I'm pretty sure that thousands upon thousands of stories like this - where the "normal" functioning of global capitalism is inseparable from some brutal social repression, delegitimizing the ruling narrative that economic "efficiency" and ethics/human decency should be separate magisteria - have never made it to the Western press, or only made a tiny splash. For ideological reasons.

I agree with your point, in general--I don't think imperialism, economic or otherwise, is often all that great for indigenous populations--but in this specific assertion, I think you're falling prey to the hostile media effect. I've seen coverage of Foxconn suicides in some pretty doggoned mainstream western media.

...it seems much more sensible...

This is the "ridiculous munchkin ideas" thread, not the "sensible advice you've already heard" thread.

This could potentially be considered fraud.

A more pertinent worry. Especially with cards that give a percentage of each purchase as "reward points" or something, I'd be worried about this.

Use nicotine patches and porn to change your sexual preferences?

You really did get lucky. In the Tampa Bay area, we've only had one meetup; that was years ago, when Michael Vassar was traveling through.

I don't see that this information is freely convertible into -decisions-. If you're betting on decisions, effectively you're voting with money.

The governance model is "vote on values, bet on beliefs." It's the "values" part that lets you convert information into decisions.

If you really want rationalist (more properly, post-rationalist) arguments in favor of God, I recommend looking through Will Newsome's comments from a few years ago; also through his twitter accounts @willnewsome and @willdoingthings.

If you follow my advice, though, may God have mercy on your soul; because Will Newsome will have none on your psychological health.

You're right that prior probability gets very, very messy. It's a bit too abstract to actually be helpful to us.

You cannot escape the necessity of dealing with priors, however messy they are.

So, then, all we can do is look at the evidence we do have.

The available evidence supports an infinite number of hypotheses. How do you decide which ones to consider? That is your prior, and however messy it may be, you have to live with it.

a very valid way to become immortal is to change yourself into something which is easy to make immortal. You just lose everything about yourself that death would have taken.

Death takes more from someone who hasn't changed themselves, at least partially, into something that can survive past it.

A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed, or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely...A legend, Mr. Wayne.

How does this work with Clippy (the only paperclipper in known existence) being tempted with 3^^^^3 paperclips?

This sounds a little bit like it might depend on the choice of SSA vs. SIA.

I'm not saying I'm willing to code that up; I'm just saying that a genetic algorithm (such as Evolution) creating agents which use heuristics to generate hypotheses (such as humans) can work at least as well as anything we've got so far.