If lack of progress is what causes negative emotions, then it seems to me that another possible reason why startup founders might have mood swings is that they usually build one startup at a time. Therefore, if you are not making any progress, you are not making any progress at all. John Conway advises that mathematicians should work at several problems at once in order to avoid such mood swings:

Work at several problems at a time. If you only work on one problem and get stuck, you might get depressed. It is nice to have an easier back-up problem. The back-up problem will work as an anti-depressant and will allow you to go back to your difficult problem in a better mood. John told me that for him the best approach is to juggle six problems at a time.

Startup founders may not have such luxury, but perhaps at least in some cases it is possible to structure things in a similarly disjunctive way, where you can note the problems in a part A, but avoid despair by noticing that at least you are making progress in part B (of course, if different people are responsible for parts A and B, the problem might remain for each one of them). Averaging might make your progress look closer to linear in a certain sense.

In an ideal (although not very realistic) scenario LW could have a karma denominated prediction market. However, that would require a lot of work to implement.

You can start copy/pasting interesting things to LessWrong discussion even if they are not from Eliezer's Facebook page. For example, LessWrong could have "Best of" threads (similar to Reddit's "Best of" subreddit) where people could post the most interesting threads or comments they have found elsewhere (this is different from "Rationality Quotes" threads).

I remember reading the idea expressed in this quote in an old LW post, older than Haidt's book which was published in 2012, and it is probably older than that.

In any case, I think that this is a very good quote, because it highlights a bias that seems to be more prevalent than perhaps any other cognitive bias discussed here and motivates attempts to find better ways to reason and argue. If LessWrong had an introduction whose intention was to motivate why we need better thinking tools, this idea could be presented very early, maybe even in a second or third paragraph.

Correctness is essential, but another highly desirable property of a mathematical proof is its insightfulness, that is, whether they contain interesting and novel ideas that can later be reused in others' work (often they are regarded as more important than a theorem itself). These others are humans and they desire, let's call it, "human-style" insights. Perhaps if we had AIs that "desired" "computer-style" insights, some people (and AIs) would write their papers to provide them and investigate problems that are most likely to lead to them. Proofs that involve computers are often criticized for being uninsightful.

Proofs that involve steps that require use of computers (as opposed to formal proofs that employ proof assistants) are sometimes also criticized for not being human verifiable, because while both humans make mistakes and computer software can contain bugs, mathematicians sometimes can use their intuition and sanity checks to find the former, but not necessarily the latter.

Mathematical intuition is developed by working in an area for a long time and being exposed to various insights, heuristics, ideas (mentioned in a first paragraph). Thus not only computer based proofs are harder to verify, but also if an area relies on a lot of non human verifiable proofs that means it might be significantly harder to develop an intuition in that area which might then make it harder for humans to create new mathematical ideas. It is probably easier understand the landscape of ideas that were created to be human understandable.

That is neither to say that computers have little place in mathematics (they do, they can be used for formal proofs, generating conjectures or gathering evidence for what approach to use to solve a problem), nor it is to say that computers will never make human mathematicians obsolete (perhaps they will become so good that humans will no longer be able to compete).

However, it should be noted that some people have different opinions.

My intuition is that this is one of those cases where given t "evaluation on the left side of t" and "evaluation on the right side of t" give different results. It seems to me that at any given time decision is made about future actions (and not the past), thus "evaluation on the left side of t" seems to be more important and it is the one that makes me reluctant to play this game. It seems to me that using "evaluation on the right side of t" (in cases where they differ) might give some strange results, e.g. murder having no victims.

It seems that left side of t and right side of t differs whenever there is different number of people on both sides. E.g. if you make an exact copy of a person and their entire memory, the "left identity" and "right identity" (perhaps there are better terms) intuitively seem to become two different things.

It is relatively easy to understand the situation when one person owes money to another person, having borrowed it before. It is also not much more difficult to understand the situation when one person owes another person a compensation for damages after being ordered by court to pay it. Somewhat more vague is a situation when there is no court involved, but the second person expects the first one to pay for damages (e.g. breaking a window), because it is customary to do so. All these situations involve one person owing a concrete thing, and the meaning of the word "owes" is (disregarding edge cases) relatively clear.

Problems arise when one tries to go from singular to plural but we still want to use intuition from the usage of singular verb. Quite often, there are many ways to extend the meaning of a singular verb to a plural verb in a way that is still compatible with the meaning of the former. For example, one can extend the singular verb "decides" to a many different group decision making procedures (voting, lottery, one person deciding for everyon, etc.), saying "a group decides" simply obscures this fact.

Concerning the word "owe", even when we have a well defined group of people, we usually prefer to either deal with them separately (e.g. customers may owe money for services) or create a juridical person which helps to abstract a group of people as one person and this allows us to use the word "owe" in its singular verb meaning. There are more ways to extend the meaning of the word "owe" from singular to plural, but they are quite often contentious.

"Western civilizations" is a very abstract group of people. It is not a well defined group of people. It is not a juridical person. It is not a country. It is not a clan. The singular verb "owes" is clearly inapplicable here, and if one wants to use it here, one must extend its meaning from singular to plural. But there seems to be a lot of possible extensions. Therefore one has to resort to other kinds of arguments (e.g. consequentialist arguments, arguments about incentives, etc.) to decide which meaning one prefers. But if that is the case, one can bypass the word "owe" entirely and go to those arguments instead, because that is essentially what one is doing, because words whose meanings one knows only very vaguely probably do not do much in actually shaping the overall argument.

In addition to that "being disadvantaged as a result of imperialism" is very dissimilar from "having a window broken by a neighbour", it is not a concrete thing. The central example of "owing something" is "owing a concrete and well defined thing". Whenever we have a definition that works well for a central example and we want to use it for a noncentral one, we again must extend it and there are often more than one way to extend it (Schelling points sometimes help to choose between all possible extensions, but often there are more than one of them and choice of the extension becomes a subject of debate).

In general, I would guess that if someone argues that an entity as abstract as "western civilizations" owes something to someone, most likely they are either unknowingly rationalizing the conclusion they came to by other means or simply sloppily using an intuition from the usage of the singular verb "owes". I think that the meaning of the word can be extended in many ways, many of which would still be compatible with the meaning of the singular word and some of them would imply "new generations are not responsible for the sins of the past ones", while some of them wouldn't, therefore it is probably better to bypass them altogether and attempt to solve a better defined problem.

Other words where trying to go from singular to plural often causes problems are: "owns", "chooses", "decides", "prefers" (problem of aggregation of ordinal utilities), etc.

Even if there were problems that were solved by such collective action, you should not create plans that rely on things like that happening (by definition, you cannot create a spontaneous action). Your plans should not rely on the problem having to solve itself. Edit: unless the type of spontaneous collective action you need is known to happen often or the problem you want to solve is of the type that are known to often solve themselves.

Actions of the crowd during the fall of the Berlin Wall seems to be an example of an event that fits the description, as it wasn't centrally organized, many people simply tried to make use of opportunity that suddenly appeared due to actions of East German government and other circumstances.

Similarly, I often remind myself that, as a general rule, I should avoid using third person imperative mood in my thinking and speech.