If you could magically stop all human-on-human violence, or stop senescence (aging) for all humans, which would it be?

Hello, trolley problem :-)

Does anyone understand how the mutant-cyborg monster image RationalWiki uses represents Less Wrong? I've never understood that.

Arxiv link.

Dear LW,

I've just this morning been offered funding for a research placement in a British University this summer (I'm 17). I have to contact researchers myself, and it generally has to be in a STEM subject area. I am looking very generally for any recommendations of researchers to contact in areas of Maths, Physics and Computer Science. If you know any people who do research that would be of interest to the average LessWronger, especially in the aforementioned fields, I would appreciate it greatly.

However, the prediction markets that we have are currently only available in meatspace, they have very low volume, and the rules are not ideal

The global financial markets are basically prediction markets.

If you have a prediction (a "view") on something important, you can often express that view in financial markets.

tax on bullshit

Not with "play money", it won't.

The question "When did you first hear the term 'effective altruism'?" is tricky because that term was only invented in late 2011, after many of us had heard about effective altruism itself.

Funny: Greater proficiency in the foreign language seems to reduce the effect. (figure 3 in the publication)

Abstract:

Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.

LINK: Someone on math.stackexchange ask if politically incorrect conclusions are more likely to be true by Bayesian Logic. The answer given is pretty solid (and says no).