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I have taken the survey, including the digit ratio question.
Since there was a box to be included in the SSC survey, I just a little bit disappointed there wasn't a question for favourite SSC post to go with the favourite LessWrong post question.
Your examples require magic, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories. Perhaps the advantage of rationalists is the ability to take boring ideas seriously. (Even immortality is boring when all you have to do is to buy a life insurance, sign a few papers and wait. And admit that it most likely will not work. And that if it will work, it will pretty much be the science as usual.)
Making things happen with positive thinking requires magic. But myths about the health effects of microwaves or plastic bottles are dressed up to look like science as usual. The microwave thing is supposedly based on the effect of radiation on the DNA in your food or something -- nonsense, but to someone with little science literacy not necessarily distinguishable from talk about the information-theoretic definition of death.
I'm not sure that signing papers to have a team of scientists stand by and freeze your brain when you die is more boring than cooking your food without a microwave oven. I would guess that cryonics being "weird", "gross", and "unnatural" would be more relevant.
This whole article makes a sleight of hand assumption that more rational = more time on LW.
I'm a proto-rationalist by these criteria. I don't see any reason cryonics can't eventually work. I've no interest in it, and I think it is kinda weird.
Some of that weirdness is the typical frozen dead body stuff. But, more than that, I'm weirded out by the immortality-ism that seems to be a big part of (some of) the tenured LW crowd (i.e. rationalists).
I've yet to hear one compelling argument for why hyper-long life = better. The standard answers seems to be "death is obviously bad and the only way you could disagree is because you are biased" and "more years can equal more utilons".
In the case of the former, yeah, death sucks 'cuz it is an end and often involves lots of pain and inconvenience in the run up to it. To the latter, yeah, I get the jist: More utilons = better. Shut up and do math. Okay.
I'm totally on board with getting rid of gratuitous pain and inconvenience that comes with aging. But, as I said, the "I want to live forever! 'cuz that is winning!" thing is just plain weird to me, at least as much so as the frozen body/head bit.
But what could I know... I'm not rational.
Upvoted for providing a clear counterexample to Yvain's assertion that people would find immortality to be "surely an outcome as desirable as any lottery jackpot".
This suggests that a partial explanation for the data is that "experienced rationalists" (high karma, long time in community) are more likely to find immortality desirable, and so more likely to sign up for cryonics despite having slightly lower faith in the technology itself.
Your conclusion is possible. But I'll admit I find it hard to believe that non-rationalists really lack the ability to take ideas seriously. The 1 = 2 example is a little silly, but I've known lots of not-very-rational people who take ideas seriously. For example, people who stopped using a microwave when they heard about an experiment supposedly showing that microwaved water kills plants. People who threw out all their plastic dishes after the media picked up a study about health dangers caused by plastics. People who spent a lot of time thinking positive thoughts because they have heard it will make them successful.
Could it be that proto-rationalists are just bad at quantifying their level of belief? Normally, I'd trust somebody's claim to believe something more if they're willing to bet on it; and if they aren't willing to bet on it, then I'd think their real level of belief is lower.
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Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome
IQ seems to be the one obvious thing. A variety of inner emotional states. A lot of personal achievements. Things like honor.
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Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome
IQ - I could hire excellent tutors to make myself more intelligent, though definitely only to a certain point. More to the point, I could hire smart people to think of good ideas for me. I'll concede that I couldn't buy the experience of thinking like someone smarter than myself.
emotional states - Hire some psychologists to figure out what experiences causes people to have them, then buy those experiences.
personal achievements - This one I'll give you; you can't buy achieving something for yourself.
honour - This is a very vague term to me.
I find it a fun game trying to think of things that money can't buy (but that it is possible for people to get in other ways). It's difficult to think of a lot of answers, especially allowing for strategies like hiring someone to train you to become the kind of person who gets x. The best answer I've been able to come up with is specific anything, such as the friendship of a specific person.
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AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
I'm a 24-year-old guy looking for a job and have a great interest in science and game design. I read a lot of LW but I rarely feel comfortable posting. I wished there was a LW meetup group in Belgium and when nobody seemed to want to take the initiative I set one up my self. I didn't expect anyone to show, but now, two years later it's still going. Ask me anything you want, but I reserve the right not to answer.
How hard did you find it to be to organize/run a meetup? How did that compare to what you expected?
Hi!
I can't seem to find a discussion of free will in the Quantum Physics sequence. I only know this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/of/dissolving_the_question/ (which demonstrates the method I was talking about).
See this wiki page for links to discussion of Free Will in the sequences: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will
In response to
On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor
Instead of complaining, could this system be hacked to help the poor people? If you created a company for hiring currently unemployed unskilled people and providing them as good working conditions as possible, could you get the same subsidies Walmart does? Then those people would prefer working for you.
I imagine something similar to Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa, but focused on low-income people.
I'm not sure if I understand what you're suggesting. As I understand it, the argument isn't that Walmart is literally getting subsidies. It's just that Walmart employees are getting welfare, so Walmart doesn't have to pay to support them, reducing Walmart's costs hypothetically compared to an equivalent company which paid their workers a better wage.
So if you created a company which provided as good of working conditions as possible, your employees wouldn't need welfare, so you wouldn't be benefiting from the "subsidies". Also, your costs would go up, so you'd be more likely to go out of business than Walmart.
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[Survey Taken Thread]
Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.
It is done. (The survey. By me.)