It may be worthwhile to cast a wider net in order to glean more professional opinions and sources of data while reducing any emotional response. Consider spending a useful amount of time exploring mailing lists, forums, and professional bodies. Google indicates there are tons of professional bodies in both the US and overseas that will have members who have dealt with similar experience and questions before. Some have membership requirements which a determined person can get around without too many problems, PM me if you get stuck. You may also consider asking a similar question on the various 'Ask a question' websites, but obviously the responses to a shotgun approach will vary wildly.

In doing so, you may be able to filter for more considered reactions if you phrase it as a hypothetical exam question or another form that encourages people to provide clear reasoning behind their answers. Focusing on the 'undetermined' section may lead to suggestions of non-obvious tests or papers that are obscure enough to have not appeared in initial searches.

Editing this page with useful summaries of more detailed information gleaned may boost its search ranking in the future. If it does, you may want to provide an easy way for someone to contact you without creating a LW account in case of the useful but lazy passerby.

If you have boldness, why not contact the writers of the textbook and ask them?

One suggestion is to consider having more than one email for the purposes of separating emails from people who email you about personal things and people who email you about work things. This may be useful in addition to the suggestion in OP to have a separate email for subscriptions/mailing lists.

This has been useful to me in the past for being able to effectively segment my 'work life' while on holidays or taking a break without missing out on social updates and emails from friends and family members. Aslo, when I am on holidays in non-urban environments I frequently don't have the spare bandwidth to download all my work emails to my desktop client as easily as at home.

I suggest conssidering this methodology to delineate a nice, clean mental 'break' and to avoid the temptations of 'just glancing' at work-related emails that come from having a general email address.

There are things one could criticize about that EY's article. Cconcidentally I did it in this Open Thread before reading your comment (what EY observed may be specific for IT elites but unusual for rich people in general).

However the linked critique is... a boring rant. It doesn't contain much more information than "I disagree".

Buck Kennedy

Brian Kennedy. Note that he's on the "Against" side with Aubrey, as makes sense given the Buck Institute's goal to "extend help towards the problems of the aged."

How would I have any more influence than his actual child does?

Conquan.

Or AskClippy :-)

Meta. Discussion goes here.

I never thought I'd find myself saying this: I don't want to be Bill Gates's kid.

While browsing the Intelligence Squared upcoming debates, I noticed two things that may be of interest to LW readers.

The first is a debate titled "Lifespans are long enough", with Aubrey De Grey and Brian Kennedy of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging arguing against Paul Root Wolpe from the Emory Centre for Ethics and another panelist TBA. The debate is taking place in early February.

The second, and of potentially more interest to the LW community, is taking place on March 9th and is titled "Artificial Intelligence: The risks outweigh the rewards". All 4 speakers for and against the motion are presently unannounced.

I am a long time watcher of Intelligence Squared debates and recommend them highly. I believe others in the LW community have referred to specific debates in the past. The moderator is quite talented and encourages interesting discourse, and is often successful in steering parties away from stringing series of applause lights together.

Both the moderator and founder of the debates have indicated previously that they have been influenced in the questions asked and experts brought on to argue by commentary and suggestions from the public. I have also had a positive response from previous suggestions made to IQ in the past in relation to other debates. I have emailed them already with some suggestions about who I think would provide interesting commentary and perspectives on the debate, and links to some useful 'background briefing' documents that they may wish to add to the resources attached to the debate. I suggest that others choosing to do the same might increase the quality of discourse in a debate that is likely to come up highly in people's Google and YouTube searches into the future.

Generally speaking, the videos from Intelligence Squared are uploaded to their YouTube account fairly soon after the live stream.

I haven't read "Games Trainers Play", but from the online descriptions, it seems to contain icebreakers and fun activities. To avoid possible misunderstanding, "Games People Play" is not like that.

Berne uses the word "game" to mean -- I'll use my own words here -- an insincere human interaction, where people pretend that they try to achieve X as an outcome of the interaction, but they actually want to achieve Y (and they arrange things so that Y actually happens). This insincerity is driven by not fully conscious forces; people may have these kinds of interactions for years without fully realizing what is going on. Sometimes the games are cooperative: both players pretend to want X, both want to achieve the same Y; both can win by playing the game. Sometimes the games are adversarial: one player pretends to want X but works to get Y, the other player either honestly wants X or they want some different Z; one player wins by making the other one lose. Sometimes the games are relatively harmless, sometimes they can ruin lives. The value of the book is describing some frequently played "games", and explaining what the X, Y and Z are for each of them. So next time you find yourself in such situation, you may have a better model of what is really happening.

Now I wonder, which of these "games" may frequently apply to wannabe rationalists...

"Ain’t It Awful" -- instead of optimizing for their goals, people complain about how the world is irrational. The pretended goal is to optimize the world. The real emotional goal is to create a sense of togetherness, and the feeling that we are better than the rest of the world.

"Blemish" -- instead of using the useful resources, people try to find fault at everything. (LessWrong is cultish; Eliezer is not fit; Gleb's articles are only read by stupid people.) The pretended goal is to make sure that things are really good before we start to rely on them. The real emotional goal is to show that everything is faulty, so we can comfortably focus on other people's imperfections instead of thinking about our own.

"Schlemiel" -- sometimes you find them at a LessWrong meetup. They don't have time to even look at the Sequences, but they have their own special theory of consciousness or quantum physics or whatever, which is based on confused thinking and pseudoscientific videos on youtube, and they will spend half of the meetup explaining the theory, while everyone who has read the Sequences is facepalming since the first few sentences. Yet you will let them speak and invite them again, because both sides are dishonest here. The pretended goal is to have a rational debate, and to be willing to hear also the minority opinions. The real emotional goal is (for the speaker) to enjoy ostentatiously breaking the social norms of the group with impunity, and (for the group) to feel superior because of how incredibly tolerant they are even in situations where it is obviously undeserved by the target.