First of all, IQ tests aren't designed for high IQ, so there's a lot of noise there and this would mainly be noise, if he correctly reported the results, which he doesn't.

Second, there are some careful studies of high IQ (SMPY etc) by taking the well designed SAT test, which doesn't have a very high ceiling for adults and giving it to children below the age of 13. By giving the test to representative samples, they can well characterize the threshold for the top 3%. Using self-selected samples, they think that they can characterize up to 1/10,000. In any event, within the 3% they find increasing SAT score predicts increasing probability of accomplishments of all kinds, in direct contradiction of these claims.

I was surprised at how popular Basic Income was in the recent survey.

I suspect one reason for that is that while some see it as an alternative to current programs, others see it as an additional program, and I don't believe the question specified which.

Isn't the "Do I live in a simulation?" question practically indistinguishable from the question "does God exist?", for a sufficiently flexible definition for "God"?

For the latter, there are plenty of ethical frameworks, as well as incentives for altruism, developed during the history of mankind.

It's nice to see that someone else has thought about this.

It's a popular rationalist pastime to try coming up with munchkin solutions to social dilemmas. A friend posed one such munchkin solution to me, and I thought he had an unrealistic idea of why regulations work, so I said to him:

Even though it's what you really want, I don't think the fact that you know everyone else will cooperate is the interesting thing per se about regulations, but that this is a consequence of the fact that you have decreased what was once the temptation payoff and thus constructed a different game. You have functionally reduced the expected payoff of the option "Don't pay taxes," by law. If you don't pay taxes, then you get fined or jailed. Now all players are playing a game where the Nash equilibrium is also Pareto optimal: Pay taxes or be fined or jailed. Clearly, one should pay taxes.

Now, ironically, this is good news if we want to cause better outcomes with less or no coercion, because it suggests that it is not coercion in itself that does the good work, but the fact that we have changed the payoffs to construct a different game; we can interpret coercion as just one instantiation of the general process by which 'inefficient games' become 'efficient games'. Coercion is perhaps a simple way to do the thing that all possible solutions to this problem seem to have in common, but there may be others that we can assume to syntactically change the payoffs in the way that coercion does, but which we may semantically interpret as something other than coercion.

A different time, a friend noticed that people building up trust seemed qualitatively similar to a Prisoner's Dilemma but couldn't see exactly how. I was like, "Have you heard of Stag Hunt? That's the whole reason Rousseau came up with it!" PD is just one kind of coordination game.

More generally, isn't it weird that the central objects of study in game theory, despite all of the formalization that has taken place since the beginning of the field, are remembered in the form of anecdotes?! You learn about the Stag Hunt and the Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken and all other sorts of game, but there doesn't really seem to be any systematic notion of how different games are connected, or if any games are 'closer' to others in some sense (as our intuitions might suggest).

Meditations on Moloch was pretty but in the audience I coughed the words 'mechanism design'. It just seems like pointing out the mainstream academic work makes you boring when you're commenting on something poetic. You also might like Robinson and Goforth's Topology of the 2x2 Games. The math isn't that complex and it provides more insight than a barrage of anecdotes. Note that to my knowledge this is not taught in traditional game theory courses but probably should be one day. They refer to this general class of games as the 'social dilemmas', if I recall correctly.

Now that I'm thinking about it, psychological papers probably have more effect in the LW-sphere than in the world generally. Are you counting nutrition as part of medicine?

Has anyone heard about the book "The egg-laying dog" from Beck-Bornholdt? I don't know about an English translation, I freely translated the title from German. It is a book about fallacies in statistics, research, especially in medicine, written in a style to be comprehensible by the layman.

It discusses at great length the problems plaguing modern research (well, the research of the 1990's when the book was written, but I doubt that very much has changed). For example, the required statistical significance for a publication is much more relaxed than it was a long time ago. Often a p-value of 5% is enough for a publication, so even with perfectly unbiased researchers, without p-fishing or other unethical tricks, there is a huge number of accepted publications around which are utterly rubbish. This is all made much worse by the fact that everyone wants new results, so few researchers can get funding by repeating and verifying already published results (unless the publication in question is on every headline), and also few researchers are inclined (or supported by the system) to publish negative results.

Let's be conservative and say the ratio is 1 in a billion.

Why?

Why not 1 in 10? Or 1 in 3^^^^^^^^3?

Choosing an arbitrary probability has good chances of leading us unknowingly into circular reasoning. I've seen too many cases of using for example Bayesian reasoning about something we have no information about, which went like "assuming the initial probability was x", getting some result after a lot of calculations, then defending the result to be accurate because the Bayesian rule was applied so it must be infallible.

You're right that "those values are irrational" is a category mistake, if we're being precise. But Houshalter has an important point...

Any time you violate the axioms of a coherent utility-maximization agent, e.g. falling for the Allais paradox, you can always use meta factors to argue why your revealed preferences actually were coherent.

Like, "Yes the money pump just took some of my money, but you haven't considered that the pump made a pleasing whirring sound which I enjoyed, which definitely outweighed the value of the money it pumped from me."

While that may be a coherent response, we know that humans are born being somewhat farther-than-optimal from the ideal utility maximizer, and practicing the art of rationality adds value to their lives by getting them somewhat closer to the ideal than where they started.

A "rationality test" is a test that provides Bayesian evidence to distinguish people earlier vs. later on this path toward a more reflectively coherent utility function.

Having so grounded all the terms, I mostly agree with pwno and Houshalter.

What kind of hourly wage do you have that you think you should vote for 10 cents?

I don't understand why you would want this. It doesn't take exactly X times as much effort to provide X times as much productivity, but its a way better approximation than a log scale. Is the goal to discourage commerce, and promote self sufficiency?