An observation: chess is a PvP game.

I'm done, but my ruler isn't good enough that I'm super confident in my digit ratios; I would have preferred one less significant digit (no pun intended, but I'll take it anyway).

Some US states do not have partisan voter registration, so choosing "no party" does not necessarily mean someone would not register by party if that option were available.

I vaguely recall believing when I was young that there were no real bisexuals, just gays in denial about it.

I used to think acne was unrelated to diet (other than perhaps via direct facial contact with grease).

When law enforcement first started being equipped with tasers, I thought this was a good thing, because they would use nonlethal force on occasions where they would previously have used firearms. It turned out that police continued to use lethal force as before, and instead used tasers in situations where they might actually have talked people down in the past.

I believed that the composition of a rational rotation of a sphere and another rational rotation of a sphere will be rational. (By a rational rotation I mean a rotation of a sphere around some axis which in radians is a rational multiple of pi, and thus will end up putting the sphere back where it started if you apply it enough.) Counterexample: Two 30 degree rotations each around a different axis with the two axies perpendicular to each other. I believed this because I was too used to thinking about the two-dimensional case, where it is trivially true.

Until very recently, I was convinced that it was extremely unlikely that any form of adiabatic quantum computing would have any chance at working at providing speedups, either asymptotically or practically. This belief came to a large extent as what was in retrospect an irrational reaction to the junk and bad hype that has been repeatedly coming from D-Wave. I changed my position when Scott Aaronson made this comment (comment number 25).

More mind-killing territory: Until about 3 days ago, I was convinced that claims that mass shootings were increasing in the US were due purely to media scare tactics and general human tendencies to see things as getting worse. This article made me strongly update against that. Since then, I've seen this response and this one which were both deeply unpersuasive as responses go.

Even more potential mindkilling: Having read more of Slatestarcodex, I've become convinced that he's correct that there really is a substantial fraction of what self-identifies as the "social justice" movement, primarily in an online context, that really is toxic, and that the rest of the left and the serious, sane part of the SJers aren't doing enough to call them out on it. On the flipside, "Gamergate" has convinced me that there's still a very real need for a vocal feminist movement, and that latent misogyny is still pretty common. Edit: To specify what this means in an operational sense, that there are a lot of SJers out there who are making personal attacks or calls for censorship against those with whom they disagree.

I was convinced in 2008 that Obama was going to be good for civil liberties. I don't think I need to discuss in any detail why that was wrong or how I got convinced otherwise, since the reasons should be pretty obvious.

I'm happy to specify completely, actually, I just figured a general question would lead to answers that are more useful to the community.

In my case, I'm helping to set up an organization to divert money away from major party U.S. campaign funds and to efficient charities. The idea is that if I donate $100 to the Democratic Party, and you donate $200 to the Republican party (or to their nominees for President, say), the net marginal effect on the election is very similar to if you'd donated $100 and I've donated nothing; $100 from each of us is being canceled out. So we're going to make a site where people can donate to either of two opposing causes, we'll hold it in escrow for a little, and then at a preset time the money that would be canceling out goes to a GiveWell charity instead. So if we get $5000 in donations for the Democrats and $2000 for Republicans, the Democrats get $3000 and the neutral charity gets $4000. From an individual donor's point of view, each dollar you donate will either become a dollar for your side, or take away a dollar from the opposing side.

This obviously steps into a lot of election law, so that's probably the expertise I'll be looking for. We also need to figure out what type of organization(s) we need to be: it seems ideal to incorporate as a 501c(3) just so that people can make tax-deductible donations to us (whether donations made through us that end up going to charity can be tax-deductible is another issue). I think the spirit of the regulations should permit that, but I am not a lawyer and I've heard conflicting opinions on whether the letter of the law does.

And those issues aside, I feel like there could be more legal gotchas that I'm not anticipating to do with Handling Other People's Money.

I wonder why wanting or having something in the "wrong" century allegedly makes you a morally bad person now; but when the thing you want arrives, works and enough people have or use it to make it socially normalized, they accept it as part of their current standard of living and don't go around disapproving of each other for possessing it.

For example, I've noticed a ramping up lately of propaganda against those horrible people called "billionaires." I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards, assuming that we continue to have exponential economic growth. In a few centuries, people with the equivalent purchasing power of today's billionaires would probably consider themselves "middle class." We find this idea in science fiction, for example, where "middle class" people in imaginary future societies own vast estates, have staffs of robots to do their bidding, fly private space ships and so forth. The really wealthy people, by contrast, can buy entire planets as their personal property. A. Bertram Chandler provides an example of this idea in his science fiction novel, To Prime the Pump, though no doubt you can think of other examples. '

I've noticed something similar regarding the public's perception of cryonicists. They call us selfish and narcissistic, for example. (People even wrote this about Kim Suozzi.) We just want a standard of health care that doesn't exist in our century, but we might have the ability to reach it via cryostasis to, say the 24th Century. How does that make us selfish or narcissistic, instead of, say, "visionary"? If the people in the 24th Century have rejuvenation, revival from cryo- and other forms of bio-stasis, radical life extension and so forth, and enough of them take advantage of these technologies to normalize them socially, then they won't go around calling each other selfish and narcissistic for benefiting from what they consider the current standard of medicine.

In other words, people who resent today's billionaires and cryonicists haven't thought deeply on the timing issue. Though that makes sense if they expect to clock out any time now, and they don't think they can do anything about it.

The "with family" option in the "living with" question is ambiguous for those of us with children. I suggest changing it to "with parents or guardians[1]", changing the partner/spouse option to "with partner/spouse (and children if applicable)", and adding an "other" option for less traditional living arrangements.

Questions in the mental health section are inconsistent about whether they're referring to whether you have ever suffered from a condition ("have you ever been diagnosed...") or whether you are currently suffering from it ("...I personally believe I have it"). Some are lifelong conditions, but others like depression are temporary.

Questions on feminism / social justice / human biodiversity don't distinguish between what you think of the concept itself and what you think of the movement around it. (Or is this the point?)

[1] Is this a Britishism? Feel free to change it to the equivalent in US English.

but it has very different global incentives. "Hey, all I need to do is contract typhus and then I can collect money for not working!"

This is a good discussion, but let's not get silly.

Typhoid Mary was a very unusual case in that she was a carrier but didn't have any symptoms. I really don't think there would have been a problem with people intentionally contracting typhus in order to get benefits and forgetting about the dying part.

"fuck it" is an awesome superpower

Not if it causes you to drive while drunk, texting, and not wearing a seat-belt. Then it's a cognitive disability.