http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheChampion

I just finished moving to the Bay Area, from a house right down the street from Focus On The Family's world headquarters. ...Bit of a change.

Somewhere out in mind design space, there's a mind with any possible prior; but that doesn't mean that you'll say, "All priors are created equal."

The corrected phrase may be: "All unentangled priors are created equal."

"No, I did not go through the traditional apprenticeship. But when I look back, and see what Eliezer18 did wrong, I see plenty of modern scientists making the same mistakes. I cannot detect any sign that they were better warned than myself."

It seems like a viable means of propagating education about such mistakes - or the mistakes of aspiring rationalists in general - would be to set up (relatively) straightforward scientific experiments that purposefully make a given mistake and then allow students to perform the experiment unsuccessfully. The postmortem for each class/lab would review what went wrong, what wrong looked like, why things went wrong, and so forth. Sort of a "no, seriously, learn from the past" symposium.

Do any of you know of any such existing educational structures in the Bay Area?

I find that the realization of consilience can be "as" good as original discovery; for me, the discovery that an idea about the world - even one posited centuries ago - comprehensively makes sense in the context of everything else known about reality is, itself, an original discovery.

It's just one that's unique to you or me.

"... people seem to get a tremendous emotional kick out of not knowing something. " Could be simple schadenfreude: asserting that "no one" knows a thing, even those demonstrably more intelligent than yourself, has the emotional effect of knocking them down into the same mud in which you already believe yourself to be mired. Not productive, but good solace for those unwilling to be productive.

My favorite part, at which there was actual LOLing:

"•[Imaginary Model Alicorn] acquired a certain level of status (respect for her mind-hacking skills and the approval that comes with having an approved-of "sensible" romantic orientation) within a relevant subculture. She got to write this post to claim said status publicly, and accumulate delicious karma. And she got to make this meta bullet point."

"...Although, do please make the check out to 'Cash'."

"Could I regenerate this knowledge if it were somehow deleted from my mind?"

Epistemologically, that's my biggest problem with religion-as-morality, along with using anything else that qualifies as "fiction" as a primary source of philosophy. One of my early heuristic tests to determine if a given religious individual is within reach of reason is to ask them how they think they'd be able to recreate their religion if they'd never received education/indoctrination in that religion (makes a nice lead-in to "do people who've never heard of your religion go to hell?" as well). The possibles will at least TRY to imply that gods are directly inferable from reality (though Intelligent Design is not a positive step, at least it shows they think reality is real); the lost causes give a supernatural solution ("Insert-God-Here wouldn't allow that to happen! Or if He did, He'd just make more holy books!").

If such a person's justification for morality is subjective and they just don't care that no part of it is even conceivably objective... what does that say for the relationship of any of their moral conclusions to reality?

"I wish I lived in an era where I could just tell my readers they have to thoroughly research something, without giving insult."

Is that not what this entire site is accomplishing?