What evidence is there for the assertion (by e.g. Moldbug) that democracy and liberalism has made the world a worse place: by the usual measures of peace and prosperity? Even if I buy the cynical story regarding the nature and origins of the current world order why shouldn't my conclusion be that they're doing a pretty good job?

So, feedback requested on the Dr. Zany thing. Made an otherwise dry post more interesting to read, or pointless and distracting?

Is histocracy compatible with a secret ballot? (And for that matter, is futarchy?)

And as a separate question, would it be a good idea to keep voters' individual reliability scores secret, too? If a voter is known to have an accurate record and her opinion is public before a vote, couldn't she get overweighted, because she'll sway others' votes as well as getting more weight in the vote sum?

Is this page broken for anyone else? When trying to load it, I just get a "Less Wrong broke!" message. I can still see the preview of it here, and I can even hit the 'edit' button from there and successfully update the post, and I can post new comments by replying to comments, but I can't actually load the page that contains this post! Is that happening for anyone else? It's been like this for me for more than an hour now.

I participated in the IB diploma program in 1997, in Texas. My experience was better than KPier's in several ways. I think having a skilled and experienced teacher makes all the difference. Mine wasn't a LessWrong style rationalist, but she had experience with teaching philosophy, so we got past initial naive intuitions on most of the class topics relatively soon, and I witnessed basic changes in attitude toward the nature of language and knowledge in both me and several of my classmates.

In retrospect, I think the best thing that could have been added would have been a discussion up front about how not to be confused about words. Some combo of the material in Disputing Definitions and Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory. After that, something to undermine reliance on introspection and intuition more generally, perhaps in the context of presenting basic cognitive biases.

When I came last week (hadn't checked here a while) and didn't see anybody there, I though the regular meeting was defunct. I'm glad to see it's still going. See y'all this evening!

I will attend most of the weekly Irvine meetups, at least through the end of July.

Zip code correction:

501 West 15th Street, Austin, TX 79701

Should be

501 West 15th Street, Austin, TX 78701

An easily accessible toggle to show/hide all karma.

Drop the little skyline/boat grayscale image (mini-landscape.gif) that appears at the bottom of each top-level post. Original mention. Seems to have no purpose, and doesn't really fit the design theme.