Would the latter remain true in America if Americans were to lose their beliefs that organ meat is repulsive?

They have to do some bending to get people to notice its existence in the first place, let alone deem it worthy of trying a first time. The fact that people insist on calling it by its French name, rather than "fat liver", is a testament to the marketing that has to be done to support interest in it.

I don't pretend this is a cure-all, or that we can always end livestock torture by not promoting its tasty products -- that would be endorsing a "just world fallacy". But sometimes we really do make our hard choices a lot harder than they need to be.

How about this solution:

• Stop expending resources to bend people's preferences in the direction of liking foie gras.

And the solution generalizes to lots of stuff beyond foie gras: critic-approved art, for example.

I think it helps establish the overall parent-child metaphor, which is important to the work.

At least we know croynics promoters tend to take their own medicine.

That was an unfortunate, arbitrary call. The whole piece is filled with good lines, and somehow they need to be trimmed out to the minimum necessary to convey the idea. There are some other borderline sections that I might swap out for it, but honestly they probably need to be removed to begin with. (Specifically, the line about the cows and wolves - that can be skipped over to the line about humans. But evolution is a recurring theme for the night as well [An Alien God is also getting abridged. Very seriously abridged] and I'd like to keep that tied in.)

I may be underestimating how long people's attention span is, but I'd prefer to risk overshooting the trimming process. But I'll try reading it with and without and see if it feels too long. If I were to include it, it'd be trimmed something like this:

And if the Khan tortures people to death, for his own amusement? They might call out for help, imagining a God. And if you really wrote the program, God would intervene, of course. But in the what-if question, there isn't any God in the system. The victims will be saved only if the right cells happen to be 0 or 1. And it's not likely that anyone will defy the Khan; if they did, someone would strike them with a sword, and the sword would disrupt their organs and they would die, and that would be the end of that.

So the victims die, screaming, and no one helps them. That is the answer to the what-if question.

This is a bad idea. Attempting to create personal relationships will just accelerate LW's degeneration into a typical internet hugbox. People will start supporting or opposing ideas based on whether they are "e-friends".

Yeah; "Aumann agreement" is (to my knowledge) my own invented term by which I mean "Agreement reached by, among other things, taking into account the Bayesian evidence the other's testimony."

It's always nice to hear that people are deriving utility (other than just the fun of discussion) out of all the stuff we talk about on this site. With that said, I wouldn't emphasize the first benefit you listed too strongly.

Yeah, it's true that surrounding yourself with people who agree with you on stuff is fun - and productive, if you agree correctly. But it's not a specific benefit of rationality - if you happened to believe that decisions should be made by searching your heart for the Holy Spirit's guidance, you would get exactly the same sense of subjective well-being by joining a group that believes the same thing. So to someone who isn't already a member of your rationalist in-group, this isn't going to look particularly appealing.

On the other hand, the second item does seem like something that's specific to a rationalist community. I would be curious to see if anyone could think of more things like that - if enough come up, it could make good reading for people who aren't necessarily enthusiastic about the topics LW covers.