The point is, when people seriously ponder if we lived in a simulated universe but have nothing but scorn for religions, it is not so much rational as cultural. In a sci-fi geek subculture, simulation is cool, religions not.

I hesitate to mention this, but I believe there was a period where a crankish LWer or two was advocating religious belief on simulator-god grounds. I think it had more to do with intellectual hipsterism than anything.

Your culture point is also discussed in this Slate Star Codex post.

2) Monetary cost and deadweight loss from taxes

Still, probably better than civil war.

I noticed a thing that I do. When I rush; I have a tendency to do clumsier versions of actions I know really well. I have now trained myself to notice moments of rush, and purposefully "slow down to normal speed" on tasks to allow them to happen in the efficient most possible time.

Simple example, searching for a key in a bundle. Where rushing causes fumbling which takes longer, slowing down to "normal speed" makes the finding the right key happen sooner.

Is there a name for this process? Has anyone recorded it before? Is this a suggestion that other rationalists can practically take on to improve their "rushing to do things" process?

Second example; trying to cut food while under pressure. third example; trying to put on a shirt. fourth: (occasionally) typing passwords. 5th: trying to retrieve something from the bottom of a bag, (or otherwise pass an object through a small opening) 6th: running down stairs ... I think you get the idea.

TL;DR. Idea: notice when you "rush"; actively do things at "normal speed" to avoid mistakes because this gets things done faster.

Have you considered a CAPTCHA-like system whereby you must solve some propositonal logic puzzle or calculate conditional probabilities before being allowed to comment?

It seems to me that something like this may help promote constructive discussion by (1) filtering out those of low analytical ability, (2) bumping those with sufficient analytical ability up into system 2 thinking, and (3) priming everyone with a problem in which they are actually seeking an answer rather than merely justifying a previously held belief.

Math is rigorous. Most conceptual analysis is not.

EDIT: Also of note is the fact that mathematics has its own special language that is completely formalized. Philosophers, on the other hand, insist on using natural language to perform conceptual analysis, which has a number of problems.

Perhaps this is already discussed elsewhere and I'm failing at search. I'd be amazed if the below wasn't already pointed out.

On rereading this material it strikes me that this text is effectively inaccessible to large portions of the population. When I binged on these posts several years ago, I was just focused on the content for myself. This time, I had the thought to purchase for some others who would benefit from this material. I realized relatively quickly that the purchase of this book would likely fail to accomplish anything for these people, and may make a future attempt more difficult.

I think many of my specific concerns apply to a large percentage of the population.

• The preface and introductions appear aimed at return readers. The preface is largely a description of 'oops', which means little to a new reader and is likely to trigger a negative halo effect in people who don't yet know what that means. - "I don't know what he's talking about, and he seems to make lots of writing mistakes."
• There isn't a 'hook'. Talking about balls in urns in the intro seems too abstract for people. The rest of the sequences have more accessible examples, which most people would never reach.
• Much of the original rhetoric is still in place. Admittedly that's part of what I liked about the original posts, but I think it limits the audience. As a specific example, a family member is starting high school, likes science, and I think would benefit from this material. However her immediate family is very religious, to the point of 'disowning' a sister when they found out about an abortion ~25 years ago. The existing material uses religion as an example of 'this is bad' frequently enough that my family member would likely be physically isolated from the material and socially isolated from myself. 87% of America (86% global) have some level of belief in religion. The current examples are likely to trigger defensive mechanisms, before they're education about them. (Side-note: 'Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion – by Sam Harris' is a good book, but has this same exact issue.)
• Terminology is not sufficiently explained for people seeing this material with fresh eyes. As an example, ~15% of the way through 'New Improved Lottery' talks about probability distributions. There was no previous mention of this. Words with specific meanings, that are now often used, are unexplained. 'Quantitative' is used and means something to us, but not to most people. The Kindle provided dictionary and Wikipedia definitions are not very useful. This applies to the chapter titles as well, such as 'Bayesian Judo'.
• The level of hyperlinks, while useful for us, is not optimal for someone reading a subject for the first time. A new reader would have to switch topics in many cases to understand the reference.
• References to LessWrong and Overcoming Bias and only make sense to us.

Eliezer and Robb have done a lot to get the material into book state... but it's preaching to the choir.

Specifically what I think would make this more accessible:

• A more immediate hook along the lines of 'Practicing rationality will help you make more winning decisions and be less wrong.' (IE: keep reading because this=good and doable) Eliezer was prolific enough that I think good paragraphs likely already exist; but need connectors.
• Where negative examples are likely to dissuade large numbers of people, find better examples. In general avoid mentions of specific politics or religion in general. It's better to boil the frog.
• Move or remove all early references to Bayes. 'Beliefs that are rational are call Bayesian' means nothing to most people. Later references might as well be technobabble.
• Make sure other terminology is actually explained/understandable before it's used in the middle of an otherwise straightforward chapter. I'd try 1n & 2n-gramming the contents against Google Ngrams to identify terminology we need to make sure is actually explained/understood before casual use.
• Get this closer to a 7th grade reading level. This sets a low bar at potential readers who can understand 'blockbuster' books in English. (This might be accomplished purely with the terminology concern/change above)
• Change all hyperlinks to footnotes.
• Discuss LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, Eliezer, Hanson in the preface as 'these cool places/people where much of this comes from' but limit the references within the content.

Is there any ongoing attempt or desire to do a group edit of this into an 'Accessible Rationality'?

Identity may be continuous, but it is not unchanging. You are not the person you were back then and are not required to be bound by their precommitments. No more than by someone else's precommitments. To be quasi-formal, the vows made back then are only morally binding on the fraction of your current self which are left unchanged from your old self.Or something like that.

1. How do you rank the difficulty of Koans? My intuition does a very good job by now, but caching it out has always resulted in obviously wrong corner cases.

2. "A Koan has the Buddha-nature if and only if all the pieces are ungrounded, except for blue pieces." is unclear to me. I am not sure whether blue pieces must be grounded or may be grounded.

3. Nice job!

Zendo, the game of inductive logic has been discussed many times on Less Wrong. To make things easier for new players, I made a web application that generates Koans of several difficulty levels. You can find it here.

Related: The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology contains a chapter, by Timothy and Lydia McGrew, arguing for the resurrection using Bayesian methods. Here is a LW discussion of the argument.