Great post.

Here's some additional reading that supports your argument:

Distract yourself. You're more honest about your actions when you can't exert the mental energies necessary to rationalize your actions.

And the (subconcious) desire to avoid appearing hypocritical is a huge motivator.

I've noticed this in myself often. I faithfully watched LOST through the third season, explaining to my friends who had lost interest around the first season that it was, in fact, an awesome show. And then I realized it kind of sucked.

Picture of Eliezer in monk's robes (That is you, right?), stories about freemason-esque rituals, specific vocabulary with terms like, "the Bayesian conspiracy".

It's all tongue in cheek, and I enjoy it. But if you're trying to not look like a cult, then you're doing it wrong.

In the modern world, karate is unlikely to save your life. But rationality can.

The term "bayesian black-belt" has been thrown around a number of times on OB and LW... this, in my mind, seems misleading. As far as I can tell there are two ways in which bayesian reasoning can be applied directly: introspection and academia. Within those domains, sure, the metaphor makes sense... in meatspace life-and-death situations? Not so much.

"Being rational" doesn't develop your quick-twitch muscle fibers or give you a sixth sense.

Perhaps, where you live, you are never in danger of being physically accosted. If so, you are in the minority. Rationality may help you avoid such situations, but never with a 100% success rate. When you do find yourself in such a situation, you may find yourself wishing you'd studied up on a little Tae Kwon Do.

On at least two occasions - one only a year past - my life was at serious risk because I was not thinking clearly. ... As a gambler I don't like counting on luck, and I'd much rather be rational enough to avoid serious mistakes.

Can you give an example of how being "more rational" could have avoided the accidents?

Of course, properly applying rational techniques will bleed over into all areas of your life. Having a more accurate map of the territory means that you will make better decisions. The vast majority of these decisions, however, can be written off as common sense. Just because I drink coffee when I drive at night to stay alert doesn't make me a master of the "martial art of rationality".

Perhaps there's something fundamental I'm missing here, but the linearity of events seems pretty clear. If Omega really did calculate that I would give him the $100 then either he miscalculated, or this situation cannot actually occur.

That's absolutely true. In exactly the same way, if the Omega really did calculate that I wouldn't give him the $100 then either he miscalculated, or this situation cannot actually occur.

The difference between your counterfactual instance and my counterfactual instance is that yours just has a weird guy hassling you with deal you want to reject while my counterfactual is logically inconsistent for all values of 'me' that I identify as 'me'.

There are various intuition pumps to explain the answer.

The simplest is to imagine that a moment from now, Omega walks up to you and says "I'm sorry, I would have given you $10000, except I simulated what would happen if I asked you for $100 and you refused". In that case, you would certainly wish you had been the sort of person to give up the $100.

Which means that right now, with both scenarios equally probable, you should want to be the sort of person who will give up the $100, since if you are that sort of person, there's half a chance you'll get $10000.

If you want to be the sort of person who'll do X given Y, then when Y turns up, you'd better bloody well do X.

We're assuming Omega is trustworthy? I'd give it the $100, of course.

This post goes hand in hand with Crisis of Faith. Eliezer's post is all about creating an internal crisis and your post is all about applying that to a real world debate. Like peanut-butter and jelly.

If you want to correct and not just refute then you cannot bring to the table evidence that can only be seen as evidence from your perspective. Ie. you cannot directly use evolution as evidence when the opposing party has no working knowledge of evolution. Likewise, a christian cannot convince an atheist of the existence of God by talking about the wonders of His creation. If you picture you and your opponent's belief systems as vin-diagrams then the discussion must start where they overlap, no matter how small that sliver of common knowledge might be. Hopefully, if you and your opponent employ crisis-of-faith properly, those two circles will slowly converge.

There is an excellent example of "priming" the mind here.

The idea is that specific prior knowledge drastically changes the way we process new information. You listen to a sine-wave modulated recording that is initially unintelligible. You then listen to the original recording. You are now primed. Listen again to the modulated recording and suddenly the previously unintelligible recording is clear as day.

I first listened to all of the samples on December 8th, when the link was posted on kottke.org. If I'm not mistaken that means it's been exactly 100 days since I last heard, or even thought about, these recordings. I listened to them again just a few minutes ago and understood every single one of them perfectly.

I can't decide if this is impressive or terrifying.

Just did a quick search of this page and it didn't turn up... so, by far, the most memorable and referred-to post I've read on OB is Crisis of Faith.

I hope that Kurige comes back to verify this, but I'll bet that when he said

I chose to believe in the existence of God - deliberately and consciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existence of God.

he did not mean, "My belief isn't correlated with reality". Rather, I'll bet, he meant exactly what you meant when you said

telling yourself X doesn't make X true

By saying that his choice had no effect on reality, I expect that he meant that his control over his belief did not entail control over the subject of that belief, i.e., the fact of the matter.

His attribution of Orwellian doublethink to himself is far more confusing. I have no idea what to make of that. Maybe your advice in this post is on point there. But the "absolutely zero effect" quote seems unobjectionable.