His arguments only undermine the conception of free will as ultimate origination, but have nothing to say about (the more defensible) conception of free will as choosing on the basis of one's desires.

...if you were to go back in time, and all of the states of affairs were identical, then you would get the exact same outcome...the causes are the same; the effects are necessarily the same.

Am I misinterpreting him, or does his elaboration of determinism contradict quantum mechanics? He correctly points out at 11:10 that quantum mechanics doesn't provide support for free will (as he defined it), but he doesn't bother to reformulate his definition of determinism so that it doesn't require a Newtonian-like mechanics.

science likes causes...it likes laws...it likes mechanisms...it doesn't like this mysteries occult power of "free will"...

Yeah, science doesn't like mysterious occult powers without mechanisms, except when it does. Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation was an occult force without a mechanism (which is why many natural philosophers on the Continent dismissed it as a throwback to the natural magic tradition of the Renaissance). Is gravity unscientific?

our brains make our decisions for us, we really have no say in the matter, and we'll be cool with it.

This sounds as if there is a homunculus sitting inside of us somewhere that is just along for the ride, but lacks causal power to change the direction of our bodies. What is this "us" that isn't our brain and where is it?

It may not have much in the way of new content, but it is stated pretty clearly and concisely, and they way he flat-out rejects Free Will as unscientific is bold and refreshing, especially coming from a Philosopher.

As far as I know, the demarcation problem hasn't been solved, so saying something is "unscientific" is simply a kind of name-calling. The video (which I did not watch from start to finish) seems to be bog-standard philosophy (at least how it was done while I was in university). According to the philpapers survey, less than 14% of philosophers accept or lean towards libertarian free will. Of those philosophers that accept or lean towards free will, most do not accept the version of free will that he rejects in the video. Even for a philosopher, that doesn't seem very bold or refreshing.

My main goal at the moment is to utilize "rationality" as a way to map how individuals comes to a decision/belief (what to do, what to say, what to believe, etc.). I am not assuming that these individuals ARE rational, but it's a useful (and quickie) tool for me to retrospectively "map out" the thought process of an individual. Like all tools though, they will be limitations.

Maybe this individual is saying, "I know I'm biased" as a sort of disclosure of where their views are coming from. If they did not say that they are biased, and it is later revealed that they are biased, then people would likely accuse said individual of misrepresenting his positions and claiming "objectivity" when he had no right to possess it. For example, had that person you quoted said, "IPhone was the best!" without me knowing that he had a bias in that belief, I might have sincerely believed him, and this could lead to terrible consequences, like me buying an IPhone instead of a potentially better version.

It's clear that this individual likely does sincerely and rationally believe whatever he believes, with or without his bias, but it's important to admit the existence of this bias to avoid accusations of "falsely portraying yourself as objective" later on. And it's better to disclose your bias rather than not mention it and end up having said bias be unmasked or revealed and you suffering embarrassment.

If it is true that officially, the karma limit is raised to 50, but effectively, the actual programming behind this "blog" allows for anyone to post at 20, then it suggests a real inconsistency between stated policy and actual policy.

Inconsistency is certainly not good if people want to actually follow policy. Either the official karma limit lowers to 20, or the real karma limit goes to 50. I lean towards the latter, because the existence of the Discussion section obsoletes the existence of the main LessWrong section, but the fact that this stated policy was formally established in 2009 suggests that there might have been policy problems detected by the staff that prevented it from becoming actual policy by this time (maybe the inability of most people to reach that high total of 50 that forced the staff to not implement this policy before).

That's not the angle Quine was taking. He was saying words don't have meanings. There are behaviors, and streams of words correlated with behaviors, but nothing inside a head that is a "meaning". Quine was not talking about cases where one person would point to a square and say "square", and another person would point to a triangle and say "square". He was talking about cases where two people both point to an equilateral triangle and say "equilateral triangle", but one meant "triangle with all three sides the same" and the other meant "all three angles the same". That's not a great example, but it is a short example. Or where you ask them to raise their right hand, and they both raise their right hand, but one person unknowingly has the perception of raising his left hand, and "feels" left the way others feel right. Quine argues that these are not singular examples, but that all language is undermined by indeterminacy like this.

"But it is an empirical question. With math, plus with some reasonable assumptions, you can prove that you can unambiguously determine the correct mapping even from the outside. In a world where you can tell someone to think of a square, and then use functional magnetic resonance imaging and find a pattern of neurons lit up in a square on his visual cortex, it is difficult to agree with Quine that the word "square" has no meaning."

Of course the word "square" has meaning, but that meaning may be different from our meaning. In a world where society told this individual all the time that an "square" is really a triangle with an X in it, and then you do that experiment, you'll see what that individual thinks a square is...and he'd be right, going off the definitions and meanings that society have told him about a square. Doesn't help the researcher who is trying desperately convince said research subject what a square is "supposed" to be.

Your questions seem ambiguous. Do you want advice about how to evaluate conspiracy theories, or do you want to know how conspiracy theories come to be popularly accepted or rejected?

As indicated by Bob Knaus in the comments at MR, the story appeared in Jet Magazine in 1978. While this is not the most reliable source, the date explains an awful lot of your observations.

Note that the stories that copy the one Tyler links to are all in quick succession. The story did not spread continuously for two years, let alone thirty. It went into hibernation when someone clipped it out of the magazine thirty years ago and it went into hibernation shortly after that person uploaded it two years ago.

The heuristic that typesetting is authority is very easily gamed, but it works here.

What do you mean by calling yourself "a random individual"? It is generally not a good sampling technique to survey people who step forward and volunteer information.