I changed my intended college major from biomedical engineering to neuroscience+compsci.

As a biomedical engineering undergrad, can I ask you what prompted this decision and how the two options compare to each other, in your opinion?

I changed my intended college major from biomedical engineering to neuroscience+compsci.

I give more money to better charities than I probably would have otherwise.

I have a regular exercise habit that I cultivated with ideas I got from LW.

I might never have read Gödel, Escher, Bach if not for LW.

LW recommended Good and Real, the book that convinced me to become vegetarian and then vegan.

I've picked up various other good habits of thought, and a much better understanding of metaethics, but those are the concretely visible ones.

ETA: also, LW convinced me that I should sign up for cryonics, but I haven't yet because I'm still in school and don't have the money, so I don't know if it counts.

Phrasing the moral example this way is likely to cause participants in the discussion to get mind-killed and not conductive to get them to reason freely.

In particular it distracts here from the strawman he's making. Most atheists do think that there something wrong with rape and murder.

(Habryka here. My account still appears to be broken)

I want to outline my thinking a bit, about why I decided to organize all of this with so much reliance on Facebook:

The attendance at these events heavily relies on networking effects and reducing trivial inconveniences. I did consider organizing it on LessWrong, but it's just less integrated into most peoples life as Facebook is. This was the easiest way for people to invite their friends, get notified of new parties, spread information and, most importantly, get interested in the event if you so far haven't been completely hooked on the book.

This is the last obvious big opportunity to get more people to read the book. Sending people to LessWrong, a website they've never been to and often only tangentially heard off, to then send an email to the current organizer, not really knowing who else of their friends will be there, if any, and then add that event manually in their own calendar, just seemed like a path that too many people would not bother to go.

I don't like Facebook. I don't like their stance on privacy, and I don't like the social pressure that drives everyone to sign up for it. But I think the stakes on this are high, and the potential positive impact on the world is large. And I think the number of people who are shied away from this because of its reliance on Facebook is smaller than the number of people who would not otherwise come.

This is the reason why I made all information available outside of Facebook and spent multiple hours copying details from the Facebook events into the spreadsheet. Because I want to make sure that if someone doesn't have Facebook, and wants to attend, that they will be able to. But the need to reduce trivial inconveniences for that category is a lot lower, as I think most would be willing to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to attend these.

I don't think the decision was completely clear, but I did make the decision consciously and tried my best at weighing the benefits and drawbacks. I am interested in anyone's thoughts on this.

Turkish Delight isn't just one thing. I've had mediocre bright-colored (and probably artificially flavored) turkish delight, and delicious fresh transparent turkish delight flavored with rose water. If you care about the subject, you should see if you have access to a middle eastern shop where you can get the good stuff.

Tentative theory: the good stuff isn't packaged, so it has to be fresh. If it wasn't fresh, it would have dried out.

I'll post details to the LW London google group; and I don't know whether individually posting every wrap party to LW is a good idea, but if we collectively decide that's what we're doing, I'll do that as well. But you should be able to see the event without a Facebook account, even if you can't RSVP (and in the specific case of London, you can RSVP - we have a separate google docs survey).

If you do in fact receive infinite utility from going to heaven, and being Christian raises the chance of you going to heaven by any positive amount over your baseline chance, then it is the right move to be Christian instead of baseline.

Where "right" is defined as "maximizing expected utility", then yes. It's just a tautology, "maximizing expected utility maximizes expected utility".

My point is if you actually asked the average person, even if you explained all this to them, they would still not agree that it was the right decision.

There is no law written into the universe that says you have to maximize expected utility. I don't think that' what humans really want. If we choose to follow it, in many situation it will lead to undesirable outcomes. And it's quite possible that those situations are actually common.

It may mean life becomes more complicated than making simple EU calculations, but you can still be perfectly consistent (see further down.)

In general, I think that any problem which includes the word "infinite" is guilty until proven innocent, and it is much better to express it as a limit. (This clears up a huge amount of confusion.)

You could express it as a limit trivially (e.g. a hypothesis that in heaven you will collect 3^^^3 utilons per second for an unending amount of time.)

And the general principle- that as the prize for winning a lottery gets better, the probability of winning the lottery necessary to justify buying a fixed-price ticket goes down, seems like a reasonable principle to me.

Sounds reasonable, but it breaks down in extreme cases, where you end up spending almost all of your probability mass in exchange for a single good future with arbitrarily low probability.

Here's a thought experiment. Omega offers you tickets for 2 extra lifetimes of life, in exchange for a 1% chance of dying when you buy the ticket. You are forced to just keep buying tickets until you finally die.

Maybe you object that you discount extra years of life by some function, so just modify the thought experiments so the reward increase factorially per ticket bought, or something like that.

Fortunately we don't have to deal with these situations much, because we happen to live in a universe where there aren't powerful agents offering us very high utility lotteries. But these situations occur all the time if you deal with hypotheses instead of lotteries. The only reason we don't notice it is because we ignore or refuse to assign probability estimates to very unlikely hypotheses. An AI might not, and so it's very important to consider this issue.

I think money pumps argue against subjectivity. Basically, if you use an inconsistent decision theory, someone else can make money off your inconsistency or you don't actually use that inconsistent decision theory.

My method isn't vulnerable to money pumps, as is an infinite number of arbitrary algorithms of the same class. See my comment here for details.

You don't even need the stuff I wrote about predetermining actions, that just minimizes regret. Even a naive implementation of expected median utility should not be money pumpable.

Assuming a particular method of assigning prior probabilities to statements, yes. But is that the right method of assigning prior probabilities to statements?

The method by which you assign probabilities should be unrelated to the method you assign utilities to outcomes. That is, you can't just say you don't like the outcome EU gives you and so assign it a lower probability, that's a horrible violation of Bayesian principles.

I don't know what the correct method of assigning probabilities, but even if you discount complex hypotheses factorially or something, you still get the same problem.

I certainly think these scenarios have reasonable prior probability. God could exist, we could be in the matrix, etc. I give them so low probability I don't typically think about them, but for this issue that is irrelevant.

Does anyone here wear makeup regularly? I'm considering starting, but I don't know if it's worth it. If it is, what sort of makeup makes sense as "light makeup"? Does that mean eyeshadow? Eyeliner? Something else?

Also:

"Professor McGonagall, Hermione is alive! " Harry Potter raised his voice again. "She's really alive and not an Inferi or anything, and she's still there in the graveyard!"

Isn't the singular "Inferius"?

How would someone donate to GiveWell in an externally verifiable manner? I am permitted to do fundraisers as volunteering projects, and donating or (if online) having customers donate to an EA organization seems like an obvious choice.