Hi everyone,

I am planning to write one or more full-length articles for the main page soon, and I thought I'd take an informal poll to see what people would find most useful.

Possible articles include:

• A three-part series on how to calibrate (how to know how much you know), and how to apply your newfound powers of calibration to make successful plans under extreme uncertainty
• A three-part series on the frontiers of reductionism (the theory that all interesting phenomena can be fully explained in terms of ordinary physics), with arguments suggesting that consciousness, free will, and/or narrative truths might be both interesting and irreducible.
• A solo article listing procedural heuristics which suggest that we should be skeptical of claims about cryonics and Friendly AI.
• A solo article examining ways that liberal Jewish memes have personally increased and decreased my rationality, and exploring possible strategies for designing memes or rituals that would achieve the benefits without the costs.
• A four-part series providing a brief overview of the American legal system (contracts, torts, criminal law, administrative law) along with analysis of the extent to which various features of the system are likely to achieve any of the system's apparent goals.
• A solo article proposing various strategies for using board games to achieve social change, and seeking feedback on how to improve these strategies as well as on which strategies are most likely to succeed.

Can anyone recommend a good primer on naturalist metaethics? I've read the Fun Theory Sequence, and found it fascinating, but it only deals with fun. There are also life, death, pain, torture, and possibly other goods & harms to consider. Also, the Fun Theory Sequence tends to focus on macro-metaethics, i.e., what would be best for all of us to do together? I would also like to learn about micro-metaethics, i.e., what should I do with my life, and how should I choose which parts of myself to emphasize, or which parts of myself I will think of as "really me" or "the best part of me?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11esp.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

It's disguised as an article about ESP to fool their editors; scroll down two paragraphs and it goes on for quite a while about what Bayesian statistics are and why Bayesian analysis is important.

(not by Parker Bros., or, for that matter, Waddingtons)

A response to: 3 Levels of Rationality Verification

Related to: Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory

It's a classic who-dun-it…only instead of using an all-or-nothing process of elimination driven by dice rolls and lucky guesses, players must piece together Bayesian clues while strategically dividing their time between gathering evidence, performing experiments, and interrogating their fellow players!

Recently, I've been ratcheting up my probability estimate of some of Less Wrong's core doctrines (shut up and multiply, beliefs require evidence, brains are not a reliable guide as to whether brains are malfunctioning, the Universe has no fail-safe mechanisms) from "Hmm, this is an intriguing idea" to somewhere in the neighborhood of "This is most likely correct."

This leaves me confused and concerned and afraid. There are two things in particular that are bothering me. On the one hand, I feel obligated to try much harder to identify my real goals and then to do what it takes to actually achieve them -- I have much less faith that just being a nice, thoughtful, hard-working person will result in me having a pleasant life, let alone in me fulfilling anything like my full potential to help others and/or produce great art. On the other hand, I feel a deep sense of pessimism -- I have much less faith that even making an intense, rational effort to succeed will make much of a difference. Rationality has stripped me of some of my traditional sources of confidence that everything will work out OK, but it hasn't provided any new ones -- there is no formula that I can recite to myself to say "Well, as long as I do this, then everything will be fine." Most likely, it won't be fine; but it isn't hopeless, either; possibly there's something I can do to help, and if so I really want to find it. This is frustrating.

This isn't to say that I want to back away from rationalism -- it's not as if pretending to be dumb will help. To whatever extent I become more rational and thus more successful, that's better than nothing. The concern is that it may not ever be better enough for me to register a sense of approval or contentedness. Civilization might collapse; I might get hit by a bus; or I might just claw through some of my biases but not others, make poor choices, and fail to accomplish much of anything.

Has anyone else had experience with a similar type of fear? Does anyone have suggestions as to an appropriate response?

I can think of no better way to spend my karma than on encouraging people to read this 19th century self-help book. It's free and online in full.

The guidelines on what makes an appropriate front-page article be damned, or, if necessary, enforced by official censorship.

Thanks to User:sfb for the quote that led me here, although the decision to post is entirely my own.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm

There's a lot of discussion on the site about akrasia (failure of willpower), but most of it focuses on the individual. Obviously, though, organizations also can be said to suffer from akrasia. Even when there is clear agreement among the leaders or members of a business, charity, political party, etc. about what the organization should try to accomplish, it's often the case that the daily tasks performed by the people who work there bear only the loosest of resemblance to the tasks that would be picked by an ideal decision-maker.

There are lots of different issues here -- what should be done, when it should be done, who should do it, how much of a budget in money, office space, website space, etc. a project should receive, when and how to evaluate the success of a project...

I've come across several good books on how to cope with office politics, how to build a financially successful company, and how to motivate people to perform at a high level, but none on how to manage an organization so that it can fulfill its mission most efficiently.

Does anyone know of a standard (or cutting-edge) text (or program!) in this area? Books, articles, videos, and other media are all welcome, even if they're behind a paywall. Sometime in the next 20 years, I hope to revolutionize the efficiency of America's legal system by developing project management software, automatic litigation tools, machine-readable law libraries, consulting, and/or teaching. Basically I think there is no good reason why the current system, which involves otherwise smart people solving the same problems over and over again for different clients for decades on end, should not give way to an entrepreneurial system where problems get solved once or twice and then the solutions get propagated across the society. Since this is an impossible problem, I will have plenty of wheels to invent, and see no need to reinvent any wheels that already exist. So...know any wheels? Even if it seems obvious to you, I might have missed it.

Thank you oodles & kaboodles in advance,

Mass_Driver