The researchers aren't entirely sure why speaking in a less familiar tongue makes people more "rational", in the sense of not being affected by framing effects or loss aversion. But they think it may have to do with creating psychological distance, encouraging systematic rather than automatic thinking, and with reducing the emotional impact of decisions. This would certainly fit with past research that's shown the emotional impact of swear words, expressions of love and adverts is diminished when they're presented in a less familiar language.

Paywalled article (can someone with access throw a PDF up on dropbox or something?): http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/18/0956797611432178

Blog summary: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/we-think-more-rationally-in-foreign.html

As mister shminux mentioned somewhere, he is happy and qualified to answer questions in the field of the Relativity. Here is mine:

A long rod (a cylinder) could have a large escape velocity in the direction of its main axe. From its end, to the "infinity". Larger than the speed of light. While the perpendicular escape velocity is lesser than the speed of light.

Is this rod then an asymmetric black hole?

In many previous comments, people call on professionals to answer questions about specific fields, like physicists, neuroscientists, economists, or computer scientists. There are many people in all these professions on this site willing to respond to questions, but most of the time none of them happen to read that comment.

As a way to fix this, I propose that people well-educated in certain fields volunteer to make an "Ask an X" post where they list their credentials and specialties, and anyone can ask questions about that field.  Obviously, this would also be a good place to have a discussion between professionals in that field.

Another possibility is to ask people who don't mind being asked random questions to volunteer to be part of a list that can be posted to the wiki. Then, people could just PM that person directly. 

What's the best way to get rid of a wart?

One day, someone not a member of the Singularity Institute (and has publically stated that they don't believe in the necessity of ensuring all AI is Friendly) manages to build an AI. It promptly undergoes an intelligence explosion and sends kill-bots to massacre the vast majority of the upper echelons of the US Federal Government, both civilian and military. Or maybe forcibly upload them; it's sort of difficult for untrained meat-bags like the people running the media to tell. It claims, in a press release, that its calculations indicate that the optimal outcome for humanity is achieved by removing corruption from the US Government, and this is the best way to do this.

What do you do?

Recently in another topic I mentioned the "two bishops against two knights" chess endgame problem. I claimed it was investigated over two decades ago by a computer program and established that it is a win situation for the two bishops' side. Then I was unable to Google a solid reference for my claim.

I also remember a "Hermes Set Theory". It was something like ZFC, regarded as a valid Set Theory axiom system for 40 years, until a paradox was found inside. Now, I can't Google it out.

And then it was the so called "Baryon number conservation law", which was postulated for a short while in physics. Until it was found that a subatomic decay may in fact in/decrease the number of baryons in the process. I can't Google that one either.

Is that just me, or what?

Just thought you guys should know about this. Some work that argues that humans should not enhance their intelligence with technology, and that super intelligence probably never evolves.

Coherent extrapolated volition (CEV) asks what humans would want, if they knew more - if their values reached reflective equilibrium.  (I don't want to deal with the problems of whether there are "human values" today; for the moment I'll consider the more-plausible idea that a single human who lived forever could get smarter and closer to reflective equilibrium over time.)

This is appealing because it seems compatible with moral progress (see e.g., Muehlhauser & Helm, "The singularity and machine ethics", in press).  Morality has been getting better over time, right?  And that's because we're getting smarter, and closer to reflective equilibrium as we revise our values in light of our increased understanding, right?

This view makes three claims:

1. Morality has improved over time.
2. Morality has improved as a result of reflection.
3. This improvement brings us closer to equilibrium over time.

There can be no evidence for the first claim, and the evidence is against the second two claims.

Topic the First - Asking "Why?"

There is a certain cliche of a young child asking "why?", getting an answer, asking "why?" to that, and so on until the adult finally dismisses them out of frustration. And we all smile and laugh at how ignorant the child is and pat ourselves on the back for being so grown up.

But I don't think this story is very funny. This story, told in countless variations, has the rather repugnant moral that it is rude and childish to ask that most important of questions. "Why?"

So why do parents near-universally admonish their children when they persist with the questions? What is motivating parents all over the world to teach their children not to ask "why?"? Do parents simply not want to admit to their ignorance? I thought so at first, but I suspect it is deeper than that.

It seems more likely to me, that this practice is a defense against acknowledging that one's answers are mysterious. It is easier for a parent to attribute a young child's lack of understanding to a lack of intelligence, than to comprehend that their own answer is a curiosity stopper and not an answer at all.

In essence, children are being trained to accept curiosity-stoppers without hesitation, by being reprimanded for continuing to ask "why?" I find this more than a little alarming; it would seem that for parents in particular, it is especially dangerous not to notice when they're confused.

Topic the Second - The Behavior of Hope

Is tenuous hope more emotionally taxing than certain doom?

I wouldn't think so, but whenever the subject of death comes up (among those who don't believe in an afterlife) I've noticed a very curious pattern.

I have only a guess, but it seems possible that when doom is certain, when there's no escape for you or anyone, it is easier to numb the emotions. Accepting the possibility of escape makes the doom not-certain, which forces fear of the doom to the surface.

Topic the Third - Abuse of the word "Love"

On another site I happened to be perusing, someone posted a bit of a rant about teenagers not knowing the difference between love and lust, to which I gave this response:

The word "love" is abused so much because we live in a society that looks down on pursuing relationships based on lust. A society that goes out of its way to make us feel bad about ourselves if we want to be intimate with someone we don't love. So of course the emotionally vulnerable try to convince themselves that love is involved even when it isn't, because they don't want to feel that misplaced guilt.

It's kind of sick, when you think about it. Real love* is quite rare, so believing that it is only proper to form a sexual relationship with someone you love, causes all kinds of problems. It is simply not healthy for the human animal to form sexual relationships that rarely, so due to this erroneous belief, you get people thinking they're SUPPOSED to be in love, or ASSUMING they're in love, or just TELLING themselves they're in love, because they've had it drilled into their heads that it's wrong to feel otherwise, and that what they're doing doesn't actually feel wrong so it MUST be love.

You want kids to stop abusing the word "love"? Stop teaching them that they need love as a justification for acting on their lust.

* I define "real love" as the state of valuing another's quality of life more than your own quality of life.

Topic the Fourth - A "Good" Parent

Let's take a moment to think about how modern parents are generally expected to treat the subject of their offspring's sexuality. This is one of those things that I firmly believe any good future for humanity will look back on in horror.

With alarming commonality, adults with maturing offspring go out of their way to stunt their children's sociosexual development, due primarily, I think, to a desire to conform to the current societal archetype of Good Parent. Despite ambiguous-at-best psychological evidence, parents fight to keep kids ignorant, unequipped, and chaste due to the social consensus that having sexually active children makes one a Bad Parent.

I would even go so far as to call such deliberate impediment of sociosexual development a form of abuse, despite its extreme prevalence and acceptableness in today's world.