that's why grocery stores design their floor layouts so that you can't help but notice the delicious rows of candy bars while you're trapped in the checkout line. no escape!

I could make similar comparisons to when my morally upright conservative parents were genuinely shocked and exasperated at their sex-starved son when he's constantly surrounded by flirtatious nubile catholic school girls in short skirts all day every day.

"Lord Grant me Temperance and Chastity... but not yet! " St. Augustine of Hippo

Why would you need more than plain English to intuitively grasp Monty-Hall-type problems?

Take the original Monty Hall 'Dilemma'. Just imagine there are two candidates, A and B. A and B both choose the same door. After the moderator picked one door A always stays with his first choice, B always changes his choice to the remaining third door. Now imagine you run this experiment 999 times. What will happen? Because A always stays with his initial choice, he will win 333 cars. But where are the remaining 666 cars? Of course B won them!

Or conduct the experiment with 100 doors. Now let’s say the candidate picks door 8. By rule of the game the moderator now has to open 98 of the remaining 99 doors behind which there is no car. Afterwards there is only one door left besides door 8 that the candidate has chosen. Obviously you would change your decision now! The same should be the case with only 3 doors!

There really is no problem here. You don’t need to simulate this. Your chance of picking the car first time is 1/3 but your chance of choosing a door with a goat behind it, at the beginning, is 2/3. Thus on average, 2/3 of times that you are playing this game you’ll pick a goat at first go. That also means that 2/3 of times that you are playing this game, and by definition pick a goat, the moderator will have to pick the only remaining goat. Because given the laws of the game the moderator knows where the car is and is only allowed to open a door with a goat in it. What does that mean? That on average, at first go, you pick a goat 2/3 of the time and hence the moderator is forced to pick the remaining goat 2/3 of the time. That means 2/3 of the time there is no goat left, only the car is left behind the remaining door. Therefore 2/3 of the time the remaining door has the car.

I don't need fancy visuals or even formulas for this. Do you really?

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

I don't think this is empirically true, though. Suppose I believe strongly that violent crime rates are soaring in my country (Canada), largely because I hear people talking about "crime being on the rise" all the time, and because I hear about murders on the news. I did not reason myself into this position, in other words.

Then you show me some statistics, and I change my mind.

In general, I think a supermajority of our starting opinions (priors, essentially) are held for reasons that would not pass muster as 'rational,' even if we were being generous with that word. This is partly because we have to internalize a lot of things in our youth and we can't afford to vet everything our parents/friends/culture say to us. But the epistemic justification for the starting opinions may be terrible, and yet that doesn't mean we're incapable of having our minds changed.

Did anyone reading this initially get the impression that Less Wrong was cultish when they first discovered it?

What do you mean, "initially" ? I am still getting that impression ! For example, just count the number of times Eliezer (who appears to only have a single name, like Prince or Jesus) is mentioned in the other comments on this post. And he's usually mentioned in the context of, "As Eliezer says...", as though the mere fact that it is Eliezer who says these things was enough.

The obvious counter-argument to the above is, "I like the things Eliezer says because they make sense, not because I worship him personally", but... well... that's what one would expect a cultist to say, no ?

Less Wrongers also seem to have their own vocabulary ("taboo that term or risk becoming mind-killed, which would be un-Bayesian"). We spend a lot of time worrying about doomsday events that most people would consider science-fictional (at best). We also cultivate a vaguely menacing air of superiority, as we talk about uplifting the ignorant masses by spreading our doctrine of rationality. As far as warning signs go, we've got it covered...

I presume Rokia was able to buy a hybrid and some prime real estate after all this.