I think it was some variant of the Typical Mind Fallacy, albeit one based not only on my own preferences but on those of my friends (though of course you'd expect that I'd associate with people who have preferences similar to mine, so this does not make the fallacy much more excusable).

I think the main belief I've updated based on this is my estimate on the prevalence of my sort of individualistic, suspicious-of-groups, allergic-to-crowds, solitude-valuing outlook in the Less Wrong community, which I have adjusted strongly downward (although that adjustment has been tempered by the suspicion, confirmed by a couple of comments on this post, that people who object to things such as rituals etc. often simply don't speak up).

I have also been reminded of something I guess I knew but hadn't quite absorbed, which is that, apparently, many people in aspiring rationalist communities come from religious backgrounds. This of course makes sense given the base rates. What I didn't expect is that people would value the ritual trappings of their religious upbringing, and value them enough to construct new rituals with similar forms.

I will also add that despite this evidence that way more people like rituals than I'd have expected, and my adjustment of my beliefs about this, I am still unable to alieve it. Liking ritual, experiencing a need for and enjoyment of collectivized sacredness, is completely alien to me to the point where I am unable to imagine it.

Downvoted for not providing even a one-sentence summary (what is that learning model?), but instead sending a reader to some long video.

801 people (73.5%) were atheist and not spiritual, 108 (9.9%) were atheist and spiritual

I'm curious as to how people interpreted this. Does the latter mean that one believes in the supernatural but without a god figure, e.g. buddism, new age? This question looked confusing to me at first glance.

People who believed in high existential risk were more likely to believe in global warming, more likely to believe they had a higher IQ than average, and more likely to believe in aliens (I found that same result last time, and it puzzled me then too.)

Why does it puzzle you?

No one showed up. Reporting for the record.

I wish you had started it this summer. I was making a 2h commute to Toronto to attend theirs when I was right on the Oakville/Sauga border.

Awesome! There are now meetups in Ottawa, Toronto, and Waterloo; an Ontario Mega Meetup draws nigh!

From the first episode of Dexter, season 6:

Batista: "...it's all about faith..."
Dexter: "Mmm..."
Batista: "It's something you feel, not something you can explain. It's very hard to put into words."

Dexter smiles politely, while thinking to himself: Because it makes no sense.

I've been self-experimenting with piracetam the past few months.

I usually study from a site called USMLEWorld with a selection of difficult case-based medical questions. For example, it might give a short story about a man coming into a hospital with a certain set of symptoms, and explain a little about his past medical history, and then ask multiple choice questions about what the most likely diagnosis is, or what medication would be most helpful. These are usually multi-step reasoning questions - for example, they might ask what side effect a certain patient could expect if given the ideal treatment for his disease, and before answering you need to determine what disease he has, what's the ideal treatment, and then what side effects that treatment could cause. My point is they're complicated (test multiple mental skills and not just simple recall) and realistic (similar to the problems a real doctor would encounter on the job).

I've tried comparing my performance on these questions on versus off piracetam. My usual procedure is to do twenty questions, take 2400 mg piracetam + 600 mg lecithin-derived choline, go do something fun and relaxing for an hour (about the time I've been told it takes for piracetam to take effect) then do twenty more questions. It's enough of a pain that I usually don't bother, but in about three months of occasionally doing my study this way I've got a pool of 160 questions on piracetam and 160 same-day control questions. Medicine is a sufficiently large and complicated field that I don't think three months worth of practice effects are a huge deal, and in any case I made sure to do equal piracetam and control questions every day so there wouldn't be a practiced-unpracticed confounder.

I got an average of 65% of questions right in the control condition and 60% of questions right on piracetam, but the difference was not significant.

USMLEWorld also tells you how other people did on each question; I used this information to run a different analysis controlling for the random difficulty variation in the questions. In the control condition I did 2.8% better than average, in the piracetam condition I did 1.3% worse than average; this wasn't a significant difference either.

I do worry that fatigue effects might have played a part; I tried to always rest and relax between conditions, but I was always doing piracetam after control (I wanted to have same-day comparisons to eliminate practice effects, and piracetam lasts too long for me to feel comfortable taking it first and then doing control after it wore off). But I didn't feel fatigued, and I haven't noticed huge fatigue effects when I study a lot without taking piracetam.

In any case, piracetam either has no effect on me in the reasoning domains I'm interested in, or else its effect is so small that it is overwhelmed even by relatively minor fatigue effects.

Certainly. A basic Mafia technique is examining the past play of the person you're suspicious of, then looking at whether their current play is more similar to their play as scum or their play as town. There is also wide knowledge (at least online) of moves that are generally "scummy," such as congratulating the doctor after he or she successfully protects, as these moves have been determined to be commonly used by scum. Of course, all of this is constantly evolving, since once something is generally known as a scumtell, advanced scum players avoid it. Further, different things are tells at different levels of play, which tends to make the game much more complicated than my above description might indicate.

That said, I think it's certainly possible to do better than chance-- my own record, at least of games that I can remember, is 4 wins to 1 loss, all as town (I have yet to be scum in my recent games).

Further, there are some situations where certain tactics have been determined, over wide periods of play, to be dominant, and applying these strategies gives you a very high chance to win. For instance, if the town has a doctor and a cop (and knows this) and also knows the scumgroup has no roleblocker, the best strategy is to stop voting to lynch, have the cop claim, and have the cop constantly investigate while protected by the doctor. The scum must then start hitting other targets in hopes of getting the doc. A truly advanced doctor will then, knowing the scum is doing this, not actually protect the cop but instead protect other members of the town in the hopes of blocking the scum's pseudorandom flailing, but a truly advanced scum player might anticipate this and try to kill the cop instead-- so there are mindgames all over the place, but dominant strategies are still known.

Generally, I feel like Mafia-- at least online Mafia-- is a rather good rationality exercise. I could expand this to a top-level post if there's interest.

Were you the scum in any of the games?