Not long ago a couple across the aisle from me in a Quiet Car talked all the way from New York City to Boston, after two people had asked them to stop. After each reproach they would lower their voices for a while, but like a grade-school cafeteria after the lunch monitor has yelled for silence, the volume crept inexorably up again. It was soft but incessant, and against the background silence, as maddening as a dripping faucet at 3 a.m. All the way to Boston I debated whether it was bothering me enough to say something. As we approached our destination a professorial-looking man who’d spoken to them twice got up, walked back and stood over them. He turned out to be quite tall. He told them that they’d been extremely inconsiderate, and he’d had a much harder time getting his work done because of them.

“Sir,” the girl said, “I really don’t think we were bothering anyone else.”

“No,” I said, “you were really annoying.”

“Yes,” said the woman behind them.

“See,” the man explained gently, “this is how it works. I’m the one person who says something. But for everyone like me, there’s a whole car full of people who feel the same way.”

-- Tim Kreider, The Quiet Ones

WoT appears to rely on users rating the website, and singularity.org would probably be a website that very few WoT users have rated (since it is a fairly niche website), so each rating has a large influence on the overall rating.

And the one comment is complaining about "Mass mailing of non-thematic Forums" (according to google translate), so that person possibly rated it low because they were annoyed by SI.

Web of Trust, a browser app designed to build a website security rating and trustworthiness oriented community, is warning me that singularity.org has untrustworthy attributes. I don't find it particularly likely that singularity.org is trying something malicious, but whatever the circumstances have been, I would like to know why this has occurred, or at least to point it out. Could be a false positive on WoT's part, or something else (I know almost nothing about web security).

If it is simply a case of WoT failing to be thorough enough in how it weighs ratings and avoiding false positives, then perhaps someone could recommend something else? I like the idea of WoT and would like to either help improve it or find a better service. EDIT: It has more ratings now and WoT no longer warns about it.

Oops, you're right.

Edit: I've gained way too much karma from this exchange when it seems I should've instead lost some for not paying attention.

Hello, Less Wrong.

With no particular or unusual intellect (that I could objectively test aside from an IQ test in elementary school, which scored somewhere around 115-125), as well as low school grades, I found myself as a teenager who took issue with religion. I suppose my journey in becoming rational started when I decided I was an atheist. I was finding various flaws with religion, as well as enjoying material put out by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I consider that as the starting point because it was when I realized that humans are inherently terrible at understanding reality, and that merely not succumbing to wrong beliefs is something the vast majority of people fail at, let alone actually understanding reality to even the vague degree our brains could comprehend. I would describe this point as "when I started thinking", or at least trying to do so.

My interest in being studious grew over time. The next milestone related to politics. I was a very typical bleeding heart liberal throughout my teenage years, having such simplistic convictions as "corporations are bad!" and "pictures of oil-soaked penguins mean we should hold back industry" and "we might as well socialize most industries!". Eventually I began studying economics, which caused me to go from liberal to libertarian. I had so many irrational beliefs about policy and society, it's a bit shameful for me to think back on it. I now frequently speak against Keynesianism, and finally am beginning to understand the subtle but huge negatives of government intervention.

But I'm not sure my journey as a rationalist was even in an uptrend. I was just absorbing material other people put out, and wasn't really able to make good decisions for myself. I was just cynical and suspicious of commonly held views.

I flipped through Less Wrong, came across Eliezer's article "Cynical about cynicism", and then I realized I was...full of it. I thought I was being rational, but now I realize I was being childish and angsty. In fact I wonder if that should be part of the sequences, I know many people who would benefit from it, many of them are either environmentalists or atheists (or both). It was the article that made me realize I have so, so much work to do yet before I can consider myself rational.

Which brings me here, now. I am working my way through the sequences, and occasionally re-reading previous ones to try and learn it as well as I can. I am highly fortunate to be here, I can escape my irrational past, and hopefully have something similar to Yudkowsky's Bayesian enlightenment. I feel as if in many ways I am starting over, and...it feels very, very good.

These documents are interesting, particularly #1 and 2. My opinion has not changed on whether or not one should supplement (except in the case of a specific deficiency caused by some sort of malabsorption). My expectation is that someone eating a diet that includes a variety of vegetables, especially dark leafy greens, and also seafood that is low in mercury, will be healthier than someone who eats none of those but supplements, ceteris paribus, even if the supplement doses were optimal. I'm not convinced both is typically necessary.

I believe supplements are a long ways off yet from being reliable ways to improve one's diet, and to become so I would expect they will require more sophisticated measures like genetic and blood tests. Though you can get tests for deficiencies right now, which you should do to get them corrected, but I would lean towards eating more of a food or foods that are rich in that nutrient except in cases where someone has a compromised ability to absorb something and cannot get enough in food.

As has been previously said, there are a boatload of factors that we know exist and affect this subject but that we aren't yet able to anticipate. Eating the foods I described (and some others) does appear reliable.

An adversarial approach may impress spectators. In Eliezer's example, it impressed at least one. But I think it's more likely to alienate the person you're actually conversing with.

I don't have objective research on this. I'm working from personal experience and social work training. In social work you assume people are pretty irrational and coax them round to seeing what you think are better approaches in a way that doesn't embarrass them.

In social work we'd call it "collaborative empricism" or Socratic questioning. Here's video example of a therapist not shouting "Of course you're not being punished by God!" It's more touchy-feely than an argument, but the elements (taking the outside view, encouraging him to lay out the evidence on the situation) are there.

Interesting. Do we have any good information on the attributes of discussions or debates that are the most likely to educate the other person when they disagree?

Something I've noticed: when someone takes the "conquer the debate" adversarial approach, a typical-minded audience appears more likely to be interested and side with the "winner" than if the person takes a much more reserved and cooperative approach despite having just as supported arguments. Maybe the first works well for typical audiences and the second for above-typical ones?

I hope you've noticed you changed the subject here. In the first paragraph you're trying to persuade the person with whom you are conversing; in the second paragraph you're trying to convince an audience. They might well require entirely different methods.