Let's nip this in the bud: I'm cynical about every ordinal you can build from cynicism.

Hanson's reply may be worth reading.

Can someone explain this post's focus on video games? It seems to me that games in "real life" (from solitaire to football) have exactly the same problem of lacking actual long-term consequences, and anything that might counterbalance this — playing with other people, training to improve, prizes/stakes — applies to video games just as well. If anything, many video games should be expected to be more emotionally involving than real life games simply because they're designed to be. Also, because of the scale and resemblence to real life, it is much easier to take goals within a video game seriously than goals within a game of Settlers of Catan.

I also have the feeling that there are some key differences in the way people involve themselves emotionally. I have read a huge amount of books when I was younger, and while I found them fascinating and captivating, to this day I cannot understand people who find books or movies more emotionally involving than any mediocre video game where you actually do something. Yet these people do exist.

So why this video game bashing? I don't understand it.

By the way, there may be some interruptions to posting sequence reruns over the course of the next week. Unfortunately, I'm going to be traveling and working on an odd schedule that may not let me reliably spend some time daily posting these things. I'll try to get to it as much as possible, but I apologize in advance if I miss a few days.

I tend to use the word fun.

We finish with high confidence in the script's authenticity

If you're already familiar this particular leaked 2009 live-action script, please write down your current best guess as to how likely it is to be authentic.

Unless someone already tried to come up with an explicit probability, this ordering will bias the results. Ask people for their guesses before you tell them what you have already written on the subject.

"Most diseases are caused by tiny little mindless creatures the reproduce and spread quickly and live in sick people's bodies, and quite a few of them can be killed be a certain mold that you can grow on bread."

Hmm, how many "and's" can I put in this one sentence? This reminds me of a competition for extra credit in one of my CS classes to write a C++ program in "as few statements as possible," where I took the obvious algorithm, completely unrolled the loop, and used logical connectives to stick every statement together into one. I skipped class the day the winner was announced, and the teacher later said he changed the rules and let the class vote for a winner, which wasn't me.

I will note that this seems as though it ought to be a problem that we can gather data on. We don't have to theorize if we can look find a good sampling of cases in which a minister said they would resign, and then look at when they actually resigned.

Additionally, this post is mostly about a particular question involving anticipating political change, but the post title sounds like a more abstract issue in probability theory (how we should react if we learn that we will believe something at some later point).

And with this post, we have reached the last post in the 2008 Hanson-Yudkowsky AI Foom Debate. Starting tomorrow, we return to the regularly scheduled sequence reruns, and start moving into the Fun Theory Sequence.

I would advise putting a little bit more effort into formatting. Some of the font jumps are somewhat jarring, and prevent your post from having as much of an impact as you might hope.