For starters, I'd say it would be best to take advice from people whose careers and accomplishments are to some extent a matter of public record. Then you can evaluate (a) whether they seem to have actually accomplished the things they're trying to teach you to accomplish, and (b) whether they seem to have accomplished those things via the procedure they're encouraging you to follow. If yes to both, then you might proceed further.

If you are privy to the information necessary to evaluate (b), you can just look at it directly and skip listening to the advice altogether.

For starters, I'd say it would be best to take advice from people whose careers and accomplishments are to some extent a matter of public record. Then you can evaluate (a) whether they seem to have actually accomplished the things they're trying to teach you to accomplish, and (b) whether they seem to have accomplished those things via the procedure they're encouraging you to follow. If yes to both, then you might proceed further.

In that case, the problem of making good advice seem too easy might come down to a couple of things. First, you want to see a good step-by-step procedure where you can really understand each step and imagine exactly what you'd have to do to achieve it. Second, it would be a red flag if any of those steps seem to be "magic" steps such as "Have a brilliant, lucrative idea for a business."

Glad you're doing this and sorry that I do not currently have time to proofread a batch of them myself.

This might be the only time ever that I can mention this without automatically sounding like an asshole, so here goes: Eliezer, whose writing is generally amazingly consistent and well-proofread with respect to style and punctuation, has the habit of using a hyphen, surrounded by single spaces, in place of a dash. He's far from alone in doing this, and it's an entirely reasonable habit to have given that the hyphen is an ASCII character but dashes aren't. However, it doesn't look good even on the web, and looks a lot worse in nicely typeset text. I'd strongly recommend replacing these space-enclosed hyphens with one of the two standard, correct dash usages: either an em (long) dash without spaces, or an en (short) dash enclosed in single spaces.

My apologies if this kind of advice isn't welcome or, of course, if you and your proofreading team already thought of it!

If you want to be a professional biologist (or any professional scientist) you will probably need to get one or more graduate degrees. (There are exceptions to this, but your career possibilities will be more limited.) This complicates matters in some respects and simplifies it in others. Let me mostly focus on ways it simplifies matters.

• Going to grad school will give you the chance to move someplace for a few years before eventually moving on to yet someplace else. This is great for a few reasons. You get a chance to see what it's like to move -- maybe it won't be as bad as you think. You defer making a more permanent decision until you're older and have more experience. You (maybe) get to see another part of the country for some perspective on where you live now. Even if you wind up not liking the place you go very much, it'll still have been a good experience for these reasons.
• If your parents are remotely reasonable, they have to be more ok with you moving away for solid career-related reasons than they would be with you moving away for more nebulous lifestyle-related reasons. (Although from this and your other thread, it sounds like your parents might actually not be remotely reasonable at all.)
• However, if you get some admission offers from grad programs, they might pay your travel expenses to go there and check out the programs. Furthermore, most good science PhD programs will fully fund your studies and living expenses, so saving up a bunch of money before moving isn't really an issue. Having this kind of financial freedom will enable you to defy your parents' ridiculousness about this. (You won't be living high on the hog by any means, but you'll have enough to get by.)
• If you can get good advice from your college professors about which grad programs would be a good match for your interests and aptitudes, this will usefully constrict your options and help you overcome the paralysis of choice. While ultimately you may want to be more discriminating about where you move for the long run, see my first bullet point for why it would probably be good to just get that first move under your belt.

I'm not a scientist, so I may be underestimating the possibilities for interesting, fulfilling employment in the sciences without a graduate degree -- others can correct me if this is the case. But I think I've given some reasons why you might want to consider grad school even if I'm wrong in that respect.

The chapter begins with a pretty delightful infelicity, since in 1678 Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was still 130 years away from its premiere.

If Siri made the journey back in time, why are you surprised that an mp3 of Beethoven's 5th made the journey? Siri was created slightly later than Beethoven's 5th.

Somewhat more amazing is that this iPhone has cellular service in the 17th century, and can make video calls to future people. It must be on Verizon.

Or where the "scientists" would come from since that term wouldn't exist for another 150 years or so.

The chapter begins with a pretty delightful infelicity, since in 1678 Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was still 130 years away from its premiere. Granted, this is very specialized knowledge available only to professional musicologists like myself and I doubt Beck's publisher can afford my consulting fees.

(I can just imagine the English scientists standing around wondering why this lunatic is inflicting this cacophony on them and looking at them so expectantly.)

You know, this is one of those cases (coming out as GLBT would be another one) where we sometimes have to, in essence, parent our parents. Be the patient grownup while they have their temper tantrum, and after they calm down be willing to forgive the hurtful, ridiculous things they said. I think it's more than reasonable to say you'll only talk to her about this when she can be at least calm about it. Encourage her to ask you questions and answer them honestly. Reassure her that nothing about your relationship with her has changed -- she has no need to feel that she doesn't know you.

If this is really a shock to her, it might be a while before she can get used to it, and again, you have to be the patient grownup during that time. But she will probably get used to it eventually. And if after a reasonable length of time she is still giving you grief about it and making it clear that she doesn't accept you, you can let her know that she needs to hurry up and get over it or else she will not see you as often. (All this is entirely parrotting Dan Savage's advice to people whose parents don't accept their sexual orientation: as he says, the only leverage you ultimately have over your parents is your presence in their lives.)

I'll add this: in your conversations with your mother, this is not the right time to argue for the factual correctness of atheism. Even if you don't really believe this, I would emphasize that religion is a very personal matter and that you are just the kind of person to whom religion doesn't seem right. That way you're making it about you, not attacking the foundations of her own beliefs. (Furthermore, this can help reassure her that she didn't fail as a parent -- you were just not the kind of person who could have been given a Catholic education that would really stick.) Ultimately, having close personal relationships with people who you really disagree with about religion has to involve agreeing to disagree and to compartmentalize some things, and also at times to leave some topics off the table for discussion. Obviously, this isn't the way we'd behave in a society of pure rationalists, but the fact is that we do often want to have those relationships and so allowances must be made.

Lastly: you've done the right thing by -- and sorry to keep using this metaphor -- coming out of the closet. Society as a whole is bettered when religious people think of atheists not as a faceless, scary group but as a group of normal people including their own friends and/or children.

Basically, I disagree with this. A few thoughts:

(1) Even if we were all perfectly rational, it'd still take time to research the optimal answer to every question. Why shouldn't I outsource that research to people who are interested in doing it and whose basic viewpoints I trust? [Edit: RomeoStevens already made this point above.]

(2) What's the harm to you from posts on "applied rationality" topics being posted on LW? Don't read or comment on what you aren't interested in. If you prefer posts on the theory and practice of rationality itself, just read, comment on, and write those kinds of posts. LW Discussion is currently nowhere near being such a firehose that you can't quickly sift through what's been posted recently and decide which threads you're likely to be interested in.

(3) As we improve as rationalists, it's vital to repeatedly apply those skills in various contexts in order to practice them. Why shouldn't that practice take place in a quasi-social arena where others can point out flaws or gaps? If I think I've learned some skill of rationality (such as researching the optimal product to buy for some purpose), the odds of my continuing to apply it successfully with no further input from other interested people are not very good. I guess in this bullet point I'm arguing that even seemingly very object-level discussions are, in the LW context, actually functioning in part as discussions of rationality.

So, this is about developing a photographic memory for text, one paragraph at a time. Is that really something you want? Why not make an Anki flashcard out of the one thing (or more, if it's a really information-dense paragraph) you most want to remember from the text?