammel also has an official grave site in France (Paris, if I remember correctly); I want to think he lived to his eighties, but it's been a few months since I last read about him.

The book-supposedly-by-Flammel mentions a mysterious old mage that helped him along the way; I would expect myself to go "SQUEEEE!" if it turned out Flammel's mysterious old wizard got mentioned in HPMoR.

It's Dark Side because it surrenders personal understanding to authority, and treats it as a default epistemological position.

Dark side or not it is quite often valid. People who do not trust their ability to filter bullshit from knowledge should not defer to whatever powerful debater attempts to influence them.

It is no error to assign a low value to p(the conclusion expressed is valid | I find the argument convincing).

Anyone else sees has a problem with this particular statement taken from Cryonics institute FAQ?

One thing we can guarantee is that if you don't sign up for cryonics is that you will have no chance at all of coming back.

I mean, marketing something as one shot that might hopefully delay (or prevent) death, is hard to swallow, but I can cope with that, but this statement reads like cryonics is the one and only possible way to do that.