Thanks a lot for putting such an event together! I'll come. Email sent.

Typos etc.:

(b) generate or redZne teaching approaches and strategies that more effectively foster student learning in specidZc contexts

You probably copied this quote out of a LaTeX document, and as a result, the stupid "fi" was copied incorrectly.

Also: In the paragraph beginning with "Expectancy of success is", did you want to put the part explaining the asterisk in a new line?

Thank you for writing this summary! You must have put a lot of effort into this.

I'm not a teacher, so I don't know whether I'll every use any of this, though. That said, I have younger siblings - maybe some of these ideas can help me explain stuff to them better.

It covers important points that HLW addresses only indirectly or that it inexplicably leaves out entirely (spaced repetition, testing, and generation effects, for example).

Argh!

Christianity was pacifist at the start, as it arose in a conquered people. When the Romans adopted it, it didn't make them any more militaristic than they already were.

But conversely, Christianity became a lot more militaristic when it became the state religion. Listen e.g. to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast Thor's Angels (free as of 01/2014; 4h long).

I have a theory that "radical Islam" is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam.

-> What about e.g. the fatwa over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, or blasphemy laws, or whatever? This theory doesn't seem consistent with already known facts.

My theory is that the women in this case are committing a Typical Psyche Fallacy. The women I ask about this are not even remotely close to being a representative sample of all women. They're the kind of women whom a shy and somewhat geeky guy knows and talks about psychology with. Likewise, the type of women who publish strong opinions about this on the Internet aren't close to a representative sample. They're well-educated women who have strong opinions about gender issues and post about them on blogs.

What statistical evidence do you have for this claim? It seems to me that this is a True Scotsman fallacy: either women behave the way the men in question ascribe to them, or they are "educated and opinionated" and thus don't count.

There are valid reasons why the discussion between "jerks" and "nice guys" turns the way it usually does. For example, both camps tend to see womens as goals to be conquered, like, I don't know, video game NPCs who respond to certain key phrases - as opposed to complex people like themselves. These so called "nice guys", as opposed to genuinely nice guys, think that if they treat a woman nicely, she's somehow obligated to fall in love with him. Reality, alas, does not work that way.

Feedback: This essay includes a few suggestions which might be valuable to pursue or do, but I downvoted the essay mainly for pulling numbers out of nowhere throughout the post.

Saying <activity X> boosts your productivity or life experience or awesomeness by factor Y is something I expect from self-help books (for a horrible example thereof, see the book Eat That Frog), not from Less Wrong.

Thanks for taking the time to conduct and then analyze this survey!

What surprised me:

• Average IQ seemed insane to me. Thanks for dealing extensively with that objection.
• Time online per week seems plausible from personal experience, but I didn't expect the average to be so high.
• The overconfidence data hurts, but as someone pointed out in the comments, it's hard to ask a question which isn't misunderstood.

What disappointed me:

• Even I was disappointed by the correlations between P(significant man-made global warming) vs. e.g. taxation/feminism/etc. Most other correlations were between values, but this one was between one's values and an empirical question. Truly Blue/Green. On the topic of politics in general, see below.
• People, use spaced repetition! It's been studied academically and been shown to work brilliantly; it's really easy to incorporate in your daily life in comparison to most other LW material etc... Well, I'm comparatively disappointed with these numbers, though I assume they are still far higher than in most other communities.

And a comment at the end:

"We are doing terribly at avoiding Blue/Green politics, people."

Given that LW explicitly tries to exclude politics from discussion (and for reasons I find compelling), what makes you expect differently?

Incorporating LW debiasing techniques into daily life will necessarily be significantly harder than just reading the Sequences, and even those have only been read by a relatively small proportion of posters...

Needs to start with a list of the top 5 things you spent money on that were completely awesome and that your younger self didn't know about. The Concrete-Abstract writing pattern says to give the example first, then the generalization; currently you're missing the example part.

Book summaries are always appreciated, but I don't understand your high praise of the book. I was disappointed with it for several reasons:

• I wanted a book on how to change habits. In fact, my edition has the subtitle "Why we do what we do and how to change". I didn't really get much of that. There's abstract theory and even seemingly concrete advice, but I never got said advice to work.

• I hated the book's structure, which required grinding through filler stories to get at interspersed facts. Most of these stories have hardly anything to do with habits.

• To fit these stories into the book, the author uses terrible, strained metaphors like 'social habits' or 'organizational habits' over and over. The latter should have been left out. So I consider a huge chunk of the book to be useless.

• Without all the waffling, the author could have made his points in half the space. Tangents lead to tangents-within-tangents. Low information density. Not zero, but low.

Out of the high-impact people you can think of, how many got there while not enjoying what they were doing and weren't that good at it? This should be enough of a clue that your first goal is to find something you both enjoy and have significant aptitude for. Of course, the best people often create their own careers (was there a meta-charity category before Give Well?).