While happy thoughts seem exceedingly unlikely to by themselves cure any sort of case of cancer, certainly persistent unhappiness can lead to many physiological changes which are associated with degenerative disease and cancer risk (stress, trouble sleeping, and so on).

As Lumifer pointed out, it's important to consider what the practical consequences are of their beliefs. If the person you're referring to simply believes that engendering a sustainably happy state of mind will decrease their cancer risk, then I doubt there's anything to worry about. But if you would expect them to refuse a proven surgical technique and instead attempt to cure themselves by hanging out with their friends and watching fun movies, then surely it would be a highly useful service to this individual to point them in a better ideological direction.

Don't introduce them to a catalog of logical fallacies. Understanding a few important logical fallacies can help people who possess a propensity to propagate new conceptions through their web of beliefs, figuring out which beliefs should stay and which should go based on their new theory. But most people don't operate in this way. Updating all the different areas of one's belief structure in accordance to a newly acquired abstract tool doesn't come naturally to most individuals. If you coax a friend down the path toward Less-Wrong-style rationality, then there may come a day where reading 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong would be quite an enlightening experience for them. But that day is probably not today.

I wonder whether your impression that the world of pseudo-science is a rosy one, and rationality is a window into the bleak reality of human life, is the key to the frustration you're communicating here. The only language that your non-rationalist friends will appreciate is the language of concrete results. If you can't employ your ability to think rationally to become noticeably better than them at activities they pursue in a serious way, give them health advice which to them seems to miraculously clear up certain long-standing inconveniences in their life, etc., then you're not giving them any evidence that your way of thinking is better than theirs.

Use your capacity for rational thinking to succeed in concrete endeavors, and then demonstrate to them the results of your competence. One day they may ask to look under the hood--to see the source of your impressive abilities. And then the time will have come to introduce them to the abstract rationality concepts you consider important.

Google will ask you for references before hiring, but will ignore and never read your cover letter.

Thank you for this article.

Many worlds seem not so much an interpretation anymore. They are really there as different non-interacting blobs!

Eh? Desktop is still more than half:

https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm

https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyMobile.htm

https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm

Mobile is a larger platform than desktop 2015. That fact and the knowledge graph seem like very plausible explanations.

The change in utility function isn't removing 10 by hand; it's by removing any utility they gain from acausal trade (whatever it is) while preserving utility gained through direct actions. Thus incentivising them to only focus on direct actions (roughly).

So, first you have the utility functions that pay both agents 10 if they cooperate and 1 if they don’t.

Then you change the utility functions to pay the agents 0 if they cooperate and 1 if they don’t. Naturally they will then stop cooperating.

I don’t get it. If you are the one specifying the utility functions, then obviously you can make them cooperate or defect, right?

This post had more statements of the type “p < 0.01” than I would expect at LW. I recently read “Frequentist Statistics are Frequently Subjective” here.

80,000 Hours (your employer?) has the following as its web page title:

“How to make a difference with your career”

and writes on the front page

“If you want to make the world a better place…”

To me, those are synonyms to “changing the world,” for the purpose of career description.

Done!