For what it's worth, the credit score system makes a lot more sense when you realize it's not about evaluating "this person's ability to repay debt", but rather "expected profit for lending this person money at interest".

Someone who avoids carrying debt (e.g., paying interest) is not a good revenue source any more than someone who fails to pay entirely. The ideal lendee is someone who reliably and consistently makes payment with a maximal interest/principal ratio.

This is another one of those Hanson-esque "X is not about X-ing" things.

So if you're giving examples and you don't know how many to use, use three.

I'm not sure I follow. Could you give a couple more examples of when to use this heuristic?

Seems I'm late to the party, but if anyone is still looking at this, here's another color contrast illusion that made the rounds on the internet some time back.

For anyone who hasn't seen it before, knowing that it's a color contrast illusion, can you guess what's going on?

Major hint, in rot-13: Gurer ner bayl guerr pbybef va gur vzntr.

Full answer: Gur "oyhr" naq "terra" nernf ner gur fnzr funqr bs plna. Lrf, frevbhfyl.

The image was created by Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka, an incredibly prolific source of crazy visual perception illusions.

Commenting in response to the edit...

I took the Wired quiz earlier but didn't actually fill in the poll at the time. Sorry about that. I've done so now.

Remarks: I scored a 27 on the quiz, but couldn't honestly check any of the four diagnostic criteria. I lack many distinctive autism-spectrum characteristics (possibly to the extent of being on the other side of baseline), but have a distinctly introverted/antisocial disposition.

A minor note of amusement: Some of you may be familiar with John Baez, a relentlessly informative mathematical physicist. He produces, on a less-than-weekly basis, a column on sundry topics of interest called This Week's Finds. The most recent of such mentions topics such as using icosahedra to solve quintic equations, an isomorphism between processes in chemistry, electronics, thermodynamics, and other domains described in terms of category theory, and some speculation about applications of category theoretical constructs to physics.

Which is all well and good and worth reading, but largely off-topic. Rather, I'm mentioning this on LW because of the link and quotation Baez put at the end of the column, as it seemed like something people here would appreciate.

Go ahead and take a look, even if you don't follow the rest of the column!

Ah, true, I didn't think of that, or rather didn't think to generalize the gravitational case.

Amusingly, that makes a nice demonstration of the topic of the post, thus bringing us full circle.

Similarly, my quick calculation, given an escape velocity high enough to walk and an object 10 meters in diameter, was about 7 * 10^9. That's roughly the density of electron-degenerate matter; I'm pretty sure nothing will hold together at that density without substantial outside pressure, and since we're excluding gravitational compression here I don't think that's likely.

Keeping a shell positioned would be easy; just put an electric charge on both it and the black hole. Spinning the shell fast enough might be awkward from an engineering standpoint, though.

I don't think you'd be landing at all, in any meaningful sense. Any moon massive enough to make walking possible at all is going to be large enough that an extra meter or so at the surface will have a negligible difference in gravitational force, so we're talking about a body spinning so fast that its equatorial rotational velocity is approximately orbital velocity (and probably about 50% of escape velocity). So for most practical purposes, the boots would be in orbit as well, along with most of the moon's surface.

Of course, since the centrifugal force at the equator due to rotation would almost exactly counteract weight due to gravity, the only way the thing could hold itself together would be tensile strength; it wouldn't take much for it to slowly tear itself apart.

It's an interesting idea, with some intuitive appeal. Also reminds me of a science fiction novel I read as a kid, the title of which currently escapes me, so the concept feels a bit mundane to me, in a way. The complexity argument is problematic, though--I guess one could assume some sort of per-universe Kolmogorov weighting of subjective experience, but that seems dubious without any other justification.

The example being race/intelligence correlation? Assuming any genetic basis for intelligence whatsoever, for there to be absolutely no correlation at all with race (or any distinct subpopulation, rather) would be quite unexpected, and I note Yvain discussed the example only in terms as uselessly general as the trivial case.

Arguments involving the magnitude of differences, singling out specific subpopulations, or comparing genetic effects with other factors seem to quickly end up with people grinding various political axes, but Yvain didn't really go there.