I seem to ascribe emotions to a system -- more generally, I ascribe cognitive states, motives, and an internal mental life to a system -- when its behavior is too complicated for me to account for with models that don't include such things.

This isn't quite a fully baked idea yet, but personlike agents are so ubiquitous in human modeling of complex systems that I suspect they're a default of some kind -- and that this doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of deep understanding of a system's behavior. Programmers often talk about software they're working on in agent-like terms -- the component remembers this, knows about that, has such-and-such a purpose in life -- but this doesn't correlate with imperfect understanding of the software; it's just a convenient way of thinking about the problem. Likewise for people -- I'm not a psychologist or a neuroscientist, but I doubt people in those professions think of their fellows' emotions as less real for understanding them better than I do.

(The main alternative for complex systems modeling seems to be thinking of systems as an extension of the self or another agent, which seems to crop up mostly for systems tightly controlled by those agents. Cars are a good example -- I don't say "where is my car parked?", I say "where am I parked?".)

Does your source distinguish between motivations for vegetarianism? It's plausible that the male:female vegetarianism rates are instead motivated by (e.g.) culture-linked diet concerns -- women adopt restricted diets of all types significantly more than men -- and that ethically motivated vegetarianism occurs at similar rates, or that self-justifying ethics tend to evolve after the fact.

You can escape parentheses with a backslash, like so:

[Wiki link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

producing:

Wiki link

(You also need to escape underscores if you want to avoid toggling italics in body text, but it's not an issue in the destination field of links.)

The Vocaloid phenomenon sounds like an instance of this.

One workaround would be to assign high confidence only to beliefs for which you have read n academic papers on the subject. For example, only assign 90% confidence if you've read ten academic papers.

Easy hack:

• Google "papers supporting $controversial_position"
• Read n papers linked in results
• Assign confidence proportional to n
• Enjoy cozy feelings of intellectual superiority

I don't think many people do this as such, but there are less self-aware versions of the same procedure that do happen in practice. For example, if you hang out on any reasonably intellectual partisan blog, links to related papers will probably come your way pretty often. If you read them as they arrive and update as suggested, in fairly short order you'll have read enough to assign high confidence to your preexisting opinions -- yet those opinions will never be seriously challenged, because all the information involved has been implicitly screened for compatibility before it gets anywhere near your head.

Your second criterion helps but I don't think it's sufficient; it's very easy to convince yourself that you understand the strongest opposing arguments as long as you've been exposed to simplified or popularized versions of them, which to a first approximation is true for everyone with opinions on controversial issues.

To be fair, the crystal sphere thing doesn't appear in any Abrahamic holy books (that I know of); it's a feature of Aristotelian cosmology that the Church picked up during the period when it was essentially the only scholarly authority running in what used to be called Christendom and therefore needed an opinion on natural philosophy. I believe the bit in Genesis about erecting a firmament in the primordial water does ultimately refer to a traditional belief along similar lines, but it's pretty ambiguous.

Flat-earth cosmology was known to be false by Aristotle's time, although some monks in the early Middle Ages seem to have missed the memo -- again without explicit Biblical support, though. Science in the Islamic world always used a round-earth model as far as I know, and I don't remember reading anything in the Koran that contradicts that, although it's been several years.

I'm far from convinced that this approach to rationality should be bound to a single tribal identification. True enough, tribal bonding is useful in the right situations, and identifying strongly with, say, your local meetup group seems like it could be instrumentally valuable for many of our contributors, but it seems far sketchier for LW as a whole: we're delving into difficult and controversial territory here, and going full-bore tribal in our organizational tactics seems like a good way to devalue outside views on our stuff that we really need to be considering.

Yeah, that looks to me like an outdoor fitness installation, not a playground. Those aren't too hard to find, though, at least around where I live; most high schools or colleges of any size have one, and I've also seen a few near practice fields or parks popular with runners.

Back in the Seventies there was a fad for public fitness trails with a lot of the same equipment, which might do in a pinch. Those will be a lot more spread out, though, and a lot of them are in pretty bad shape four decades on.

I've experimented with this before, and found that my caffeine-assisted productivity hit its highest levels when I had a cup of coffee every three days or so. More frequently and I built up too much tolerance; less frequently and the stimulant effects were too powerful when I did drink it, giving me distractibility and a tendency to fixate that weren't made up for in alertness and mental agility.

Your body chemistry might vary, of course. Also, that's peak, not sustained, productivity; you're probably better off with a steady intake of caffeine if whatever you have to do will take more than a day or two.

I think it just requires a cultural meme about criticism being a good thing.

That usually gets you a culture of inconsequential criticism, where you can be as loudly contrarian as you want as long as you don't challenge any of the central shibboleths. This is basically what Eliezer was describing in "Real Weak Points", but it shows up in a lot of places; many branches of the modern social sciences work that way, for example. It gets particularly toxic when you mix it up with a cult of personality and the criticism starts being all about how you or others are failing to live up to the Great Founder's sacrosanct ideals.

I'm starting to think it might not be possible to advocate for a coherent culture that's open to changing identity-level facts about itself; you can do it by throwing out self-consistency, but that's a cure that's arguably worse than the proverbial disease. I don't think strength of will is what's missing, though, if anything is.