Thanks for writing this, this is an interesting area, and improving decision making is a worthwhile goal.

However, what I am a bit skeptical about is the extent to which people want to improve the decision making process. In LW-circles I can see that desire, but in the world at large it seems more important to win the argument than necessarily be right; there is some more work to do before they would even want to use the tools.

If we focus on LW-readers which are (hopefully) more interested in truth seeking, it would be interesting to see if there has been a discussion where one of these tools could really have made a difference. Personally, I usually don't have so much trouble following the causal steps - the difficulties lie usually in missing the background knowledge to weigh the arguments.

As a programmer I know the urge to come up with some solution for a problem, preferably in the form of some algorithm. But is there evidence that these tools actually help in realistic situations?

You might still be able to determine a manageable utility function for a lower animal. For humans it's simply too complex -- at least in 2010, just like the function that predicts next week's weather.

Agreed, but I'd say that people do have a utility function -- it's just that it may be so complex that it's better seen as a kind of metaphor than as a mathematical construct you can actual do something with.

I share your annoyance -- there seems to be a bias among some to use maths-derived language where it is not very helpful.

In addition, there's the work of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. It's even available as an audio book through Librivox.

John Stuart Mill is probably easier to read.

Lotteries are one clear example where many people ignore the expected value of their cough investment -- although the case presented here may be an exception.

Anyway, a very other common form of lottery is called insurance. There, as well, your expected values is negative, still, most people do get (voluntarily, and sometimes involuntarily) insurances. If you had a million houses, it would make little sense to buy fire insurance for them.

I would argue that the expected value is too limited a criterion for rationality; we'd also have to include the subjective feelings of security (insurance) or possible fortunes (lotteries).

Well, in this particular case, the 'new' knowledge is the new mainstream viewpoint, and this new mainstream viewpoint seems already present in Wikipedia (the article mentions the article on Wernicke's area).

So while it may sometimes be hard to change things in Wikipedia, the difficulties you mention do not seem to apply in this case. I would make the change myself if I were more knowledgable in this area

A full, generally agreed-upon definition may indeed be hard to formulate, which makes it even more important to formulate a good operational definition in the context of this article. That's not too much to ask, or? Otherwise, what do these numbers even mean?

I think this article would be better if it started with a definition of consciousness (or maybe even two definitions, a formal one and an operational one). It's hard to figure out how much sense the calculations make if we don't know what the results mean.

What about some concrete examples of people who have lost their edge because they achieved high status? Or some counter examples?

If I am thinking of some people of high status in different intellectual fields, say, scientists like Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russel or even technologists like Linus Torvalds, Paul Graham; I'm not sure I can see the kind of "High Status Stupidity" there. Or did I just pick the wrong examples?

Then, an obvious way to improve the situation would be for somebody knowledgeable to update the Wikipedia entries, or? It would actually be interesting to see how good Wikipedia is as a vector for spreading updated knowledge.