How heritable is reading?

remain firmly on the fence.

But presumably you have a prior probability distribution over the heritability parameter?

I would place 0 value on creating identical non-interacting copies of myself. However, I would place a negative value on creating copies of my loved ones who were suffering because I got blown up by a grenade. If Sly is using the same reasoning, I think he should charge me with attempted murder.

Reading the information on creating a site a bit more it seems they will consider existing users with over 1000 'karma' who support the proposed new site as a factor in accepting proposals. I have over 1000 reputation on StackOverflow (the original site) and would be willing to support a proposal for a RationalityOverflow.

I think discussion of talent is generally lacking from rationality. Some clearly very irrational people are extremely successful. Sometimes it is due to luck, but even then it is usually the case that a large amount of talent was necessary to enter the lottery. With my particular combination of talents, no amount of learning the arts of rationality is going to turn me into a golfer like Tiger Woods or a media mogul like Rupert Murdoch.

The closest Roko's list comes to this sort of thing is microeconomics, which includes comparative advantage. Taking proper advantage of that comes down to having something valuable to trade, asking others for help and negotiation skills, the last two of which Morendil and Johnicholas have already pointed out are not commonly discussed here.

More generally, it's easier to learn to accurately recognize successful performance of a professional skill than to achieve it yourself. At the very least, you can always taste the cookie, or check whether the program works, or read the prose, and judge how good it is. So, the process naturally starts with training a critic, by observing the successful work by others.

A critic, being a creature of human general intelligence, is able to compare more or less successful performance even at the meager levels of skill, to tell with at least some measure of correctness what choices you need to make at your own level.

This allows to guide you on the steady progression from inaptitude to expertise, every step of the way, a kind of reinforcement learning with the critic rewarding or punishing, with ever finer granularity and contextual generality in its critique.

What would be the simplest credible way for someone to demonstrate that they were smarter than you?

I instantly distrusted the assertion (it falls in the general class of "other people are idiots"-theories, which is always more popular among the Internet geek crowd than they should be), and went to the linked article:

The Piagetians used what they called a clinical interview to determine which reasoning schemes a child had mastered. They posed questions of the children and then asked about how they arrived at their answers. As mentioned above, the elementary reasoning schemes (classification, etc) were what were being used.

Because each clinical interview took two or three hours, it was only possible to get data for a small number of children. Some psychologists decided to try to create a simple pencil and paper version which could then be administered to many children and thereby obtain data about broad classes of children.

This already suggests that the data should be noisy. I can think of at least two problems:

1. The test only determines, at best, what methods the individual used to solve this particular problem - and, at worst, determines what methods the individual claims to have used to solve the problem.

2. The accuracy of the test may be greatly reduced by the paper-and-pencil administration thereof. Any confusion which occurs by either the evaluators or takers will obscure the data.

Someone posted a while back that only a third of adults are capable of abstract reasoning. I've had some trouble figuring out exactly it means to go through life without abstract reasoning. The "heavy boots" response is a good example.

Without abstract reasoning, it's not possible to form the kind of theories that would let you connect the behavior of a pen and an astronaut in a gravitational field. I agree that this is an example of lack of ability, not compartmentalization. Of course, scientists are capable of abstract reasoning, so its still possible to accuse them of compartmentalizing even after considering the survey results.

When we talk about the states of a microprocessor, what we care about are the contents of the registers, the cache, and the instructions in the pipeline. I'm not certain about the gigahertz level processors of today, but for the processors of 20 years ago, these states are completely stable in terms of changing the placement of one electron with non-relativistic energy levels.

Those processors operated at tens of megahertz. Are 100 Hz neurons so much more sensitive that the placement of a single electron has any effect on the mind states we care about?