A 2 minute youtube video

I'm not going to explain what it is because that would ruin the video.

Also since explaining the video ruins it, here is a link to rot13

I feel like I am forced to raise my credence level for remote viewing being real to somewhere between 50 and 60 percent.

A general note on this sort of situation without getting into the specifics of this case:

If something very unlikely ,say P, happens and you have something which would explain that, say A. You should increase your confidence in A and as you receive stronger evidence you continue increasing your confidence. However you should not keep increasing your confidence in A until it is almost 1:

Since your test isn't between A and not A but between P and not P. You should simply move probability from not P to P which would increase the probability of things in P, like A, but not change the relative probabilities of things in P.

So the only way the quote could be correct is if you had started out believing that Psi is as good an explanation as all others put together for the things that you have observed. This seems wrong to me since even everyone involved flat out lying seems much more probable than Psi being real.

Also an Abstruse Goose which involves this sort of situation.

So MIRI is interested in making a better list of possible concrete routes to AI taking over the world.

I wouldn't characterize this as something that MIRI wants.

Some ideas which come to mind:

1. An AI could be very capable of predicting the stock market. It could then convince/trick/coerce a person into trading for it, making massive amounts of money, then the AI could have its proxy spend the new money to gain access to what ever the AI wants which is currently available on the market.

2. The AI could could make some program which does something incredibly cool which everyone will want to have. The program should also have the ability to communicate meaningfully with its user (this would probably count as the incredibly cool thing). This could (presumably) be achieved by the AI making copies of itself. After the program has be distributed, and assuming the AI has good social skills, it would have a lot of power via mass-manipulation.

Maybe "God" is well defined in the context of analytic philosophy, but if not you could consider starting by asking what they mean by "God". You could then ask a variation of 1 or 2 (they seem identical?) and how their response would change with other common definitions of "God".

This would hopefully prevent wasting time due to different use of words or misunderstanding their position.

In a similar vein you could ask what would be sufficient evidence for them to believe something. (Maybe this is already specified by the analytic philosopher part?)

Are you going to talk to them one on one or in a group? If it its a group, to me it seems, a likely failure-mode is them discussing the points that they disagree on which are likely to presuppose the the existence of God.

People with borderline personality disorder generally lack "insight," i.e. they are typically unaware that they have BPD; will deny having it; and will get extremely defensive at the suggestion they have it.

One can contrast with, for example, obsessive/compulsive disorder sufferers who usually do have pretty good insight.

So a survey based on self-reporting is not going to be very helpful.

Anyway, I doubt that there are many people on this board with BPD. This is based on my interactions and observations.

Also, this discussion board doesn't seem like it would be very attractive to someone with BPD since it doesn't offer a steady stream of validation. For example, it's common on this board for other posters, even those who agree with you on a lot of stuff, to challenge, question, or downvote your posts. For someone with BPD, that would be pretty difficult to handle.

The main mental issue I sense on this board (possibly disproportionate to the general population) is Asperger's. There also seems to be a good deal of narcissism, though perhaps not to the point where it would qualify as a mental disorder.

LW believes the average probability that cryonics will be successful for someone frozen today is 22.8%

This is a nitpick, but using average (I'm assuming that means arithmetic mean) is misleading since so long as at least a nonnegotiable proportion of people is answering in the double digits every answer below 1% is being treated as essentially the same, thus skewing towards higher probabilities of cryonics working.

Why for fish?

No, but you can just add an edit saying something like "Wrong; see below".

They did link to the source as "(source)" (see the bottom line of their post). But I agree that this should be in the open thread.