The comments baffle me. I think it can be taken for granted that people on this site have an elevated sense of skepticism -- perhaps not enough to repel ALL scams, but certainly enough to recognize a scam when your attention is explicitly drawn to it contemporaneously. Why are we now wasting time with in-depth discussion ABOUT scams and methodology, WITH the scammer in the conversation? And if you believe him not to be a scammer, why are you putting a burden of proof onto him to countersignal "fishy behavior" rather than simply lay out behaviors which will not be tolerated, or setting up an escrow Bitcoin wallet?

"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown."

Ayn Rand

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc.

I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.

Benjamin Franklin

It's also possible that, in concealing the information from your parents, you also managed to conceal it from the TF as well. It would be much, much harder to figure that out experimentally, given how little we know about the mechanisms by which purportedly magical beings interact with information.

But, Senjougahara, can I set a condition too? A condition, or, well, something like a promise. Don't ever pretend you can see something that you can't, or that you can't see something that you can. If our viewpoints are inconsistent, let's talk it over. Promise me.

Bakemonogatari

caveats: they're new; it's hard to do what they're doing; they have to look serious; this is valuable the more it's taken seriously.

They have really wonderful site design/marketing...except that it doesn't give me the impression that they will ever be making the world better for anyone other than their clients. Here's what I'd see as ideal:

• They've either paid the $5k themselves, a drop in the bucket of their funding apparently, and put up one report as both a sample and proof of their intent to publish reports for everyone, or (better) gotten a client who's had a report to agree to allow them to release it.
• This report, above, is linked to from their news section and there's a prominent search field on the news section (ok), or there's a separate reports section (better)
• The news section has RSS (or the reports section has RSS, or both, best)

On a more profiteering viewpoint, they could offer a report for either $5k for a private report, or $3k for a public report, with a promise to charge $50 for the public report until they reach $5k (or $6k, or an internal number that isn't unreasonable) and then release it.

Most people who are seriously sick tend to get into a pretty idealistic mode, is my experience, and would actually be further convinced by putting their $5k both to help themselves and to help others, and while sure, they could release the report themselves, metamed has a central, more trustable platform. If they want me to believe that they're interested in doing that kind of thing, it'd be nice if they had something up there to show me that they hope to.

On preview, I realize that the easy objection is that these are personalized reports, and data confidentiality is important. They obviously will only be able to publish pieces of reports that are not personal, and this is obviously a more costly thing than just tossing a pdf up on a website. Hm.

All of that said, they look like a really exciting company, I really hope they do well (and then take my advice =).

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

--Sam Harris

Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to approach the Way without studying. Still, one cannot say that a man embodies the Way simply because he has studied and speaks well. There are also people who are naturally in harmony with the Way and who have never studied at all.

— Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword

There is a hugely successful webcomic called Homestuck (maybe you've heard of it; it raised over $2 million in one month to make a game out of it) and a significant part of the comic's events are reliant on time travel. The comic itself is dense and insanely complex, so I will do my best to spoil as little as possible, because to my knowledge there are no plot holes, and in the end it all makes sense if you keep reading through to Act 5 and beyond.

The basic idea is that the four main characters are playing an immersive video game called Sburb, and the game takes place within their universe. In Act 4, Dave is shown in a Bad Future where something happened and made the game unwinnable. At some point he had created time-tables that let him go back and forth in the timeline, became the Knight of Time, and eventually decided to go back and Make Things Right. We then learn that Sburb, the game-universe, encourages the use and abuse of stable time loops, but punishes those who try to change fate by killing the errant traveler. This leads to a handful of dead Daves piling up, the equivalent to Dumbledore discovering his own sticky notes, except more gruesome.

The biggest mystery of Act 4 was the fact that the Dave from the Bad Future came from a Doomed timeline, but his interference in the Alpha timeline was critical to winning the game. In fact, his interference caused a grandfather paradox, as he prevented the events that caused him to go back. Normal causality had to be thrown out the window. This caused a hurricane of argument on the MSPA forums over which time travel theory used Occam's Razor the best.

My personal favorite was developed by myself and BlastYoBoots, and we called it Wobble Theory. It worked like a turing machine: Sburb steps through the initial seed of the universe and tries to see if certain conditions are met, chief among them being the WIN or LOSE condition, but there are additional caveats <rot13>fhpu nf erdhvevat gung nyy vagre-frffvba pbairefngvbaf gnxr cynpr, gur cynagvat bs gur Sebt Grzcyr, gur cnffntr bs Wnpx Abve naq gur Pebfolgbc/Srqben, rgp</rot13>. If these conditions were not met, the universe would mark down places where things had gone right (i.e. adhered to the Alpha timeline as decided), constrain those, and see what else it could tweak. The most-often changed variable would be a Time player's decisions, as they were literal butterfly effects who could bring huge changes back to the present after their decisions had propagated into a Doomed future. In this way, the Alpha timeline was like a vigorously shaken wet noodle, grabbed from one end and pinched along its length until it stopped wobbling.

Eventually, the comic explained that Immutable Timeline Theory was the winner. Sburb had literally calculated the entire timeline AND all of its off-shoots in one go; that something happened was "AN IMMUTABLE FACT THAT WE ARE STATING FOR THE RECORD." The various problems with this are explained away with a turtles-all-the-way-down demeanor, and going into those explanations would only spoil more than I want to.

The short version is that Andrew Hussie literally exists in-universe as the author of the comic, and if he says the timeline ought to go this way, it will.

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Rationality challenge: Understand why I posted it here.

Bonsu Rationality Challenge: Reinvent the meaning of "God" I used to ironman the position. Start by ironmaning it yourself.