I disagree. Sure, research shows that memory formation is improved when you relax. If I want to remember a specific fact though, it helps me to mentally search for contextual clues around where I learned the fact.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong though - any research or convincing anecdotes on this?

See this at 41 minutes.

Has there been a description of what specific advanced persuasion techniques Trump has been using?

Yes. Ad nauseum.

Example.

Related WaPo article.

Again I only casually follow it, but from what I've read of his blog, he explains the phenomenon of Trump in terms of people's irrationality and Trump's ability to manipulate them. And then he gives example after example of how Trump does this.

I've casually followed his predictions about Trump. It's so silly.

• Far Away From Election when Trump is the #1 news story every day — Trump will win because he is using advanced persuasion techniques!
• Post Khan Debacle once Trump is getting beaten badly in polls and looks unelectable—Hillary has now started using advanced persuasion techniques! That is why she has come back! (Hedging...)
• Polls Tighten — Trump is back to using advanced persuasion techniques!

Um. No. Sounds like phlogiston to me.

At any rate, Adams is the winner here. I'd never heard of the guy who wrote Dilbert. Now I've probably visited his blog 50 times in the last year and clicked around a bit. I'm sure he's sold plenty of books because of his predictions on the election.

Prediction: After the election, Adams will say this whole "Trump will win" gambit was just a meta advanced persuasion project he'd been running on all of his readers. This fact people believed Trump had special powers was proof that Adams is a Master Persuader. (Unless Trump actually wins...then Adams will say "See! I knew it all along!") Win. Win. For Adams.

Interesting interview. Does Adams ever write about his voice? It's distinctive (a little slower and more resonant than most people, I think) and it may be something he's worked on. Also, I'm wondering whether Putin is a better manipulator than Trump.

Relax when trying to remember something instead of making an effort.

Thank you for posting this. I agree that LW is a potentially valuable site, and I'm very angry that one person has been able to nearly wreck it.

MarsColony_in10years, thank you for working on a venue. I recommend text for easier reference rather than a phone call system, though both text and voice might be a good idea if people want voice for hashing out ideas.

Vaniver, thank you for working on this and posting about it. I didn't know progress was happening at all.

It seems to me that the history of biological systematics/taxonomy is a great source of material for a study on dissolving the question (but I am neither a systematicist nor a historian). Are there any popular intros into the field that don't focus on individual botanists of the past? Serebryakov's "Morphology of plants", printed half a century ago, has a nice section on history, but it is limited in scope (and not quite "popular"). Other books often just list the people and what they did without interconnecting them, which is boring.

Here's my piece in Salon about updating my beliefs about basic income. The goal of the piece was to demonstrate the rationality technique of updating beliefs in the hard mode of politics. Another goal was to promote GiveDirectly, a highly effective charity, and its basic income experiment. Since it had over 1K shares in less than 24 hours and the comment section is surprisingly decent, I'm cautiously optimistic about the outcome.

Would anybody listen to an almost-almost-molested woman? It's not awful or something, and I do not need it, would probably feel down regardless of that thing, but still. Please.

Edit: thank you a lot. I have written to some of people who agreed to listen, and if anything rough happens to anybody here, I could listen, too.