Alt-rockers They Might Be Giants explain/advocate empiricism in a record aimed at young children.

[...] before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.

The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.

What Happened to the Hominids who were Smarter than Us?

I'm strongly inclined to defy the data -- true superintelligence should have just dominated our ancestors -- but given the expense of large skull size (primarily in difficult birthing) it also seems profoundly unlikely that a lineage would see expansion like this that wasn't buying them something mentally.

From the UK Telegraph:

A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.

To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.

Be lucky -- it's an easy skill to learn

On reading the article, the takeaway message seems to be that the 'unlucky' systematically fail to take advantage of high-expected-but-low-median value opportunities.

2:45:24 PM Katja Grace: The main thing that puts me off in online dating profiles is lack of ambition to save the world
2:45:35 PM Katja Grace: Or do anything much
2:48:03 PM Michael Blume: *nods*
2:48:07 PM Michael Blume: this is indeed a problem
2:57:55 PM Katja Grace: Maybe there is a dating site for smart ambitious nerds somewhere
2:58:25 PM Katja Grace: Need to set up lw extension perhaps
2:59:02 PM Michael Blume: haha, yes ^^
3:00:40 PM Katja Grace: Plenty of discussion on why few girls, how to get girls, nobody ever says 'oy, girls on lw, want to get together some time?'
3:01:14 PM Michael Blume: somebody really should say that
3:01:34 PM Michael Blume: hell, I'm tempted to just copy that IM into a top-level post and click 'submit'
3:01:48 PM Katja Grace: Haha dare you to

This has been in my drafts folder for ages, but in light of Eliezer's post yesterday, I thought I'd see if I could get some comment on it:

A couple weeks ago, Vladimir Nesov stirred up the biggest hornet's nest I've ever seen on LW by introducing us to the Counterfactual Mugging scenario.

If you didn't read it the first time, please do -- I don't plan to attempt to summarize.  Further, if you don't think you would give Omega the $100 in that situation, I'm afraid this article will mean next to nothing to you.

So, those still reading, you would give Omega the $100.  You would do so because if someone told you about the problem now, you could do the expected utility calculation 0.5*U(-$100)+0.5*U(+$10000)>0.  Ah, but where did the 0.5s come from in your calculation?  Well, Omega told you he flipped a fair coin.  Until he did, there existed a 0.5 probability of either outcome.  Thus, for you, hearing about the problem, there is a 0.5 probability of your encountering the problem as stated, and a 0.5 probability of your encountering the corresponding situation, in which Omega either hands you $10000 or doesn't, based on his prediction.  This is all very fine and rational.  

So, new problem.  Let's leave money out of it, and assume Omega hands you 1000 utilons in one case, and asks for them in the other -- exactly equal utility.  What if there is an urn, and it contains either a red or a blue marble, and Omega looks, maybe gives you the utility if the marble is red, and asks for it if the marble is blue?  What if you have devoted considerable time to determining whether the marble is red or blue, and your subjective probability has fluctuated over the course of you life? What if, unbeknownst to you, a rationalist community has been tracking evidence of the marble's color (including your own probability estimates), and running a prediction market, and Omega now shows you a plot of the prices over the past few years?

In short, what information do you use to calculate the probability you plug into the EU calculation?

I found this letter from the US Food and Drug Administration to General Mills interesting. It appears on the surface that the agency is trying to protect the American public from ungrounded persuasion, yet I can't find anything in the letter claiming that GM has made an unsupported statement.

Does anyone understand this better than I do?