Please correct me if I'm wrong, but did you just describe the difference between Serif (letters with more lines than they need to have) and Sans Serif (letters with only as many lines as they need) fonts?

If so, that was well done - both of you! It is no easy task to effectively communicate something you don't have the words for. Nor is it easy to understand that communication! That's a pretty big win-win, in my experience. :)

What do folks here think about blood donation? Is the consensus that it's not an efficient way to help people?

So, my actual motivation is solving a specific problem I set myself: if I have two or more processes running on different machines, with access to the public internet, but no guarantee of locally open ports beyond 80 and 443, no knowledge of any existing sibling processes, and no guarantee that any previously-established communication channel (like a mail server, message queue or coordinating service) is still active, how do they form a peer group?

The first not-completely-terrible solution I hit upon was for them to monitor existing chatter-heavy online services such as Reddit or Wikipedia, use some sort of pre-established scoring rule to identify esoteric topics, and obliquely pass data to one another in comments or discussion of that topic whenever it arises. Image steganography is a good inroad here, since Reddit is very image-heavy and doesn't draw too much attention to itself, but most services you can use to anonymously host images (like imgur) strip metadata from the images, so dumping some cyphertext in the image header won't work.

I'm still keen on putting together a text solution, because it interests me, and I find the idea of Reddit bots carrying out human conversations while passing covert information to each other highly appealing.

I think this writing is very good, but the way the words look is not normal. The words have letters with more lines than they need to have, stuck onto the ends of other lines, but the other writing on the Less Wrong shared computer thing uses letters with only as many lines as they need, and the words under each other are closer together.

LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?

My formerly existing but weakly skeptical atheism and generic anti-supernaturalism got really strengthened here. I bought into the idea that the supernatural means the propositon that some mental things are are not reducible to nonmental things and from that it is only a small jump to say that mental things are entirely in the map, not in the terrain, it is a useful shorthand model to think of some things as mental but they are never irreducibly so in the terrain. So irreducibly mental things i.e. supernatural things are always, in principle, map-terrain mistakes. So we can on the map level think of medicine having healing properties, because the effect they have on a certain condition is what we put into a mental category of making us "healthier", but the medicine does not actually heal bodies, it just changes bodies. From this viewpoint, a Potion of Healing is map-terrain mistake, as it suggests a substance could have a real healing property. But healing is a mental property, a property of models, maps, not real things. You could say the same about a magic sword that has an bloodthirsty evil spirit in it. The real world has only change, certain things can effect certain changes, but it is entirely a mental model that we call that change helping, harming, healing, good, evil, cruel, nice, killing, purifying etc.

Sh1t, now it seems to me the single most important step from the medieval-alchemical world to the world of science was understanding the map-terrain problem! That a Philosopher's Stone (which does not simply turn lead to gold but improves everything) cannot exist in principle and not just empirically doesn't, because the idea of improvement itself is a mental category that does not exist in the terrain!

And now my beloved Dragonlance novels feel utterly stupid to me.

(Note: I haven't read HPMOR beyond the first few chapters, the conflation of the two worlds, rational and fantasy, made me feel uncomfortable and dizzy somehow.)

For fun, what is the worst fantasy or other fictional offender of mistaking mental phenomena for something essentially real? My proposal: the ideas that goodness or evil are substances and they can formed into magic objects such as sword made of pure evil. Not sure where I've read that but pretty sure some novels proposed something like that.

If you can recommend any further reading even if only tangentially relevant to what I wrote here I will be grateful. Am I no the first one to notice the all-improving Philosopher's Stone could not exist in principle because improvement is a mental category and not real, right?

Then repeating them in this way in a public forum is quite a breach of trust.

This is me hoping not to get caught. :(

You are talking about steganography.

That one is evil.

Assuming the question was known in advance, the obvious solution is for the people who care more about their grades to pay those who care less to circle A while circling B themselves. If they trust each other, they might even be able to do this after-the-fact.

The universalizing answer would be to choose A 51% of the time.

What was the ratio of As?

I am thinking of recommending this to people, all of whom are unlikely to pay. Is having people acquire this for $0 who would otherwise not have read it beneficial or harmful to MIRI? (If the answer is "harmful because of paying for people to download it", I can email it to my friends with a payment link instead of directing them to your website.)

Yeah, that section is called speculative for a reason!

I guess the attractiveness of this option partly rests on whether you think parents generally have too much or too little influence/incentive/involvement in their children or not.