A whole community of rationalists and nobody has noticed that his elementary math is wrong?

1.9 gigaFLOPS doubled 8 times is around 500 gigaFLOPS, not 500 teraFLOPS.

Big difference, and one that trashes his conclusion.

There is nothing about being a rationalist that says that you can't believe in God. I think the key point of rationality is to believe in the world as it is rather than as you might imagine it to be, which is to say that you believe in the existence of things due to the weight of evidence.

Ask yourself: do you want to believe in things due to evidence?

If the answer is no, then you have no right calling yourself a "wannabe rationalist" because, quite simply, you don't want to hold rational beliefs.

If the answer is yes, then put this into practice. Is the moon smaller than the earth? Does Zeus exist? Does my toaster still work? In each case, what is the evidence?

If you find yourself believing something that you know most rationalists don't believe in, and you think you're basing your beliefs on solid evidence and logical reasoning, then by all means come and tell us about it! At that point we can get into the details of your evidence and the many more subtle points of rational reasoning in order to determine whether you really do have a good case. If you do, we will believe.

The last Society for Neuroscience conference had 35,000 people attend. There must be at least 100 research papers coming out per week. Neuroscience is full of "known things" that most neuroscientists don't know about unless it's their particular area.

This professor, who has no doubt debated game theory with many other professors and countless students making all kinds of objections, gets three paragraphs in this article to make a point. Based on this, you figure that the very simple objection that you're making is news to him?

One thing that concerns me about LW is that it often seems to operate in a vacuum, disconnected from mainstream discourse.

Has anyone considered extending an invitation to Raymond Smullyan, as, say, a guest of honor to the summit (if not having done so already). Living in New York State, he recently published an amusing and short literary book (at age 89). There aren't many students of A. Church (recall that Turing was one of them) still with us. With Aubrey de Grey on the roster covering issues of longevity and more, an appearance by Ray Smullyan, provided he is willing and able, may raise the level of your conference not only intellectually, but also in terms of humor, humanity and perspective. I've heard he also does magic tricks. Thoughts?

One of my favourite posts here in a while. When talking with theists I find it helpful to clarify that I'm not so much against their God, rather my core problem is that I have different epistemological standards to them. Not only does this take some of the emotive heat out of the conversation, but I also think it's the point where science/rationalism/atheism etc. is at its strongest and their system is very weak.

With respect to untheistic society, I remember when a guy I knew shifted to New Zealand from the US and was disappointed to find that relatively few people were interested in talking to him about atheism. The reason, I explained, is that most people simply aren't sufficiently interested in religion to be bothered with atheism. This is a society where the leaders of both major parties in the last election publicly stated that they were not believers and... almost nobody cared.

This is interesting, but (as far as I know) a much better explanation as to why most people don't own stock is that they don't actually bother researching how to invest or spend much cognitive effort on investing.

Perhaps Napoleon's old statement needs a corollary: "Never attribute to a complicated model of behaviour contingent on the interconnection of numerous noisy empirical estimates that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

In case it hasn't already been posted by somebody, here's a nice talk about irrational behaviour and loss aversion in particular.

Changed title.

To make things more confusing, this says algorithmic/Kolmogorov complexity is a subfield of AIT.

Are you sure? I always thought that was "computational complexity". This seems to agree with my usage, as does this.