I think Less Wrong has an abnormally high percentage of lurkers because if participating at any web site is intimidating, participating at Less Wrong is especially intimidating because of the high level of discourse and English linguistic proficiency.

For the strictest definition of lurker, if you have registered for an account you are not or are not longer a lurker, but the definition is really not important.

If you haven't already, do check out Eby's Instant Irresistible Motivation video for learning how to create positive motivation.

Interesting. In fact, it seems to mesh with the process I've successfully used to do things like cleaning my desk.

Unfortunately, many of the tasks I have to do don't lend themselves to the visualization in step 1. How does one visualize having studied for an exam, or completed an exercise routine?

It's very hard to compare one example of genocide to another, particularly when you are comparing events that occurred in different eras. As the genocides of the 20th century proved, technology changes the game by making it easier to commit systematic mass murder. Therefore, comparing body counts or even the frequency of mass slaughter doesn't truly compare two ideologies.

I would say that Gall's Law is about the design capacities of human beings (like Dunbar's Number), or is something like "there's a threshold to how much new complexity you can design and expect to work", with the amount of complexity being different for humans, superintelligent aliens, chimps, or Mother Nature.

(the limit is particularly low fo Mother Nature - she makes smaller steps, but got to make much more of them)

Deleated as a repeat.

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

WIlliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin

I'm not sure.

Isn't the first rocket or airplane also built on simple technologies?

I'm not saying that the first rocket and first airplane falsified Gall's Law. I'm saying that, had the space shuttle, in the form in which it was actually built, been the first rocket or the first airplane, it would have falsified Gall's Law.

I wonder if anyone else is reading this...

Surely having accurate positive self-beliefs is a win over having inaccurate positive self-beliefs, even if having inaccurate positive self-beliefs is a loss compared to having accurate negative self-beliefs. I don't suggest that you should become luminous enough to say, "Wow, I suck in the following ways!" and then quit.

I am generally confused by the metaethics sequence, which is why I didn't correct Pengvado.

at some point you need at least one arbitrary principle. Once you have an arbitrary moral principle, you can make non-arbitrary decisions about the morality of situations.

Agreed, as long as you have found a consistent set of arbitrary principles to cover the whole moral landscape. But since our preferences are given to us, broadly, by evolution, shouldn't we expect that our principles operate locally (context-dependent) and are likely to be mutually inconsistent?

So when we adjust to a new location in the moral landscape and the logician asks up to justify our movement, it seems that, generally, the correct answer would be shrug and say, 'My preferences aren't logical. They evolved.'

If there's a difference in two positions in the moral landscape, we needn't justify our preference for one position. We just pick the one we prefer. Unless we have a preference for consistency of our principles, in which case we build that into the landscape as well. So the logician could pull you to an (otherwise) immoral place in the landscape unless you decide you don't consider logical consistency to be the most important moral principle.