they have to pay them a lot, given that they select people at random and you're not allowed to refuse unless you are ill or something

Why so? Usually when people can't refuse to do a job, they're paid little, not a lot.

The link "Crowley on Religious Experience" doesn't work. Why?

Yeah, you definitely have to beware of WEIRD psychological samples, too.

For example, there's a culture in which people don't experience the Müller-Lyer illusion - which has even been observed in people who have been blind from birth.

You are correct; it is not terribly effective. However, any disproportionate response to a minor, or even an imagined, slight will reduce total unhappiness while discouraging others from hurting me.

That assumes that he is following a different rule from the rule that you are following. Does knowing that he will give you the 0.64 units prevent you from giving him the 0.8 units?

...living on planet earth, giving you 80% of the crap you gave me seems about right.

Consider the consequences if everyone follows your rule. Assume someone gives you one unit of crap, possibly accidentally. You respond with 0.8 units. (It's hard to measure this precisely, but for the sake of argument let's assume that both of you manage to get it exactly right). He, in turn, responds with a further 0.64 units of crap. You respond to this with 0.512 units.

This is, of course, an infinite geometric series. The end result (over an infinite time period) is that you recieve 2 and 7/9 units of crap, while the other person recieves 2 and 2/9 units of crap. He recieves exactly 80% of the amount that you recieved, but you recieved over twice as much as you started out recieving.

If you return x% of the crap you get (for 0<x<100), and everyone else follows the same rule, then the total crap you recieve for every starting unit of crap is:

This is clearly minimized at x=0.

Those video experiments were very poorly produced. That's not the kind of video I have in mind. And video would of course only be there in addition to text.

It's certainly at least worth trying, since among things to learn it may be both unusually instructive and unusually useful. Here's the big list of LW recommendations.

Sure. The book is a sort of resource for learning the programming language Scheme, where the authors will present an illustrative piece of code and discuss different aspects of its behavior in the form of a question-and-answer dialogue with the reader.

In this case, the authors are discussing how to perform numerical comparisons using only a simple set of basic procedures, and they've come up with a method that has a subtle error. The lines above encourage the reader to figure out if and why it's an error.

With computers, it's really easy to just have a half-baked idea, twiddle some bits, and watch things change, but sometimes the surface appearance of a change is not the whole story. Remembering to "think first, then try" helps me maintain the right discipline for really understanding what's going on in complex systems. Thinking first about my mental model of a situation prompts questions like this:

• Does my model explain the whole thing?
• What would I expect to see if my model is accurate? Can I verify that I see those things?
• Does my model make useful predictions about future behavior? Can I test that now, or make sure that when it happens, I gather the data I need to confirm it?

It's harder psychologically (and maybe too late) to ask those questions in retrospect if you try first, and then think, and if you skip asking them, then you'll suffer later.

Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Think about it.

Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Try it out!

Does the order of the two previous answers matter? / Yes. Think first, then try.

• Friedman and Felleisen, The Little Schemer