Done, all questions answered. Yvain, well done on clear questions and good design.

If possible, I'd be curious to hear more details about why Briggs found it too work-intensive. Her giving up on it was definitely not an outcome I would have predicted.

"as I am no different from anyone else as far as rational thinking is concerned" is the part that bothers me about this. This approach makes sense to me in the context of clones or Tegmark duplicates or ideal reasoning agents, sure, but in the context of actual other human beings? Not a chance. And I think the results of Hoftstadter's experiments proved that trusting other humans in this sense wouldn't work.

An informative read, thank you.

Also, for this "oh my god, and then I have to cite my sources!" I find that what makes life easier for me is to do in-place citations as I write (sometimes not completely correctly). That way, there is no "and then", as I've done all the thinking about my cites as I was writing.

That's it exactly! Thanks much. (It's a little disappointing how close my article comes to his, even stylistically. This was completely unintentional; I hadn't read his since it was published.)

Re: journals, I've edited it to also mention reproductions (which are accepted much less frequently). I should have mentioned reproductions in the first place, although what I was thinking of was more failures to reproduce results (as in the parapsychology example).

Reminds me of Scott Aaronson's Malthusianisms. Is this the article you couldn't find?

Also, I am not sure your example of science is correct: After all, plenty of very famous journals do publish retractions, and some that do not are (rightly) laughed at (parapsychology journals for example).

An appealing idea. I would also consider such an insurance.

I also see a problem, similar to kilobug's second point: How would such an insurance handle a person refusing some recommended treatment? Especially if the treatment is effective (say in terms of life expectancy), but also has nasty side effects (for a while/for the rest of your life/etc). The parallell obvious to me is life insurance and suicide, but life insurance does not pay out for death due to suicide. The policy becoming void if treatment is refused (without caveats) would, however, be a dealbreaker for many people (me included). As far as I can tell, Robin Hanson's proposal also does not address this.

I can imagine wanting to say something about what risk/quality of life/life expectancy tradeoffs I would want to make (and thus what treatment I would refuse), but it's not clear to me how something like this could be specified.

So, it’s like if you use a map of the territory to build a road from A to B, and then you later realize that the map that you used to build the road was wrong. But the road still takes you from from A to B! So it doesn’t matter if you built it with the wrong map, it still works.

I think this summary omits a key point: How we know that the road still takes us from A to B? As far as I can tell, the answer is "by experiment" --- we know from repeated use how the instruments behave, and therefore it doesn't matter what our map of the world was when we initially built them. It could, of course, be that they are off --- but we know (by experiment) their precision, and so we can use that to check precision on other things.

What do you think?

I think it's worth noting explicitly (though you certainly noted it implicitly) that meta-contrarianism does not simply agree with the original, non-contrarian opinion. Meta-contrarianism usually goes to great lengths to signal that it is indeed the level above, and absolutely not the level below, the default position.

An example, from a guy who lives in a local hipster capital:

People not interested in (or just unskilled at) looking cool will mostly buy their clothing at places like Wal-Mart. The "contrarian" cluster differentiates itself by shopping at very expensive, high-status stores (dropping $150 on a pair of jeans, say). Your hipster crowd does not respond to this by returning to Wal-Mart. Instead, they get very distinct retro or otherwise unusual clothing from thrift stores and the like, places that no one who simply, actually didn't care about signaling would never bother to seek out.

The counter-counter culture often cares just as much about differentiating itself from the culture as it does the counter-culture. The noveau-riche may not have to worry about this, if in their case it comes automatically, but other groups do.

You've misunderstood the axiom of non-dictatorship: it requires that there not be a person who is always capable of determining the outcome.

It is impossible, given Pareto efficiency, for there to be no person sometimes capable of determining the outcome (i.e. pivotal voter), because a unanimously pro-A group, which must elect A, can be turned into a unanimously pro-B group, which must elect B, by repeatedly changing the preference of just one individual. (But not the same individual every time, of course.)