eliminativists want to prove that humans, like the blue-minimizing robot, don't have anything of the sort until you start looking at high level abstractions.

Just because something only exists at high levels of abstraction doesn't mean it's not real or explanatory. Surely the important question is whether humans genuinely have preferences that explain their behaviour (or at least whether a preference system can occasionally explain their behaviour - even if their behaviour is truly explained by the interaction of numerous systems) rather than how these preferences are encoded.

The information in a jpeg file that indicates a particular pixel should be red cannot be analysed down to a single bit that doesn't do anything else, that doesn't mean that there isn't a sense in which the red pixel genuinely exists. Preferences could exist and be encoded holographically in the brain. Whether you can find a specific neuron or not is completely irrelevant to their reality.

Exercise: Say "Ducks" whenever someone sneezes.

(No, this was not my idea. Jasen again.)

A billion and a half words. Can you mentally grasp how big that is?

1.5N GB, where N is the average bytes per English word. Multiply by, say, 5 for the HTML overhead and it would still all fit onto a 64GB memory stick uncompressed, though I'd want something faster for actually accessing it.

It would actually be larger, as you'd need all the images as well, and you'd want the ancillary things like wikisource and wiktionary (I don't know if those are independent projects or if they're included in your figure) but even so, it sounds like the whole thing would easily fit onto a typical hard disc.

Because those are the class of problems this post discusses.

From the top of the post:

A parole board considers the release of a prisoner: Will he be violent again? A hiring officer considers a job candidate: Will she be a valuable asset to the company? A young couple considers marriage: Will they have a happy marriage?

The cached wisdom for making such high-stakes predictions is to have experts gather as much evidence as possible, weigh this evidence, and make a judgment. But 60 years of research has shown that in hundreds of cases, a simple formula called a statistical prediction rule (SPR) makes better predictions than leading experts do.

To answer my own question, I personally figured out that the whole Santa story was a lie around the age of six or so, but I continued to believe in belief, that it was right or appropriate that young children be encouraged to believe in Santa Claus. I never confronted my parents about it, but we held an "I know you know I know" understanding, and I continued to prop up my younger sister's belief for years afterward. It wasn't until years later, after my sister had stopped believing, that I started to wonder why adults would want children to believe in Santa Claus, and whether their reasons for it were actually good.

I don't think it ever really encouraged me to question adults' motives so much as learning to question adults motives led me to question it. I was a bit surprised when I started to learn how traumatic the discovery can be for children, since my own realization never seemed like a big deal to me.

I'm bothered by the intertemporal implications of this, i.e. if I have $100 that I will spend to help the most humans possible, then I could either spend it today or invest it and spend $105 next year (assumed 5% ROR). Will I then ever spend the money on charity? Or will I always invest it, and just let this amassed wealth be distributed when I die?

Most of us allocate a particular percentage to charity, despite the fact that most people would say that nearly nothing we spend money on is as important as saving childrens lives.

I don't know whether you think it's that we overestimate how much we value saving childrens lives, or underestimate how important xbox games, social events, large tvs and eating tasty food are to us. Or perhaps you think it's none of that, and that we're being simply irrational.

I doubt that anyone could consistently live as if the difference between choice of renting a nice flat and renting a dive was one life per month, or that halving normal grocery consumption for a month was a childs life that month, etc. If that's really the aim, we're going to have to do a significant amount of emotional engineering.

I also want to stick up for the necessity of analysing the way that a charity works, not just what they do. For example, charities that employ local people and local equipment may save fewer people per dollar in the short term, but may be less likely to create a culture of dependence, and may be more sustainable in the long term. These considerations are important too.

I have to admire the cunning of your last sentence.

Or have I accidentally defected? I can't tell.

EDIT: I think the 'wizened' correction was intended to be a joke. When I read your piece originally the idea of you 'wizening up' made me smile, and I suspect that the corrector just wanted to share that idea with others who may have missed it.

Could that be a kind of intellectual assent vs belief test for Many Worlds?

No, because it assumes you're indifferent to any effects you have on worlds that you don't personally get to experience.

Imagine a raffle where the winner is chosen by some quantum process. Presumably under the many worlds interpretation you can see it as a way of shifting money from lots of your potential selves to just one of them. If you have a goal you are absolutely determined to achieve and a large sum of money would help towards it, then it might make a lot of sense to take part, since the self that wins will also have that desire, and could be trusted to make good use of that money.

Now, I wonder if anyone would take part in such a raffle if all the entrants who didn't win were killed on the spot. That would mean that everyone would win in some universe, and cease to exist in the other universes where they entered. Could that be a kind of intellectual assent vs belief test for Many Worlds?