Some companies do donation-matching, so if an employee donates $X to a charity then the company will also donate $X. The scammer is pretending "I don't work for such a company, but I'd like to double my donation, so I'd like to send money to you and you donate it and then your company also donates".

I was surprised to see mention of MIRI and Existential Risk. That means that they did a little research. Without that, I'd be >99% sure it was a scam.

I wonder if this hints at their methodology. Assuming it is a scam, I'd guess they find small but successful charities, then find small tight-knit communities organized around them and target those communities. Broad, catch-all nets may catch a few gullible people, but if enough people have caught on then perhaps a more targeted approach is actually more lucrative?

Really, it's a shame to see this happen even if no one here fell for it, because now we're all a little less likely to be receptive to weird requests/offers. I suspect it's useful for EAs to be able to make random requests of specific people. For example, I can imagine needing a couple hours or days of consulting work from a domain expert. In that situation, I'd be tempted to PM someone knowledgeable in that area, and offer to pay them for some consulting work on the side.

I can actually think of 2 instances where this community has done things like this out in the open (not PM), so it wouldn't surprise me if there are occasional private transactions. (I'd link to examples, but I'd rather not help a potential scammer improve on their methods.) Perhaps a solution would be to route anything that looks suspicious through Bitcoin, so that the transaction can't be cancelled? I wouldn't want to add trivial inconveniences to non-suspicious things, though.

What about those who treat matching donations as an applause light, and simply do it because it is ingroup behaviour and not because they've followed the argument?

No, if we're rationalist, we should figure out if the cost of doing the tests is worth the expected gain from getting the test results. If we're fairly certain that it's a scam already (so test results won't change the situation much) and if the tests are expensive, it might be a better idea not to test.

Let's not break our arms patting ourselves on the back, at least not until the data's in. At the moment we could be more, less, or equally susceptible to scamming than our demographics generally are.

It'd be interesting to see which, though.

My two main sources of confusion in that sentence are:

1. He says "distinct elements onto distinct elements", which suggests both injection and surjection.
2. He says "is called one-to-one (usually a one-to-one correspondence)", which might suggest that "one-to-one" and "one-to-one correspondence" are synonyms -- since that is what he usually uses the parantheses for when naming concepts.

I find Halmos somewhat contradictory here.

But I'm convinced you're right. I've edited the post. Thanks.

So, we have

1. We don't have both “Either K or A” and “Either Q or A”
2. Therefore, we either have “Neither K nor A” or “Neither Q nor A”
3. Since both of the possibilities involve “no A”, there can be no A.

Your post seems to be a rather verbose way of showing something that can be shown in three lines. I guess you're trying to illustrate some larger framework, but it's rather unclear what it is or how it adds anything to the analysis, and you haven't given the reader much reason to look into it further.

The reason that someone might think an Ace would be a good choice is that they misread it as saying “one of these two statements is true”. But it is nowhere stated that either statement is true; rather it is stated that at least one statement is false. Once one notices that the Ace is involved in both of these statements, of which one has to be false, one's intuition should lead one choosing the King.

Also, if you're using set notation, (K ∪ A) indicates the same thing as (A or K or K ∩ A).

I think that the first step is to unpack "annihilate". How does one "annihilate" a universe? You seem to be equivocating between destroying a universe, and putting it in a state inhospitable to consciousness.

It also seems to me that once we bring the anthropic principle in, that leads to Boltzmann brains.

That's known as a VR 4 schedule (variable-ratio 4) because the behavior is rewarded an average of every four times the correct response is given. Variable schedules maximize what is known as resistance to extinction; the probability a behavior will decrease in frequency goes down. Continuous schedules are best for establishing a new behavior. I would expect they use continuous reinforcement whenever a new skill is being learned in the game.

"show that one serving of Soylent 1.5 can expose a consumer to a concentration of lead that is 12 to 25 times above California's Safe Harbor level for reproductive health"

Concentration, or amount? it seems to me that that is a rather important distinction, and it worrying that As You Sow doesn't seem to recognize it.