A tulpa is an "imaginary friend" (a vivid hallucination of an external consciousness) created through intense prolonged visualization/practice (about an hour a day for two months). People who claim to have created tulpas say that the hallucination looks and sounds realistic. Some claim that the tulpa can remember things they've consciously forgotten or is better than them at mental math.

Here's an FAQ, a list of guides and a subreddit.

Not sure whether this is actually possible (I'd guess it would be basically impossible for the 3% of people who are incapable of mental imagery, for instance); many people on the subreddit are unreliable, such as occult enthusiasts (who believe in magick and think that tulpas are more than just hallucinations) and 13-year-old boys.

If this is real, there's probably some way of using this to develop skills faster or become more productive.

This is untrue as a general rule, though it can be closer or farther from the truth depending on market conditions.

To see why, imagine that every month you buy a supply of fizzlesprots from Acme Corp. Today is the first of February, so you eagerly rush off to buy your monthly fix. But wait! The government has just imposed a tax on all fizzlesprot purchases. Curses! Now you'll have to pay even more, because Acme Corp will just pass the whole tax on to you.

Now change "fizzlesprot" to "labor" and "Acme Corp" to "employee". Huh? You're an employer, not an employee? My world is turned upside down! Could it be that the narrative where You bear the full brunt of every tax and They end up paying nothing is wrong?

In fact, whenever an economic transaction is taxed, the buyers and the sellers split the tax based on who is more eager to buy or sell. Labor is no different. It's possible that, empirically, the employee usually pays more of a labor tax than the employer, but this is by no means guaranteed and I would personally expect the proportion to vary significantly between labor market segments.

(Wikipedia's article on tax incidence claims that employees pay almost all of payroll taxes, but cites a single paper that claims a 70% labor / 30% owner split for corporate income tax burden in the US, and I have no idea how or whether that translates to payroll tax burden or whether the paper's conclusions are generally accepted.)

For more details, consult your nearest introductory economics textbook.

I need to quibble with the "compulsory retirement savings" point. Realistically, any amount that the government forces the employer to contribute as a condition to hire you is money that would have otherwise been given to you as wages. There is no way to increase someone's value by fiat, so it's misleading to suggest that you somehow gain from the tax (apart from the social value of the retirement scheme). Also, the US SS withholding is 12.4% of income, as half of it is paid by the employer before the employee sees the funds but, as discussed, both halves are really paid by employees through lower wages (7.65% (x2) would include Medicare taxes, which I don't think you should include without including all of Australia's other taxes that contribute to their Medicare, like GST and tariffs).

I was unfamiliar with the case. After checking out both links for quite some time, but prior to reading the comments, I estimated:

1. 80% (Knox)
2. 60% (Sollecito)
3. 95% (Guede)
4. 90% (confidence in coincidence)

After reading the comments, I was a little surprised that the consensus seems to be decidedly against Knox's guilt. The simplest explanation is that I'm just not a very good rationalist, but I don't find that very satisfying. The four parts of the story that I felt were inconsistent with Knox being innocent were:

1. Knox's initial account of the night. I tend to believe confessions; it's a weakness of mine. With the exception of the wrong black man being implicated, I think the major thrust of it was true. Complete innocence would mean that the entire account was made up, which seems hard to believe, even if under heavy police questioning.
2. The bra was removed after Kercher's death. Would Guede have done that? I think that evidence is much more consistent with someone cleaning up after the fact.
3. The body was covered. This is inconsistent with the actions of a rapist/murderer, but very much what you would expect of someone who had a close relationship with the deceased.
4. Knox did not flush the toilet. She says that she noticed that the toilet contained a deposit, yet she walked away without flushing. Why?

I'm not sure what role Knox had in Kurcher's murder, but I feel very confident that she (and likely, but not necessarily, Sollecito) knew about the murder long before the police were called, and moved to cover it up. I can't see that as anything other than a sign of guilt, unless my understanding of the evidence itself is wrong (which is certainly possible). I can understand if some feel the need for the motive to make sense to find in favor of guilt, but according to Knox's initial account, she was stoned at the time -- which lowers my personal threshold for the expectation of rational action.

I'm looking for a particular fallacy or bias that I can't find on any list.

Specifically, this is when people say "one more can't hurt;" like a person throwing an extra piece of garbage on an already littered sidewalk, a gambler who has lost nearly everything deciding to bet away the rest, a person in bad health continuing the behavior that caused the problem, etc. I can think of dozens of examples, but I can't find a name. I would expect it to be called the "Lost Cause Fallacy" or the "Fallacy of Futility" or something, but neither seems to be recognized anywhere. Does this have a standard name that I don't know, or is it so obvious that no one ever bothered to name it?

Okay, now for my attempt to actually answer the prompt:

Your supposed "taste" for alcoholic beverages is a lie.

Summary: I've never enjoyed the actual process of drinking alcohol in the way that I e.g. enjoy ice cream. (The effects on my mind are a different story, of course.)

So for a long time I thought that, hey, I just have weird taste buds. Other people really like beer/wine/etc., I don't. No biggie.

But then as time went by I saw all the data about how wine-tasting "experts" can't even agree on which is the best, the moment you start using scientific controls. And then I started asking people about the particulars of why they like alcohol. It turns out that when it comes any implications of "I like alcohol", I have the exact same characterstics as those who claim to like alcohol.

For example, there are people who insist that, yes, I must like alcohol, because, well, what about Drink X which has low alcohol content and is heavily loaded with flavoring I'd like anyway? And wine experts would tell me that, on taste alone, ice cream wins. And defenses of drinking one's favorite beverage always morph into "well, it helps to relax..."

So, I came to the conclusion that people have the very same taste for alcohol that I do, it's just that they need to cook up a rationlizations for getting high. Still trying to find counterevidence...

Your turn: convince me that you really, really like the taste of [alcoholic beverage that happens to also signal your social status].

Am I the only one that has always assumed that story was a joke epically misunderstood? If the monk had instead asked, "What is the nature of a dog's path to enlightenment?" I think Joshu would have answered "Rough."

What would remain of you if you could download your mind into a computer?

That depends on the resolution of the simulation. Wouldn't you agree?

Once you subtract the biological from the human, I imagine what remains to be pure person.

I think you're using the word "biological" to denote some kind of unnatural category.

I don't have any disagreement with Eliezer's description of how our biology molded our growth, but I see no reason why we should hold on to that biology forever.

The reasons you see for why any of us "should" do anything almost certainly have biologically engineered goals behind them in some way or another. What of self-preservation?

I'm curious as to what sorts of goals you think a "solely rational" creature possesses. Do you have a particular point of disagreement with Eliezer's take on the biological heritage of our values?

What I think you're driving at is that you want it to value the Beatles in some way. Having some sort of useful crossover between our values and its is the entire project of FAI.