A huge chunk of an MBA'a job is to play a hostile asymmetric game against their employees (where their productivity has somewhere between negative value and positive sentimental value to them and their wages have negative value to you), and an approximately zero sum game against competitors, and a more neutral zero sum game against their customers trading quality and advertizing for price. These sorts of games are complicated and winning strategies change as the playing field evolves and your opponents change tactics. A working strategy could quite legitimately be described as "it simply works, don't ask why" because no one has quite figured out why. And different strategies will work better or fail miserably depending on who the other players are.

As a general rule, the easiest way to verify a scientific discovery is to find out how the original discoverer did it and replicate their experiment. There are sometimes easier ways, and occasionally the discoverers used some expensive equipment... but mostly the requirement is some math and elbow grease/patience. Another advantage of replicating the original discovery is that you don't accidentally use unverified equipment or discoveries (ie equipment dependent on laws that were unknown at the time).

This refereed medical journal article, like many others, made the same mistake as my undergraduate logic students, moving the negation across the quantifier without changing the quantifier. I cannot recall ever seeing a medical journal article prove a negation and not make this mistake when stating its conclusions.

That would be interesting if true. I recommend finding another one, since you sya they're so plentiful. And I also recommend reading it carefully, as the study you chose to make an example of is not the study you were looking for. (If you don't want to change the exemplar study, it may also be of interest what is your prior for "PhilGoetz is right where all of LessWrong is wrong')

The different but related question of the proportion of people (especially scientists, regulators, and legislators) misinterpreting such studies might also be worth looking into. It wouldn't surprise me if people who know better make the same mistake as your logic students, possibly in their subconscious probability sum.

Nice questions. Could you please explain me how "Matthew 26:39" is related to "Jesus' willingness to die for our sins"?

Most any skill can be abused, even the most useful ones.

I would have to agree with that. Still, one can ask if generally speaking, a person is better off learning Skill X.

(Sensible if legal) Compound-interest cryonics: Devote a small chunk of your resources towards a fund which you expect to grow faster than the rate of inflation, with exponential growth (the simplest example would be a bank account with a variable rate that pays epsilon percent higher than the rate of inflation in perpetuity). Sign a contract saying the person(s) who revive you receive the entire pot. Since after a few thousand years the pot will nominally contain almost all the money in the world this strategy will eventually incentivise almost the entire world to dedicate itself to seeking your revival. Although this strategy will not work if postscarcity happens before unfreezing, it collapses into the conventional cryonics problem and therefore costs you no more than the opportunity cost of spending the capital in the fund before you die. (Although apparently this is illegal)

(from the link)

The rule is often stated as follows: “No interest is good unless it must vest, if at all, not later than twenty-one years after the death of some life in being at the creation of the interest." For the purposes of the rule, a life is "in being" at conception.

It seems a workaround would be to keep around a frozen embryo. Since frozen embryos are viable with current technology, they probably have to qualify as not dead. You could probably also do it via donating the money to an "independent" organization, but that's not as cool as using cryonics as a workaround to aid your cryonics.

The bigger problem is that you'll have trouble investing the money at a rate higher than inflation (and keep in mind that in the US the rate of inflation is much higher than the official number)

There's just so many routes for an AI to gain power.

Internet takeover: not a direct route to power, but the AI may wish to acquire more computer power and there happens to be a lot of it available. Security flaws could be exploited to spread maliciously (and an AI should know a lot more about programming and hacking than us). Alternately, the AI could buy computing power, or could attach itself to a game or tool it designed such that people willingly allow it onto their computers.

Human alliance: the AI can offer a group of humans wealth, power, knowledge, hope for the future, friendship, charismatic leadership, advice, far beyond what any human could offer. The offer could be legit or a trick, or both. In this way, the AI could control the entirety of human civilization, or whatever size group it wishes to gain direct access to the physical world.

Robot bodies: the AI could design a robot/factory combination capable of self-replication. It would be easy to find an entrepreneur willing to make this, as it implies nearly infinite profits. This is closes to our current technology and easiest to understand, already popularized by various movies. Furthermore, this seems the only method that could be done without assistance from even one human, since the necessary components may already exist.

3D printers: technically a subset of robot bodies, but with improvements to 3D printers the factory size would be much smaller.

Biotechnology: biotechnology has proven its worth for making self-replicators, and microscopic size is sufficient. The AI would need to design a computer --> biology link to allow it to create biotechnology directly. We already have a DNA --> protein machine (ribosomes) and a data -- DNA system (however companies that produce made-to-order DNA do it). All that is needed is for the AI to be able to figure out what proteins it wants.

Chemo/bio/nanotechnology: Odds are the AI would prefer some alternatives to our DNA/protein system, one more suited to calculation rather than abiogenesis/evolution. However, I have no concrete examples.

Reprogramming a human: Perhaps the AI considers the current robots unacceptable and can't design its own biotechnology, and thinks humans are unreliable. Besides merely convincing humans to help it, perhaps the AI could use a mind-machine interface or other neuro-techonlogy to directly control a human as an extension of itself. This seems like a rather terrible idea, since the AI would probably prefer either a robotic body, biological body, or nano-techological body of its own design. Would make for a nice horror story though,

If dancing will largely prevent you from having interesting conversations, it may well be an antiskill-- but if you go to a lot of nightclubs where loud music makes conversation difficult, knowing how to dance seems very useful indeed!

This seems like a poor example -- why go to loud nightclubs if not to dance, conversely knowing how to dance increases the chance that you'll choose to go to loud nightclubs. The benefits and drawbacks of dancing are similar whether the music is loud or soft. It only makes sense if you were dragged to the party and had to make the best of it.

I think a better example would be martial arts -- there are situations where knowing martial arts could get you into a ton of trouble (eg some gang wants to beat you up as a show of dominance, but with trained instinct you manage to hurt one of them), and others where it could save your life. As a more mundane example, knowing facts about politics seems to polarize people by allowing them better motivated skepticism of opposing viewpoints.

Is Bayesianism a skill or an anti-skill?

First, I should note that all the most common/obvious questions have been thoroughly answered (where thorough refers to length). For many of these questions, you could get a better answer from reading what has already been written about it. Edit: you probably don't want to ask these questions as bluntly as I've worded them.

Why is choice of god mainly determined by which country a person was raised in, like eg language but unlike eg science? Does belief in God help one make more accurate predictions (not "better explanations") than using a secular model?

Why is wisdom praised throughout the Bible, except for a reversal in the New Testament, where standard wisdom is condemned as an opponent to Godly wisdom? Why is it that higher education leads to lower rates of theism, and what is this evidence of?

Why are various good traits assigned to God? For example, why is God considered forgiving if He demands a blood sacrifice (human sacrifice according to Christians) before He can forgive sins? I know humans who can forgive without requiring any sacrifice, nor even a request for forgiveness, remorse, etc. Why is God considered just, when He is willing not only to excuse evildoers, but actually punish the innocent in their place as a sacrifice (and eternally reward people for a trivial thing with no moral value like believing in Jesus)? Why is God considered merciful what with going out of His way to eternally punish people in Hell? I've heard that the answer to this sort of question is that God is holy -- is holiness some sort of terrible character flaw that we must avoid at all costs, or something to be emulated?

Why do people say that Jesus willingly died for our sins, when He clearly didn't (Matthew 26:39) and don't forget that disobeying God is frequently regarded as resulting in eternal damnation. Some people say that Jesus suffered in our place -- shouldn't that mean eternal damnation, not being dead for 3 days? Why can't I die for everyone's sins, or at least my own? Why all the confusion with what exactly "death" means in the Bible, especially if it starts in Genesis 3 yet is prevented by believing in Jesus?

Compare Genesis 3:3-5 vs Genesis 3:22. Why is the serpent considered a liar? Why is God upset at humans knowing good and evil in Genesis, yet elsewhere wants that distinction taught?

Consider the sort of worlds created by humans to interact without other humans -- eg the worlds in which MMORPGs are set. These worlds have moral laws, unbreakable ones. For example, in many MMORPGs, theft is simply against the laws of physics in that universe, as is murder but not dueling, much like in our universe traveling faster than the speed of light is forbidden. Why wasn't our universe designed with moral laws of some kind to protect one person from another (eg such a universe could allow dueling to the death, gambling, and adultery, but not murder, theft and rape, as part of the laws of physics). Free will and choice are not the answer, as I am not free to travel faster than the speed of light, regardless of my will or choice, nor is the ability to violate another's will necessarily and improvement in free will.

How would the world be different if someone else (eg the listener, or Mother Teresa) were made omnipotent and omniscient in place of God?