Please, call me Ali. Ms. Corn is my mother.

...No, seriously, folks, it's a word, abbreviating it doesn't make sense. "Alicorn".

I very much appreciated reading this article.

As a general comment, I think that this forum falls a bit too much into groupthink. Certain things are assumed to be correct that have not been well argued. A presumption that utilitarianism of some sort or another is the only even vaguely rational ethical stance is definitely one of them.

Not that groupthink is unusual on the internet, or worse here than elsewhere! Au contraire. But it's always great to see less of it, and to see it challenged where it shows up.

Thanks again for this, Mr. Corn.

Is there a suitable substitute for tl;dr that you would find less distracting? I do want to signal "this is an ultra-short summary" to avoid people interpreting it as part of the "flow" of the whole article.

I noticed the distinction between wanting and liking as a result of my meditation practice. I began to derive great pleasure from very simple things, like the quality of an intake of breath, or the color combination of trees and sky.

And, I began to notice a significant decrease in compulsive wanting, such as for excess food, and for any amount of alcohol.

I also noticed a significant decrease in my startle reflex.

Similar results have been reported from Davidson's lab at the University of Wisconsin. http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/

The first category, "things you do even though you don't like them very much" sounds like many drug addictions.

It's not limited to drugs or even similar physical stimuli like tasty food; according to my personal experience you can get the same effect with computer games. There's games that can be plenty of fun in the beginning (while you're learning what works), but stop being so once you abstract from that to a simple set of rules by which you can (usually) win, but nevertheless stay quite addictive in the latter phase. Whenever I play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for more than a few hours, I inevitably end up at a point where I don't even need to verbally think about what I'm doing for 95%+ of the wall-clock time spent playing, but that doesn't make it much easier to quit.

Popular vocabulary suggests that this is a fairly common effect.

I now think that the constant wrongness of Ann Coulter isn't an accident. She is an almost perfect example of a pure anti-rationalist: someone who will always and only believe things that accord with her ideology.

I'm very opposed to this kind of statement, because one of my core beliefs is that reasonable people can and will disagree on politics. This sounds too much like people calling Bush or Obama stupid when they disagree.

I suspect that you have a strongly opposing political ideology to Coulter's, and this is biasing you against her. I am aware of factual errors in some of her books, especially the ones about evolution, obviously. But assuming that you don't like Coulter and that you disagree with her values, I don't think you can objectively comment on her rationality.

She will, no doubt, be right about things on occasion, by accident. But I'm starting to feel better about the reliability of my "shortcut to truth." :)

Most real-life issues admit of more than two answers. It's just the political and media approach to paint things as black and white.

In other words: reversed falsehood is not truth. You can't get at the truth by taking the opposite position from Ann Coulter. Because the vast majority of statements don't have a single opposite position.

So while you can judge her always wrong, it will only help you to be right by dismissing her opinions, not by suggesting the right ones.

Oh jeez you're asking a lot. Too many to count. Google her if you feel up to it.

And honestly, I don't really believe this is a serious guide to truth and falsehood. Every time I test it, it comes out right. But I can't run enough tests to know for certain.

For a claim that she is almost always wrong 'a few' examples won't be substantial evidence - assuming she has more than a few opinions. We'd need either an almost exhaustive catalog of her opinions, or a way to sample them in a sufficiently random fashion.

The first thing I saw was that Ann Coulter is convinced that Amanda and Raffaele are guilty. I immediately moved my belief in their guilt way down. When Ann Coulter takes a strong position on a controversial issue, she is almost always wrong.

Okay, I'll bite. Could you name a few examples of this, especially the ones that cemented this belief?