That was my first answer as well. I bought a wet/dry razor after such an encounter.

But thinking further, I believe wet hair is both longer and softer, making for an easier and closer shave.

But I agree with the OP's general principle for a lot of other things. I apply the 80/20 rule for a lot of maintenance cleaning tasks.

I am confused about Eliezer's metaethics. If you ask 10 LessWrongers what Eliezer's metaethical theory is, you get approximately 10 distinct positions. In other words, I don't know how high a probability to assign to it, because I'm very unsure of what it even means.

I'm even more confused that people seem to think it quite natural to spend years debating the ethical positions of someone watching the debate.

I agree. The world really is mad.

A little creative editing with Stirner makes for a catchy line in this regard:

Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard almost the whole world of men as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse, who only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space.

How many have replied to religious propaganda about the benefits of religion with disdain for invoking mere prudential benefit where truth is at stake?

That's a particular blindness of most rationalist communities - the disdain for winning through anything but epistemic rationality. I'm encouraged by the many people here who can rationally analyze winning and see that epistemic rationality is only one means to winning.

Beliefs can help you win in a great many ways. Predictive accuracy is only one of those ways, and given the interdependence of humans, predictive accuracy is probably less important for most people than having the beliefs that make for social winning.

What I prefer is to be in a place where the socially winning beliefs are the epistemically accurate beliefs, but that's more the exception than the rule in this world, at least for "far" beliefs.

And what is your success rate using these conversion techniques?

Your observation in your update is interesting. There is a large swath of libertopia which starts their argument from the Non Coercion Principle. But I didn't notice any of that here.

This is yet another case where I find the aversion to political discussion unfortunate. Political discussions with people who you disagree with but can still communicate with until you find the point of disagreement are interesting, if rare. This is one of the few groups where I think there'd be a decent chance of success.

Naturally, it will depend on what you mean by Libertarianism and Socialism.

To take just the issue of "redistribution", Milton Friedman was for a negative income tax and guaranteed minimum, apparently Hayek was as well, Thomas Paine had his Agrarian Justice. According to your terminology, are these guys Libertarians, Socialists, or neither? Libertarians with "some degree of Socialism"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

Tabooing the terms may get you farther, as then you may identify the particular policies you're concerned with.

It appears that standard lab rats and mice are all morbidly obese. Using them as model organisms may give misleading results that fail to transfer to humans, or even to healthy rats and mice.

Or it may give extremely accurate results. Have you walked around in a mall lately, and actually looked at people?

(Here's hoping the rest of the world isn't getting as portly as the US.)

Given the historical usage of "should", I can't endorse this. Instead, I'd go with "become who you want to be".

Shut up an calculate brings up two points.

Knowledge is not necessarily representational. It may just be algorithmic. You may know that performing a certain calculation gives the right answer, but be unable to map all elements of the calculation to real entities.

We'd rather be able to do white box testing than black box testing, but I'll take a useful black box.

Back before Bell's Theorem ruled out local hidden variables, it seemed possible that (as Einstein thought) there was some more complete description of reality which we didn't have, and the quantum theory summarized incomplete knowledge of this more complete description.

EY seems a big fan of Jaynes. Has he ever specifically confronted Jayne's arguments against Bell?

Jaynes paper on EPR and Bell's Theorem: http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/cmystery.pdf