Repeating my question from late in the previous thread:

It seems to me that if you buy a stock, you could come out arbitrarily well-off, but your losses are limited to the amount you put in. But if you short, your payoffs are limited to the current price, and your losses could be arbitrarily big, until you run out of money.

Is this accurate? If so, it feels like an important asymmetry that I haven't absorbed from the "stock markets 101" type things that I've occasionally read. What effects does it have on markets, if any? (Running my mouth off, I'd speculate that it makes people less inclined to bet on a bubble popping, which in turn would prolong bubbles.) Are there symmetrical ways to bet a stock will rise/fall?

Let me be a bit trollish so as to establish an actual counter-position (though I actually believe everything I say):

This is where the sequences first turn dumb.

For low-hanging fruit, we first see modern mythology misinterpreted as actual history. In reality, phlogiston was a useful theory at the time, which was rationally arrived at and rationally discarded when evidence turned against it (With some attempst at "adding epicycles", but no more than other scientific theories) . And the NOMA thing was made up by Gould when he misunderstood actual religious claims, i.e. it is mostly a straw-man.

On a higher level of abstraction, the whole approach of this sequence is discussing other peoples alleged rationalizations. This is almost always a terrible idea. For comparison, other examples would include Marxist talk about false consciousness, Christian allegations that atheists are angry at God or want a license to sin or the Randian portrayal of irrational death-loving leachers. [Aware of meta-irony following:] Arguments of this type almost always serve to feed the ingroup's sense of security, safely portraying the most scary kinds of irrationality as a purely outgroup thing. And that is the most simple sufficient causal explanation of this entire sequence.

Depending on how close and dear someone's belief are to their own identity, a context of warmth and growth could work against going against a wrong belief full-bore. Especially when you notice how essential such a belief is to someone's identity. Like telling a child there's no Santa, to their face.

rather than just looking for weak points in mine

Probably the crux of our disagreement: Looking for weak points in your own and the interlocutor's belief is what you should be doing, with as few distractions as possible. (If correct beliefs were the overriding goal. Which, all protestations to the contrary aside, they mostly aren't.)

However, I totally get that there are often more important things than correcting someone else's wrong beliefs. Such as building shared experiences, creating a sense of community et coetera. Singing Kumbaya ;-).

it would be trivial for finite generating groups... That would mean only finitely many utility levels and then the result is obvious

Z^2 lexically ordered is finitely generated, and can't be embedded in (R,+). [EDIT: I'm now not sure if you meant "finitely generated" or "finite" here. If it's the latter, note that any ordered group must be torsion-free, which obviously excludes finite groups.]

But your implicit point is valid (+1) - I should've spent more time explaining why this result is surprising. Just about every comment on this article is "this is obvious because <some proof which is invalid>", which I guess is an indication LWers are so immersed in utilitarianism that counter-examples don't even come to mind.

Two points:

1. I don't know the Holder theorem, but if it actually depends on the lattice being a group, that includes an extra assumption of the existence of a neutral element and inverse elements. The neutral element would have to be a life of exactly zero value, so that killing that person off wouldn't matter at all, either positively or negatively. The inverse elements would mean that for every happy live you can imagine an exactly opposite unhappy live, so that killing off both leaves the world exactly as good as before.

2. Proving this might be hard for infinite cases, but it would be trivial for finite generating groups. Most Less Wrong utilitarians would believe there are only finitely many brain states (otherwise simulations are impossible!) and utility is a function of brain states. That would mean only finitely many utility levels and then the result is obvious. The mathematically interesting part is that it still works if we go infinite on some things but not on others, but that's not relevant to the general Less Wrong belief system.

(Also, here I'm discussing the details of utilitarian systems arguendo, but I'm sticking with the general claim that all of them are mathematically inconsistent or horrible under Arrow's theorem.)

There are some interesting points in there, especially about the fact that most people make themselves like what seems 'cultured' (I've definitely seen this type of appeal to majority among my friends - I was nearly roasted alive when I mentioned I honestly don't enjoy a particular classical composer).

There are also some fallacies in there too.

Anyway, the part where he talks about trickery is interesting:

What counts as a trick? Roughly, it's something done with contempt for the audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired. Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, "Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to drive off-road. So don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can."

I question this premise. It seems to imply that the purpose behind the art determines its quality, and not the art itself. For instance, if you have two identical paintings, but one was drawn with the intention of making money, and the other was drawn for true artistic merit, the latter one somehow has more value (and is thus of 'better taste') than the former.

At any rate, in the end that paragraph was the closest I got to his definition of 'taste' - the ability to recognize trickery in artistic works.

And especially this paragraph about people with good taste:

Or to put it more prosaically, they're the people who (a) are hard to trick, and (b) don't just like whatever they grew up with.

Finally,

I wrote this essay because I was tired of hearing "taste is subjective" and wanted to kill it once and for all.

While the insights presented are interesting (in providing a window to the author's mind, at least), It has not actually succeeded in this purpose.

I've heard several stories in the last few months of former theists becoming atheists after reading The God Delusion or similar Four-Horsemen tract. This conflicts with my prior model of those books being mostly paper applause lights that couldn't possibly change anyone's mind.

Insofar as atheism seems like super-low-hanging fruit on the tree of increased sanity, having an accurate model for what gets people to take a bite might be useful.

Has anyone done any research on what makes former believers drop religion? More generally, any common triggers that lead people to try to get more sane?

Edit: Found a book: Deconversion: Qualitative and Quantitative Results from Cross-Cultural Research in Germany and the United States of America. It's recent (2011) and seems to be the best research on the subject available right now. Does anyone have access to a copy?

last night [...] because it's pegged to the actual holiday of Twelfth Night

which is in early January. Is that just because arranging parties takes time, or did someone get Twelfth Night mixed up with Candlemas?

[EDITED to add: great idea, though.]