Ancedote coming up:

At some point I realized I was drinking way too much coke, so I resolved to not drink any when I went back home for a few days (small step, concrete, environment, fixed period). Once I had succeeded doing that, it was easier to carry the new behaviour back to everyday life. The first time I succeeded for a period of 8 months or so then lapsed again, bootstrapped again with the same process about 2 years ago, haven't drank coke since.

This seems congruent with most of these points except "involves a new behavior, not stopping an old one,". I generally find it's easier to stop doing something than to start doing something else. Anyone else have the same experience?

Does SPR beat prediction markets?

I disagree. Behavioral economics is typically criticizing the standard neoclassical model as a starting point. Understand the neoclassical model first and you'll better understand behavioral economics.

Starting with behavioral economics could be a good place, since the applications to daily life are obvious.

some possible books include:

Predictably irrational by Dan Ariely Why Smart people make Big Money Mistakes - Gary Belsky Nudge - Richard Thaler

Success story: I posted this link on my facebook and was able to reference 1 friend to EY's "Intuitive Intro to Bayes." He's taking a grad course this semester on Bayesian stats application to forensic psychology and I thought Intuitive Intro would probably prepare him well for the course.

Thanks for sharing.

England reporting in. I mostly agree with Will/Russia/Cosmos about the game. While I don't think I was as busy as him, my newbishness with the rules (especially convoy rules) really held me back. I got lucky that I was England, and land locked enough that, at the beginning, nobody could take advantage of my blunders.

My favorite part was the diplomacy under anonymity, coordination being a real problem when you can really only use in-game incentives.

My chat logs are also posted as well as the first turn game journal, which I couldn't maintain.

Special thanks to Zvi for the in-game analysis and for staying impartial (as possible) for the running analysis.

I don't think that's what is meant by the phrase. I think the author is asserting that it seems to them that some of the stuff put out by the website shows the general trends one expect if someone has learned about some idea from popularizations rather than the technical literature. If that is what the author is discussing then that is worrisome.

"imagined by the author as a combination of whatever a popular science site reported"

I've heard this argument from non-singulatarians from time to time. It bothers me due to the problem conservation of expected evidence. What is the blogger's priors of taking an argument seriously if it seems as if the discussed about topic reminds him of something he's heard about in a pop sci piece?

We all know that popular sci/tech reporting isn't the greatest, but if you low confidence about SIAI-type AI and hearing it reminds you of some second hand pop reporting then discounting it because of the medium that exposed you to it is not an argument! Especially if you priors about the likelihood of pop sci reporting being accurate/useful is already low.

Some fruit hang so low you have to bend down to reach them.

I'm seriously considering writing a rationalist Ender's Game/Shadow. It's fairly low hanging fruit b/c the Ender and (especially) Bean are obviously intelligent and have excellent priors.