Perhaps a person tends to make more assumptions in areas not thoroughly familiar. Short-cutting comprehension as a means of saving time or effort where the cost of more study outweighs the benefits, especially short term. Not so much a cognitive effect but a necessary memory expedient.

In this case "taken aback" is a little stronger and hostile than "surprised," but it's not at all in terms of "I should get free food of my choosing." I'm not frustrated that a Holiday party on the other side of the continent isn't offering free food that I like. I'm frustrated that in a gathering of intellectuals who have dedicated their lives to rationality and the study of how to create AI that will, hopefully, be able to radically change the world, eating meat doesn't seem to have even registered as a bad thing with any of them. This does not bode well, IMO, on the nature of the hypothetical utopian future I might look forward to.

(It was later pointed out that the menu DID include vegetarian things, but those things were all things I'd consider obviously a "side dish" as opposed to a main course. Other vegetarians might disagree with me on that, and if that was the intent of the organizers, than I do apologize. But when the subject was brought up in that thread it didn't seem to be)

Ugh. Without paragraph breaks, the above is very unpleasant to read. Please add more structure to your posts.

some humans cannot experience pain

Human vegetables cannot experience pain. Some aware humans may not experience pain from being burnt or cut, but they still experience emotional and psychological pain. This is a very important distinction. I think much of the suffering we cause animals is in the latter categories, although I think they have far less ability to experience such (so the same situations cause far less pain then they would a human).

That said, if we treat and kill animals humanely, their deaths don't bother me unless the animals seem aware and intelligent enough to be invested in goals that we might be thwarting by ending their lives.

Likewise, if we could engineer animals so that they could not feel any sort of pain or distress, physical or emotional, I don't think I could object to any sort of ill-treatment. I wouldn't necessarily approve, but that's more of a squick thing than an actual offense to my morals.

I like the spirit, but the phrasing needs work. I'm probably not the best person to ask about this but here's what I can identify that needs improvement.

1) "learn to love finding out you were wrong" feels long and clunky. Can we say this in fewer syllables?

2) For some reason, having three sentences of the same form carries a lot of impact, while having only two feels weak. We need another sentence of the form "if you X, then learn to love Y". Perhaps we could change the third sentence to fit this form?

3) "If your emotions are not appropriate to your values" also feels long and clunky.

Sorry about not offering much constructive, but since I'm hopefully not the best writer on this site someone else ought to.

If eating meat is wrong because animals suffer, is it bad to eat animals that don't suffer? Most farm animals are man-made, genetically modified by breeding, to provide food for man. I have been told that some humans cannot experience pain. I suppose that condition may occur from time to time in domestic animals. Suppose pain was bred out of animals raised for food or labs genetically modified animals to eliminate pain. Would meat eating then be less immoral? Because domestic animals are bred for food, they are highly specialized. Dairy cattle and chicken cannot survive without human assistance. A friend likes to say that a farmer is just a cow's way of living like a queen. The animals will die and be food for something. Is it morally better to let the animal die of foot and mouth and feed the death beetles instead of man? I suspect that hanging a moral issue on meat eating because of suffering is anthropomorphic to some degree. All things die and become food. Even me. To demonstrate that eating meat is unhealthy would require a sample of non-meat eating humans for comparison. Does such a population exist? My impression is that as economies have grown and more meat has been added to the diet that overall morbidity decreases. It is true that over indulgence in animal fat can cause problems in my culture but Eskimos ate nothing else for generations without ill effect. Today they get fat on sugar and starches. Is it the food that is bad or the lifestyle? Unsustainable agriculture is agriculture that drains the soil of nutritive value. In the 17th and 18th century soils all over Europe were depleted. North America was the solution. But modern farming and so-called factory farming have reversed that trend. Soils that could no longer support people are now producing excesses of crops. Instead of increasing exports, the European Union has had to mandate ‘set asides' where no crops can be grown to prevent mountains of over supply. Fact is that domestic animals have better lives and better deaths then any of their wild fellows enjoy. Fact is that a meat eating diet improves the overall health of developing nations. Fact is that intensive modern agriculture and factory farming have reduced the burden on nature and virtually eliminated human hunger wherever it is practiced. Vegetarianism is a choice but it is not a moral choice.

See also this article by Steve Silberman.

One problem I had when reading Silberman is that there was some vagueness around what the "placebo effect" was supposed to be. He was constantly referring to it as if it were a real thing, but that struck me as a figure-ground inversion: a controlled experiment doesn't "measure the placebo effect", it tries to accurately measure the effect of the drug's active ingredient by keeping every other effect the same (i.e. identically distributed). (Things cleared up a little for me when I read Peter Lipson's response to Silberman, though his critique also has some vagueness to it.)

So what "the placebo effect" really means is "every random effect other than that of the active ingredient". It does not mean "the beneficial effects of taking a pill that you think is going to help even though it contains no active ingredient", even though that's the meaning implied by these articles.

The linked article is different in an interesting way. The study referenced measured the difference between a "no treatment" group (i.e. no pill but the same interaction with doctors) and a group receiving treatment consisting of an avowedly inactive pill patients were told would help through "psychological effects".

One problem I can see is that the instrument used to measure "effects" of the "placebo" is itself psychological: the IBS-GIS as far as I can tell is a questionnaire given to the patients. So quite possibly this study is replicating priming effects, not necessarily measuring actual difference in health outcomes.

I like your piece, Mass_Driver.
I hope you can tolerate my discourse as a sort of 'stream of consciousness'. What is the proper contribution of a rational person that will give meaning and enjoyment in life? I decide to test the question against the little I know about such things. What is the natural role of individuals in evolution? I believe it is simply to pass on the species to the next generation through supporting current living species success. Evolution has no interest in my individual skills and outputs. It wants another generation of my species. All I need to be an achiever is that I do no harm to my species and if I can add a little extra it will be for my pleasure because evolution doesn’t care. So I am quite smug about my achievements. I have grown daughters and I have grandchildren and that satisfies my primary purpose. In addition, I have spent years educating others, creating horticultural beauty for others, and myself and have worked diligently to improve the lot of disabled people in my community. That satisfies evolution and gives me pleasure I did not discover the graviton. I did not succeed Dr. Borlaug. I have not cured autism. But I have satisfied the standard of nature so I am an achiever; as are you.

This smug self-satisfaction did not come to me until retirement age. It is necessary to struggle for yourself and others when you are of working age. But your success is determined by the fact of your birth. You are a bit of the evolutionary ocean. Enjoy the swim.

He took up cambisting.

I think I own some halfling programs !

It will be difficult to measure without a clear definition. Perhaps, a taxonomy of definitions based on frequency of application would help so that important changes over small domains would be measured separately from unimportant changes over larger domains so that the rate of change in particle physics would a show a measure different from the development of robot vacuum cleaners. But once having determined clean definitions and categories, a simple count expressed as quantity per year, or other time frame, would give a rate. Those expressions could be used to compare a periods of time and determine if technological change was advancing.