The bulk of available evidence suggests that people in all societies tend to be relatively rational when it comes to the beliefs and practices that directly involve their subsistence... The more remote these beliefs and practices are from subsistence activities, the more likely they are to involve nonrational characteristics.

Robert Edgerton

I take it Bart Ehrman followed a similar path...learning Greek in order to learn New Testament "scripture"...only to find out that nobody knows for sure what the "original" really was.

This is a common problem for all the Abrahamic scripture-based religions, whether they admit it or not (they mostly don't.) It's really, really hard -- I would say impossible -- to prove that variations or changes have not been introduced since the time of a hypothetical original text, copied from handwriting scribe to handwriting scribe. And the harder, fundamentalist versions of the Abrahamic religions always ascribe HUGE importance to the integrity and wonderfulness of the text.

The argument you give here (the "bum comparison principle") is the exact same one I've used. If you can commit suicide, then you should be able to walk away.

The worst thing about how frequenting prostitutes is no longer socially acceptable, even for males, is that there are so many quips and jokes that just don't work any more.

They don't really. Or if they do, with very much less urgency than when confronted with the possibility of being eaten by a tiger.

I'm reminded of movies where people in impossibly tough situations stick to impossibly idealistic principles. The producers of the movie want to hoodwink you into thinking they would stand by their luxurious morality even when the going gets tough. When the truth is, their adherence to such absurdly costly principles is precisely to signal that, compared to those who cannot afford their morality, they have it easy.

Pascal's wager was a very detached and abstract theological argument. If Pascal's heart rate did increase from considering the argument, it was from being excited about showing off his clever new argument, than from the sense of urgency the expected utility calculation was supposed to convey, and which he insincerely sold the argument with.

I think it's entirely wrong for Americans to sympathize with Boston victims while disregarding and in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes. It's hypocrisy at its finest and especially rich coming from self-proclaimed Christians.

That is exactly the problem with nationalism.

I suspect you're probably saying that it's understandable for Americans only to feel the reality of this kind of cruelty when it affects "their own", and my response is that it may be understandable, but then so are the mechanisms of cancer.

-- HN's Vivtek in discussion about nationalism.

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design are full of amazing quotes. My personal favourite:

6) (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

(See also an interesting note from HN's btilly on this law)

you would be foolish to accept what people believed for “thousands of years” in many domains of natural science. When it comes to the ancients or the moderns in science always listen to the moderns. They are not always right, but overall they are surely more right, and less prone to miss the mark. In fact, you may have to be careful about paying too much attention to science which is a generation old, so fast does the “state of the art” in terms of knowledge shift.

Razib Khan

How can somebody (without access to a lab) practically implement that technique?

The hardware is pretty cheap.

This is for people interested in optimizing for academic fame (for a given level of talent and effort and other costs). Instead of trying to get a PhD and a job in academia (which is very costly and due to "publish or perish" forces you to work on topics that are currently popular in academia), get a job that leaves you with a lot of free time, or find a way to retire early. Use your free time to search for important problems that are being neglected by academia. When you find one, pick off some of the low-hanging fruit in that area and publish your results somewhere. Then, (A) if you're impatient for recognition, use your results to make an undeniable impact on the world (see Bitcoin for example), or (B) if you're patient, move on to another neglected topic and repeat, knowing that in a few years or decades, the neglected topic you found will likely become a hot topic and you'll be credited for being the first to investigate it.