I like the calibration check idea, and it's a fair point about intensity. The last survey I took that included this kind of question asked about "moderate exercise (eg brisk walking)" and "intense exercise", or some similar wording, which I thought was a reasonable split. These might all be details we don't care about though.

A couple (more) questions I'd find interesting:

• How many times do you exercise per week, on average?

• How many nonfiction books do you read per month, on average?

• How knowledgeable would you consider yourself in the following fields? (on a scale of 0 to 5, where 3 is about "studied it at university" and 5 "I'm a publically recognized expert")

  • Psychology

  • Economics

  • Artificial Intelligence

  • Statistics

A random comment.

This is the first time I've seen "anti-agathics". Based on what I know of biblical Greek, I read this as something that would be like "anti-good". If I had been in charge of making up an anti-aging drug, I would have called it something like anti-presbycs (maybe that wasn't chosen because it looks too much like "presbyterian"? Presbyterian does derive from the world meaning "elder"...).

This isn't a request to change the wording if that's what people who will be taking the survey are familiar with BTW, just something I noticed. Carry on.

Miracle claims are on shaky epistemic grounds. How do you confirm it was a miracle and not someone being mistaken about some phenomenon? Or more likely, that they don't have enough knowledge of the physical or cognitive sciences to know whether some phenomenon is possible or miraculous?

The proper use of humility is to take into account that we are human beings and we make mistakes and we have insufficient information, so we should try to anticipate our mistakes or lack of info and correct for them in advance. Meaning that one should have the prior for "I'm a flawed human being" higher than the prior that something was a miracle. Indeed, one should always take into account alternative explanations.

When I was 16, I wanted to follow in my grandfathers footsteps. I wanted to be a tradesman. I wanted to build things, and fix things, and make things with my own two hands. This was my passion, and I followed it for years. I took all the shop classes at school, and did all I could to absorb the knowledge and skill that came so easily to my granddad. Unfortunately, the handy gene skipped over me, and I became frustrated. But I remained determined to do whatever it took to become a tradesman.

One day, I brought home a sconce from woodshop that looked like a paramecium, and after a heavy sigh, my grandfather told me the truth. He explained that my life would be a lot more satisfying and productive if I got myself a different kind of toolbox. This was almost certainly the best advice I’ve ever received, but at the time, it was crushing. It felt contradictory to everything I knew about persistence, and the importance of “staying the course.” It felt like quitting. But here’s the “dirty truth,” Stephen. “Staying the course” only makes sense if you’re headed in a sensible direction. Because passion and persistence – while most often associated with success – are also essential ingredients of futility.

That’s why I would never advise anyone to “follow their passion” until I understand who they are, what they want, and why they want it. Even then, I’d be cautious. Passion is too important to be without, but too fickle to be guided by. Which is why I’m more inclined to say, “Don’t Follow Your Passion, But Always Bring it With You.”

• Mike Rowe

It's an implicit assumption that you have to make before you can get anywhere, like modus ponens. From there, you can refine your beliefs more.

People are more likely to believe true things, so someone believing something is evidence that it's true. If you find out that they're especially likely to believe this even if it's not true, but not proportionately more likely to believe it if it is, then the fact that they believe it is not as strong evidence. Thus, if it's a given that they believe it, finding out that they'd believe it either way is evidence against it.

It occurs to me that a large part of my rejecting theism (Christianity) had nothing to do with the claims of religion itself, but rather was based on a study of human psychology and cognition. That is, while my study of the historical evidence for Christianity did help assign low probabilities to traditional biblical accounts like Noah's Ark, the Exodus from Egypt, Jesus' resurrection, etc., the nail in the coffin seems to be my observation of the tendency humans possess to believe in some sort of religion, regardless of the particular details.

I've noticed this in the area of conspiracy theorists as well. The biggest reason I tend not to accept traditional conspiracy theories (9/11 was planned by insiders, multiple shooters in Dealey Plaza, etc.) is unrelated to the details of the particular theory. My biggest reason for rejecting conspiracies is my observation that humans are prone to believing them.

I'm wondering how Bayesian probability treats this sort of 'evidence'—evidence that is unrelated to the objective details of the question at hand.

Anyone wanna explain?

In the military, we had sort of ready-made memes for dealing with decision anxiety. In leadership schools it is taught with more seriousness, but in the field (so to say) we would just refer to it as "making a (fucking!) command decision". Since being in the military you have to be prepared for making a decision in a life or death situation, time is critically important. So it was drilled into us to make any decision if we have significant and/or crippling anxiety about the choices to be made. If a bad decision is made, so what? Suck it up and press on (another military turn of phrase). You can correct for it later.

One vivid example was when I was in charge of the military ceremony for a somewhat well publicized funeral. An airman had been killed in Afghanistan (funerals for active duty members pretty much get the full production for a funeral, like what you would see in some epic war movie). We had a plan for where everyone would be during the funeral, where and how we would carry the casket, etc. Of course, like the greatest plans of mice and, well, you know, the hearse pulled up in a place where we completely did not expect it to. This was no time to sit down patiently and redraw our plan, so I had to make a command decision and change things at the last minute to make sure it looked like we knew what we were doing.

A takeaway from this would be to give yourself a time limit for making a decision. People seem to refuse to make a decision if they have too many options; time should be factored in as a sort of 4th dimension of decision options. Paring down possible options should also include trimming the time limit to make the decision. That might make the decision process easier.

But in our timeline, the anthropic evidence is outweighed by much stronger regular-old evidence that Europe did, in fact, successfully colonize the Americas