There's a science question here, and there's an engineering question here. They are two different questions.

Science asks, what are the numbers, what are the likelihoods? And there is always going to be more study needed. Consider that people are still arguing over evolution, there may never be numbers so compelling that they convince everyone.

The engineering question asks what we could do to change things. Engineers don't get to wait for better numbers, they have to do the best they can with what they've got. We don't really know why the violent crime rate has been going down for the last three decades, when everyone expected the rate to rise. Was it declining lead levels? Legalized abortion? How much consensus would we need to do more of it?

Lots of focus on fiction media- the videogames and movies that are supposed to be shaping young people's thoughts. I don't see news people asking questions on what effects their own reporting has had on the problem. Roger Eber thttp://boingboing.net/2012/12/15/roger-ebert-on-how-the-press-r.html and Charlie Brooker http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4 both make a compelling case that it's the way these events are reported that makes their recurrence inevitable.

Ultimimately, i think you have to decide how deeply you want to question these things. James Howard Kunstler http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ&feature=youtu.be#t=14m29s points to the architecture we live in as a primary source of dispair. I think he's got a point too.

Mass shootings are not the only symptom that we are doing it wrong. I doubt that it's even the worst symptom of us doing it wrong. They're just a symptom that few would disagree about that something needs changing.

In 2008, there were 14,137 homicides in the US (source), of which 9,484 involved a firearm (source). If we assume (very generously) that none of these would have happened if there were no civilian firearms, we'd save 9,484 lives.

In 2008 the value of a life was £6.9 million (source), so those deaths cost $65,400 million.

Banning guns wouldn't (supposedly) just save those though; it'd also save lives in future years. As this functions like an investment, we'll discount it by 10% (long run stock market return), and get a present value of $654,000 million.

There around 270 million civilian guns in the US (source).

In 2008 4,498,944 guns were produced (source), and industry revenue was $9.4 billion (source), for an average price of $2,089. (possibly a slightly over-estimate if military/police weapons cost more, but might also get bulk discounts).

So the total price of the US civilian gun stock (2008) is $564,000 million.

Now the contentious bit. If the ban magically destroyed all these guns, we'd lose not only their price but also their consumer surplus. Let us utter handwave and say the surplus is the same as the price. So we'd lose $1,128,000 million.

Therefore the net present value of a ban is $654,000 million - $1,128,000 million = negative $474000 million.

Contentious assumptions made:

• All homicides made using guns would not be made otherwise in absence of guns. (major assumption, favouring ban)
• The statistical value of a murder victim's life is the same as the average life. (somewhat major, as higher socioeconomic groups are murdered less often. favours ban.)
• All US civilian guns would be magically destroyed. There would be no implementation costs (favours ban) and no re-sale value (favours laissez faire. Market value of arms might collapse with US ban anyway though.).
• There are no other externalities associated with gun ownership. (major. I suspect favours ban, as the other major externality is deterrence of crime/state oppression).
• I'm not sure how to deal with the consumer surplus issue.

Since the Kern County shooting, I'm noticing that this topic (and problem) is not going away. John Stewart nailed it: http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-january-8-2013-stanley-mcchrystal

-where it's a problem about framing. But it's a comedy program, not a political forum.

[disclaimer: I may be a newbie, but if I'm breaking a rule here, I can usually hear it without freaking out.]

The main problem I'm having, is that gun violence in schools makes me angry, and that makes it harder to think straight. But if gun violence in schools doesn't make someone angry, then I'm not sure I want to talk to them. Does that push me over into the partisan camp?

"becoming rationalist"- there's an 'ism' there that raises my hackles a little. But there was one experience not long ago that piqued my interest in cognitive bias: I quipped to a friend, "When I do it, it's processing. When you do it, it's drama."

He called that attribution bias, and now I've started a collection of biases that I think I understand in my gut. Most of them seem highly mental and theoretical, but that's mostly because I have so few points of contact with other people.

Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:

• Hi, I'm Joe and the main thing I'm good at is art.
• Hi, I'm Joe and I'm proud of my Native American ancestry.
• Hi, I'm Joe and my IQ is 170.

Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That's not telling Joe he's okay. That's telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let's explore what it means to be told you can't talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following:

• Hey, don't say you've got Native American blood, that's socially inept.

^ This comment will surely be interpreted as racism.

• Hey, don't say you're good at art, you're a liar.

^ This comment will be interpreted as an extremely rude or even oppressive comment. Making judgments about whether artists are "good" or "bad" is taboo and considered, by many, to be oppressive to self-expression.

• Hey, don't say your IQ is 170, don't be an elitist.

^ This comment prejudges the person. It assumes that they're an elitist when they're just talking about an intellectual difference that doesn't prove anything about your personality.

So, why doesn't Joe get to have the same freedom to express himself without society oppressing that? Why doesn't he get to talk about his difference without expecting prejudiced remarks that jump to conclusions about who he is?

We have a million excuses for this. "People feel threatened by intellect." Well, they used to feel threatened by black people, but that doesn't excuse society from working on removing their prejudices about black people and it doesn't excuse them from working on removing their prejudices about gifted people.

"That's just not polite." <- This is an interesting excuse. I'll explain why:

Imagine you go into a room and say "Hi, I'm white." (I realize that people of any race may read this comment, I am asking you to humor my hypothetical situation for a moment.)

Your race is evident. This is a neutral statement of fact.

If someone tells you "That's just not polite." why are they saying that? They're probably confusing it with an expression of the white pride attitude that is associated with the KKK. They're assuming that you're prejudiced.

What if you went up to a bunch of random white people and accused them of hating black people? Since this doesn't happen frequently, they'd probably be mostly bewildered. But imagine if random people did that to them every day.

Prejudice is a very serious offense to be accused of. It would stress them out. They'd wonder what kinds of social and career opportunities they might be missing out on. They might become more cautious to guard their physical safety - after all, prejudice is the kind of thing people get really heated about and some people get violent when they're upset. They'd start to hide hints that they're white on things like resumes. They would be oppressed by an assumption that they're prejudiced, just the same way that they'd be oppressed by an assumption that they're all criminals.

Accusing a person of prejudice simply for being part of a certain group is, in and of itself, prejudiced. That's prejudging them based on some trait that they can't control, not on their behavior. Yet, if you claim to have a high IQ, you are very likely to be accused of elitism. People act like this prejudice against people with a high IQ is okay and that gifted people should behave like an oppressed minority by hiding their difference.

I'm glad you think it's okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, I think that's okay. But a looooooot of people don't!

I have a form of autism called Asperger Syndrome

This is not at all unusual here at LessWrong... I can't seem to find a link, but I seem to recall that a fairly large portion of LessWrong-ers (at least relative to the general population) have Aspergers (or at least are somewhat Asperger-ish), myself included.

I'm not entirely sure though that I agree with the statement that Aspergers is "a form of autism"... I realize that that has been the general consensus for a while now, but I've read some articles (again, can't find a link at the moment, sorry) suggesting that Aspergers is not actually related to Autism at all... personally, my feeling on the matter is that "Aspergers" isn't an actual "disease" per se, but rather just a cluster of personality traits that happen to be considered socially unacceptable by modern mainstream culture, and have therefore been arbitrarily designated as a "disease".

In any case, welcome to LessWrong - I look forward to your contributions in the future!

Office stuff is different from carpentry, but I know that one person is less productive (per person) than two, and two less than three. Four is usually overkill. Beyond that, carpentry teams are organized in groups of three when they're not singletons.

I don't know if the sheer number of items on the board is a good measure of productivity. Under certain circumstances, a brainstormer might edit what she says more tightly. I suspect that above a certain number of people, there isn't enough time for everyone to be heard in any case.

I have a hunch that for office environments, the ideal team size is somewhere between 1 and however many co-workers you are forced to endure. I've been at really effective meetings: they aren't "productive" so much as "efficient". Rather than inspiring everyone, they end up with everyone knowing what's been done and what needs to be done, all with the least time spent.

There's certainly a case to be made for fewer meetings that are better run, and smaller teams may make sense, but I'm not convinced that this study has anything to say about introverts vs extroverts.

About me: I think a lot- mostly by myself. That's trained me in some really lazy habits that I am looking to change now.

Yes, I know the feeling. Welcome out of the echo chamber!

I like being agnostic more than atheist, just on a few tiny little wiggle-words that seem powerfully interesting to me...

Do you mean that it's literally the words you find interesting? Which ones?

Hello, newbie here. I'm intrigued by the premise of this forum.

About me: I think a lot- mostly by myself. That's trained me in some really lazy habits that I am looking to change now.

In the last few weeks, I noticed what I think are some elemental breakdowns in human politics. When things go bad between people, I think it can be attributed to one of three causes: immaturity, addiction, or insanity. I would love to discuss this further, hoping someone's interested.

I wasn't going to mention theism, but it's here in the main post, and suddenly I'm interested: I trend toward the athiestic- I'm really unimpressed with my grandmother's deity, and "supernatural" doesn't seem a useful or interesting category of phenomena. But I like being agnostic more than atheist, just on a few tiny little wiggle-words that seem powerfully interesting to me, and I notice that other people seem to find survival value in it. So that's probably something I will want to talk about.

Many of my more intellectual friends and neighbors can seem like bullies a lot of the time. So I like the word "rationality" in the title of this place, much more than I like "science" or "logic". When I see the war of the darwin fish on people's bumpers, I remember that the Romans still get a lot of credit for their accomplishments even though math and science as we know it barely existed. Obsession with mere logic seems to put an awful lot of weight on some unexamined premises- and people don't talk in formal logic any more than they math in roman numerals.

I'm not against vaccination, but I am a caregiver to a profoundly autistic child. It's frustrating to try to have any sort of conversation about autism without it devolving into a vaccination tirade.

I don't think of myself as a 9/11 "truther", and yet I still have many questions about those events and the response that trouble me. Some of these questions are getting answered now that the 10 year anniversary has seen the release of more information. As with the Kennedy assassination, I don't think the full story will ever be widely known. I'm cynical enough that I doubt that it matters.

SETI fascinates me. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs- not so much. Whitley Streiber is actually kind of interesting, when I can muster up the required grains of salt.

Anyway, it feels a bit like I'm crawling out from under a rock, not sure what the weather is really like out here. I want to outgrow the pleasures of cleverness, hoping for some happiness in wisdom.