I think this is a bad principle to try to uphold. It means you have to understand the motivations behind all your principles, rather than just knowing that they are good principles. Which may be valuable for a small class of philosophers, but it's wasted effort for the general population.

I'm curious about the opening line: It is a general and primary principle of rationality, that we should not ... enforce upon our fellows a law which there is insufficient justification to enforce.

On my ordinary understanding of the sentence, it seems to imply that acting justly is necessarily part of what Eliezer means by "acting rationally". Is this right?

More explicitly: the implication is that refraining from "enforcing insufficiently justified laws" is a "general and primary" principle of rationality. Perhaps what is meant is some tautology deriving from (Eliezer's) meanings of "fellows", "justification", and "should". Or perhaps it's just a rhetorical flourish?

Manufacturers hold the details of their processes close to the chest, but you can use their sale price for a back-of-the-envelope upper bound. Searching Google for "photovoltaics", the first price I found was $2.38/W (in one of the ads). Assuming the manufacturer only breaks even, and that entire price was spent on energy used for manufacturing the panels and the materials used to make the panels, then at 5 cents/kWh (which according to http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/115.htm is a good price), making the panel couldn't have used more than 47kWh/W. If that much energy was used, and the solar panel operated at rated capacity for 8 hours/day, then it would take 16 years to produce the energy used to make it. By comparison, the warranty on the same panel guarantees at least 80% capacity for 25 years.

However, this is a very loose upper bound, in that I assumed that the entire purchase price was spent on electricity. This is probably off by an order of magnitude, since the cost of solar cells is dominated by labor, R&D, factory equipment, and profit, not by energy use.

the strong horse is universalism/antinomianism.

What does that mean? The whole clause. And I don't understand why you equate universalism with antinomianism.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. -Vonnegut

Seems apropos to recent posts on honesty, as well.

I think writers probably spend more time thinking about tricks for avoiding procrastination than, say, binmen. If you're a binman there isn't much procrastination you can do - you get up in the morning, drive your lorry, pick up the bins and take them back to wherever it is binmen take bins to. If you don't, you get fired. For a writer, the schedule of a days work is much less well-defined and, probably more importantly, the deadlines tend to be much longer. Whether writers spend more time thinking about procrastination than, say, freelance web-designers is a different question.

I certainly spend much more time procrastinating now that I'm trying to write a PhD than I did as an undergraduate when I had exercises to hand in each week - currently my only 'deadline' is to finish in about 3 years, which seems much too far away to worry about. Probably the fact that writing is a profession in which procrastination is an option combines with jimrandomh's point to produce the effect you're talking about.

You know, I just might. The "don't get frustrated" pill seems more in line with my preferences than a "be willing to play hurt" pill. The last time I tried - well, "was pushed into" is more accurate than "tried" - filling out a job application, I got frustrated halfway through and stopped.

Incidentally, I'm a lot better at getting things done when I have someone to do those things with, but there is one big exception. I have a great deal of trouble at working alongside one of my parents. Nothing kills my intrinsic motivation to do something as effectively as one of my parents telling me I need to do it.

Another note: I've generally found that, when I "work hard" at something, I'm usually reasonably successful at it. By simply applying enough effort for a long enough period of time, I can brute force my way through many tasks that are really, really difficult, such as learning to play an extremely difficult song on the piano, beating the notoriously difficult Battletoads on the NES, or even just cramming for an exam by doing several months' worth of suggested problems in the space of a week or two. The difference between what I think of myself capable of doing with enough effort and what I actually achieve contributes to thinking of myself as "lazy." I have a strong preference for avoiding anything that feels like it takes some kind of an effort to do; in other words, something that feels frustrating. (Interestingly, difficult video games often don't trigger this reaction. I like games that show me no mercy, that let me push myself to my limits and make even the little successes feel like an accomplishment.)

The only emotion that I've found that really motivates me to do things I don't normally do is, oddly enough, anger. If I get sufficiently annoyed with a problem, I'll go to absurd, ridiculous lengths to solve or fix the problem. A trivial example of this is the time I got annoyed at the dirt on the floor in my room sticking to my feet, so I went and got the broom to sweep it. A less trivial example concerns one of my courses at college. In that course, I had to "design" digital circuits using Verilog and an automatic hardware generator. I hated doing the work, would only get started reluctantly, and could never focus on it. This one time, however, the Verilog code worked just fine, but the hardware generator gave me a design that kept giving me errors. Instead of getting frustrated, I got angry. How dare this program not work! I ended up spending several hours in the computer lab making a furious, focused effort to understand what was going on and fix it. Which I did.

Late to the party, I thought I'd just throw in the following observations. I have actually participated in speed dating a few times; I found it fascinating and educational.

The speed dating events I attended allowed about 3 minutes per interview (or "date") before proceeding to the next pairing. Each attendee is provided with a notepad, complete with numbers corresponding to the number on a nametag worn by each participant. (Names are also on the nametags, but there are often duplicates so numbers are required to avoid ambiguity). This way you can make notes so that you'll remember something about people you are (maybe) interested in. You are also given a card with a box to check for each number if you would like to see that person again. The notes are for you to take home, the card you submit to the organizers. The notes can be useful when filling out the card, if you want to deliberate a bit on your choices at the end instead of making a snap judgment after each meeting.

One thing I noticed is that, as the man, I did not really have much time to make notes in a non-awkward way. My options were to a) writing down things about the person I had just spoken with before continuing to the next table b) writing down something about the previous date when I arrive at a new table or c) writing in transit between tables. All of these are physically or socially awkward, or both, as well as time-pressured. Meanwhile, the women who remain seated can use the time between one man leaving and another arriving to write notes; even if the next man arrives before she has finished, it is much less awkward than showing up to a new table, introducing yourself, and immediately scribbling notes about someone else.

This is just one subtle but, at least for me, significant asymmetry between the seated and rotating groups. It is overall much less awkward to remain seated, I would suppose, and it is thus probably easier to make considered, discriminating judgements. In my own case I know that I probably checked off a few more numbers than I would otherwise at the end of the evening, simply because it was hard to remember enough of my impressions to make choices. As a man, I expect to be making the initial contact with my matches (and apparently the women generally shared this assumption about roles) so there was little risk of awkwardness in getting matched with someone who on further reflection I didn't really want to see -- I could simply not follow up.