I agree, but poverty and efforts for its alleviation aren't really about material concerns. Everyone having say food, shelter from the elements and basic healthcare can be made to work. But poverty as in relative poverty is unavoidable.

This can also be downloaded as an iTunes podcast: itpc://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/current.xml (LW doesn't seem to let me link to this).

I'd recommend linking to the main Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, as well as their "5x5" podcast (which is currently linked to). Most weeks some common fallacy or cognitive bias is mentioned (usually in connection with alternative medicine).

ciphergoth has made an epub version of Eliezer's posts, which can be read with iBooks on the iPad (or iPhone, iPod Touch). I would recommend this over a PDF version, as you cannot adjust line lengths with PDFs. I've been reading the sequences in this way recently. Before discovering this, I used the Instapaper app to save the LW web pages.

I think our current culture tends to push people into a certainty that they may not be inclined to, thus over-representing both atheists and some-sort-of-deists. My observation is that many people do not like uncertainty and are uncomfortable with it. We prefer knowing over not-knowing, and I suspect that many will adopt a position closer to the poles than their facts and knowledge would suggest. There is also quite a bit of herd mentality.

I am an agnostic because I have no faith, not because logic tells me there is no god. This same lack of faith makes me doubt things like the Big Bang (Just because Carl Sagan/Richard Feynman says so is no better to me than "Because the Pope/Mohammad says so". Both sets are Human, and both sets have other agendas and both sets can be wrong).

The big bang, and the rest science provides a more useful tool in predicting what will happen tomorrow than "God Did It", but there's no evidence that "Let There Be Light" wasn't what God said right as he initiated the Big Bang.

You believe what gets you to bed at night, and I'll lay awake with my uncertainty. I've been uncertain about a lot of things for a long time, and I'm not going to say I'm ok with it, but I'm used to it.

Oh, and without having seen a neurologist or psychiatrist (though I've tried), I tend to exhibit many of the symptoms of mild aspergers--down to some of the odd details.

The other thing is my eldest child, who was not raised by me much, has pretty much the same religious beliefs (or lack of same) that I do, tempered by the fact that she's still in her early 20s, and as such feels them SO MUCH MORE.

Depends on which area of pure mathematics.

One of my strongest mathematical interests is graph theory, in part because networks are incredibly pure abstract mathematical objects which you can draw lots of conclusions about on a purely logical basis, and in part because they can be used to model so many real-world phenomena. As a result, even modest propositions in that particular area have lots of real-world consequences.

History also strongly suggests that even the most historically useless pure maths can have tremendously important applications and consequences further down the line, some choice examples being radon transformations, modular arithmetic and eigenspace. It would be an incredibly bold statement to say a particular area of pure maths is completely without real-world consequence. There's an awful lot of remaining time for even the most esoteric theorem to be put to use.

This also doesn't differentiate 'dead but sentient' from 'brain in a vat', and I think the prior for the latter is a bit higher than the prior for the former.

If the gray-haired gentleman is the Simulator of our universe, then presumably he could demonstrate this by allowing you to "view" the simulation, in particular your decomposing corpse, grieving loved ones &c. Also, he could further replay to you events from the past: events you remember vividly, and perhaps some historical ones too. And also, he could allow you to spectate on the ongoing simulation.

Of course, he would no doubt have to provide a considerable number of bits of information in order for the Afterlife hypothesis to become more likely than the alternatives such as dreaming, drugs, major brain malfunction, &c.

My signal is usually someone's beliefs on certain controversial issues that arouse emotional gut responses in most people.

E.g., someone's view of the war on drugs is a pretty good signal of how rational they are - to a limited extent (although opposing it doesn't mean that they'll have Razib Khan or Robin Hanson levels of rationality). Mostly though, it just filters out irrational people (and it does a better job at filtering out irrational people than, say, views on abortion).

I do generally investigate more deeply though - beliefs on the public education system is another measure I use (and one where most academics, unfortunately, really fail on rationality). On that, at least, the "rational" position seems to be supported by a small minority of the population (other possible signals: views on cryonics, the use of mind-enhancing drugs, eugenics - this is actually a strong one, and life-extension)

I also use irreverence as a signal too. If you put too much respect on someone, then you'll get offended if someone points out possible defects in that person's way of thinking. Every statement someone makes must be critically evaluated, and yes, this applies to Razib Khan and Robin Hanson as much as anyone else (even though I highly respect them)

==

(of course, you also have to consider their "potential" for being rational - even I used to buy into the BS of the war on drugs and increased support for public education in the way it's structured now)

On the one hand, no. I suspect building a better than human intelligence to be much harder than we imagine. It has been much harder than we imagined in the past. I don't see any reason to think we have passed some inflection point where our understanding is just so good that progress from now on will be qualitiatively better than in the past.

On the other hand, we already have a self-improving intelligence, but it is only partially artificial. It seems clear to me that the intelligence of the human race as a whole is taking off quickly as our technology of tying brains together to work cooperatively improves. Probably the last "natural" improvement was the evolution of the ability to use spoken language to increase the bandwidth of inter-brain communication by orders of mangitude. Since then the artificial improvements include recording devices (starting with writing), communication devices (starting with books on boats). With the internet and fantastic interfaces to it, we know have a fantastically complex inter-brain communication. Amazingly, a big part of it is still intermediated through our fingers, which seems likely to me to change soon for the better.

What is the IQ of the planet as a whole? Whatever the answer, the planet with books was smarter than the planet without them, and the planet with internet is pretty remarkable indeed.