Does anyone have an idea of the prerequisites necessary for Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms or Introduction to Economic Analysis?

Having children is an example where two methodologies in happiness research dramatically diverge. One method is asking people in the moment how happy they are; the other is asking how they happy they generally feel about their lives. The first method finds that people really hate child care and is probably what you remembered.

If it turns out that the whole MIRI/LessWrong memeplex is massively confused, what would that look like?

Note that in the late 19th century, many leading intellectuals followed a scientific/rationalist/atheist/utopian philosophy, socialism, which later turned out to be a horrible way to arrange society. See my article on this. (And it's not good enough to say that we're really rational, scientific, altruist, utilitarian, etc, in contrast to those people -- they thought the same.)

So, how might we find that all these ideas are massively wrong?

This looks very similar to the trolley problem, specifically the your-organs-are-needed version.

Does the waterbear experience verification and then wake up again after being thawed, or does subjective experience terminate with vitrification - subjective experience of death / oblivion - and a new waterbear with identical memories begin living?

English is for my a second language but I probably wrote more words in it than in my native one.

In the last months I frequently found myself forgetting "'s" after "there" or "ït". It not an issue that I remember being there a year ago. Has anyone observed similar things or knows of research that might describe processes like this?

The only explanation I can think of is having reread Korzybski's arguments against the "is of identity".It would be interesting if my unconscious is so opposed to "is" that it censors me from using it whenever I don't pay attention.

I'm not sure what this has to do with it, as people who commit real-world serious violence for frivolous purposes are not regarded as valiant heroes, even in war.

And yet it's fun to watch people who commit fictional serious violence for frivolous purposes. So what's fun to watch isn't a terribly reliable way of telling what's considered good.

Are the entrails leading me astray?

I'll try to reword my post to avoid those connotations. Anyway, “right-wing/theist/low-Openness/nationalist” was supposed to imply "not the whole of humanity, and therefore I wouldn't assume Bundle_Gerbe is from that cluster without any evidence other that they are human", and by “‘side’” I meant something roughly like "each of the two regions of ideologyspace you get when you split it by the sign of the first principal component".

How big is this "plenty"?

I don't have statistics, but probably around 50% of my high-school classmates. (More recent social circles of mine aren't unbiased samples.)

America still has a huge military

Never been to the US and don't know much about it, so I won't say anything except... doesn't it still have (say) 95-year-long copyright too?

and I haven't heard of any mainstream agitation

Are you treating non-mainstream groups the way you accused me of treating right-wing/theist/low-Openness/nationalist groups?

for shutting it down as a gang of murderers and slaves, which would be the consequence of actually believing that. In fact, I rather doubt that any country anywhere, ever, has had any substantial movement for disbanding its military on these grounds.

As for the “slaves” part, well, conscription was recently abolished in my country (two years before I was supposed to be drafted, lucky me!). And whereas there aren't that many people who propose to disband the military altogether (which is a much stronger position than not thinking soldiers are heroes), pacifism doesn't seem exceedingly rare to me.

This passage by Grothendieck (source) seems potentially relevant:

What my experience of mathematical work has taught me again and again, is that the proof always springs from the insight, and not the other way round – and that the insight itself has its source, first and fore- most, in a delicate and obstinate feeling of the relevant entities and concepts and their mutual relations. The guiding thread is the inner coherence of the image which gradually emerges from the mist, as well as its consonance with what is known or foreshadowed from other sources – and it guides all the more surely as the “exigence” of coherence is stronger and more delicate.

Surveyed, requesting free internet points.