It's in the works. I've got a few ideas, but right now I'm running them by family and friends. I have some ambitious goals but I'll probably start small. I would like to see some big changes happen in the world, and I don't think that working in the most straightforward way towards the Singularity is the only way to bring them about.

In separation studies, you're also comparing with environments that include the factors known to produce twins, like high maternal age, fertility treatment, etc.

That would be a good way to determine someone's communication style, but unfortunately that question is too open ended for OkCupid. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the site. "Questions" on there refer to a set of questions with specific answers, exactly like those in this comment.

Given the importance of communication style in interpersonal relationships, I am looking to create an OkCupid question to determine if someone is an asker/teller or guesser. I'm having difficulty creating an unbiased question. Any way I've written the question makes ask/tell seem obviously better, e.g., here are two possibilities:

1. When you want someone to do something for you, do you prefer to ask them directly or do you prefer to mention something related and expect that they infer what you want?

2. Should your partner "just know" what you want without you ever saying so explicitly?

That perception might just be my own bias. Quite a few people I know would probably answer #2 as yes.

Unfortunately, this question probably won't be answered very often, so it's also useful to look for a proxy. Vaniver suggested a question about gifts when I mentioned this at a meetup, and I believe he meant the question "How often should your significant other buy you gifts, jewelry, or other things more expensive than, say, dinner, cards, or flowers?" This question is a reasonable proxy because many guessers I know seem to expect people to "just know" what sort of gifts are appropriate for them. Unfortunately, many guessers might not care that someone buys things for them with any regularity.

Another possibility is "Imagine that a friend asks you to read a short story they wrote. Unfortunately, you find it to be very boring. Which is closest to how you might respond when they ask you what you think of it?" I think that indirectly gets to the core of the ask vs. guess issue. Saying negative things is considered inappropriate to most guessers. Any other potential proxy questions?

Suffering is an emotional state triggered by desire. Desire is the attachment of value to imagined experiences.

So there's a minimal level of consciousness required to experience suffering, and a neuron farm probably doesn't meet it, that's why it's not morally significant. What sorts of organisms do meet it is another matter.

Most of the stuff I own is consumer goods, and I need to store it in a way that optimizes for accessibility. You know who else needs to do that? Retail stores. So I made a list of all my available closets, shelves, under bed storage, etc. and assigned each space a corresponding retail category. There's sporting goods, where I keep things like my tent and sleeping bags. Headlamps go in electrical along with the flashlights. Some sections are just 1/4 of a shelf, but having a designated area makes it way easier to find things, and cleaning up is a lot faster, when I actually get around to cleaning up, that is.

When I first implemented this idea I went a little overboard and it was really organized, but inconvenient. They say you should normalize until it hurts, then denormalize until it works, and sometimes it's just nice to keep things handy, sometimes in more than one place. So I added back things like the kitchen junk drawer, which consists of a subset of office supplies (pens, notepads, scissors), electrical (batteries), hardware (measuring tape), and personal care (vitamins). After adjusting the balance a bit the system got more comfortable.

I also have two more categories of stuff that fall outside the retail model: reference, and archival. The reference section is for books, digital media and papers, basically the bookshelves and file cabinets. I don't use The Universal Decimal System but it seems like the logical way to organize books. The archival section includes things like artwork and artifacts with historical/sentimental value, which I curate like a museum collection. Some go on display, others go in the least accessible parts of my storage spaces, ie. long term storage.

May I suggest, the resource you're referring to might be more like stress tolerance, rather than happiness?

You left off the most important point. If you think a topic is important and that someone smarter than you is already working on it, it would seem like your best move is to try and help.

Well, you might think that you don't have anything meaningful to contribute on top of their abilities.

You might be pretty smart, but believe they're so much smarter that your mental faculties won't be a significant asset to them, in which case you wouldn't be any more help than a non-smart assistant performing grunt labor for them, whereas your intelligence would be a greater asset in a field not already dominated by such a great intellect.

You left off the most important point. If you think a topic is important and that someone smarter than you is already working on it, it would seem like your best move is to try and help.

One argument in favor of leaving RALI A to HLA 1 and going off to fund your own puppy cuteness augmentation program is that you might not want to make a redundant effort. But I think the risk depends on how much progress has been made on the topic in question. If the big fish already have a pretty solid direction, ask someone who knows more about it than you do where the gaps are and go work on that. If you think you might get a response, go ahead and ask the big fish what needs working on. Fortune favors the bold.