Since we're trying to be lesswrong here, I'll risk seeming petty by pointing out that "begging the question" is a logical fallacy, not a synonym for "raising the question". Just sayin...

Sunk Costs - should be easy. Someone does something reasonable, then the situation changes, but the person refuses to change their path, explicitly speaking about the sunk costs. Because it's a bedtime story, the stupidity of the person could be astronomical. For example: there way a boy who wanted to ski in the winter, so he saved money and bought skis... but at the time the snow melted and the winter was over. But the boy insisted on his emotional and financial investment, so he kept wearing the skis during the whole year. Insert various unrealistic situations, resulting problems, and lost opportunities. The other kids were swimming in the lake, this one kid tried, but... wearing the skis... he almost drowned, and after he was saved he just kept sitting at the beach, envying the other kids. But he still refused to take the skis off, explaining how long he worked to get them.

Wondering which side is true instead of arguing for a side - make it so that no side is completely true; each of them is right about some aspect, but wrong about other. Two teams of children saw a mysterious animal; one team reported it as a pink elephant, other team as a brown bear; the Curious Kid refused to take sides and investigated, and it was actually a brown elephant.

The "known knowns" quote got made fun of a lot, but I think it's really good out of context:

"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know."

Also, every time I think of that I try to picture the elusive category of "unknown knowns" but I can't ever think of an example.

when trying to characterize human beings as computational systems, the difference between “person” and “person with pencil and paper” is vast.

Procrastination and The Extended Will 2009

Easy and entertaining. Done!

Qualia are neither a barrier ("sense data") to knowledge of the physical world, nor are they illusory. Rather, qualia are a constant concomitant to perception of the physical world. The best hypotheses to explain our experience involve positing both qualia and the rocks, trees, and animals that the "sense-data" of certain philosophers would screen off.

Try this experiment. Set an apple on the table and look at it. Now approach closer and keep looking at it.

Your experience changes during this experiment. However, the apple doesn't seem to change, the table doesn't seem to change, etc. Your experience involves more redness, but the apple hasn't gotten any redder, nor seemed to. Some of our experience amounts to cognition or alleged cognition of the external world - the apple is red, it is sitting on the table, etc. But some does not - it is just an internal aspect of the way we sense the world. Philosophers call the latter "qualia".

Drugs or sleep deprivation or psychosis may cause someone to hallucinate an apple. If they have enough relevant history, they may correctly doubt that the apparent apple really exists. But they won't doubt that they are having an experience. What does that experience involve? Qualia, but no external object. If the hallucinator says "I hope the apple is real, because I'm hungry" the word "apple" in that sentence does not refer to the qualia. (Nor does "the apple" said by someone having a veridical experience.) It does not refer at all.

Armchair philosophy cannot reveal the full and exact reference of terms, "qualia" included. Understanding the reference of terms requires doing science. The exact reference of many (any?) terms doesn't exist, due to semantic vagueness. There is no exact number of hairs you need in order not to be bald. There may likewise be no exact cutoff in evolution between sentient and nonsentient organisms. But the existence of dusk and dawn doesn't stop the difference between night and day being like, well, the difference between night and day.

How to Draw Conclusions Like Sherlock Holmes? Become a fictional character and point out all the details your author has included to move the plot forward.

I'd be careful about generalising about "Africa" from one Nigerian folktale. I spent a couple of years crossing Africa in the 90s and Nigeria was by far the most generally fucked up place I visited. Some places like Zaire (now Congo) had specific - and huge - issues, but Nigeria seemed somehow endemically damaged. Africa is as diverse as Europe, if not more so.

Something I have learnt from this series of posts and the comments on them (including mine):

• Most people have no real idea what it is that separates good writing from bad, except that we know it when we see it

• When we read your posts, most of us get a vague sense of them being long/uninteresting. But the specific criticisms of your writing are virtually all instances of a bias (availability?) where we try to quantify our vague sense of 'don't like' by grabbing something salient out of the post, such as your use of pronouns or the inclusion of unnecessarily specific details. It's possible that any or all of those things are actually problems, but they're probably not the sole cause. Most writing advice on the web is also like this. The stuff that's actually important for good writing is much harder to communicate.

• it's more likely that the actual cause of your posts feeling long/uninteresting is a more systemic issue. My best guess is that you're not sure which parts of your new improved mindset are actually important, and which were incidental to the instrumental gains, so you feel like it's all relevant and it all needs to be communicated, when in fact either only a subset is relevant, or else the insights build on each other in a non-obvious way so that they need to be communicated in a much more precise order than you've done so far in order to not appear as noise.

I appreciate personal anecdote. Sometimes I think anecdotes are the most valuable parts of an essay. It all depends on the style and the preferences of the audience. I don't criticize HPMOR on the grounds that it focuses too much on Harry and not enough on rationality concepts...