Meditation 3: [Hardest of the meditations, for me.] Let us observe the difference between [post-utopian]-->[colonial alienation] and a connected thing (say [I see you picked Ace]-->[You see you picked Ace] from a deck of cards): In the first case, there is no way to settle an argument about whether Ellie is post-utopian or not. We would predict that it would cause arguments between people that are not settled. Anything connected to the causal web is more likely to lead to settlable arguments, at least among people behaving more-or-less rationally. It is not a perfect test, but it does suggest that I expect to see different things from connected networks and unconnected networks, like people changing their minds.

[Cheating, since I already read some Zombie sequences, but have not read any replies in this thread] The consciousness causes you to speak of consciousness, which is the result of neurons in your brain firing your jaw muscles (and other muscles, and so on). If it was epiphenomenal enough that none would talk about it, we wouldn't have this question in the first place.

[Has consciousness] --> [Writes books/blogs on consciousness]

Causually connects consciousness to the universe.

Replying without reading any of the other answers. Apologies in advance for redundancy:

Meditation 1: The psychic cousin is indeed connected to the network of things. Let's assume that it works, for simplicity, on decks of two cards: an Ace and a King.

Probabilities: Moshe picked Ace/Cousin says Moshe picked Ace -- 0.4 Moshe picked King/Cousin says Moshe picked Ace -- 0.1 Moshe picked Ace/Cousin says Moshe picked King -- 0.1 Moshe picked King/Cousin says Moshe picked Ace -- 0.4

The True Love/Communing is more complicated: Does True Love have any discernible effect? If we assume True Love, say, changes the probability of having a fight (or some property of the fight -- for example, a fight without reconciliation inside of 24 hours), then we should have a diagram:

True Love --> Communing says True Love | | \/ No fight

and resulting joint probability distributions. Since "fighting" is something observable (by a trained psychologist, say, who puts them in the "Love Lab" http://www.gottman.com/49847/The-Love-Lab.html) we have connectedness.

Dunno about Russian, but Hebrew has them for sure -- "T'khelet" means "Light blue", "Kakhol" means "blue". I know quite a few bilingual ~5yo kids, who, if they're wearing a light blue T-shirt, will scream at you if you say "you have a Kakhol T-shirt" in Hebrew, but will happily agree they are wearing a "blue" T-shirt -- thus showing that sufficient lack of reflectivity can have two conflicting vision systems in the same individual. (BTW -- "light blue" is just an approximation, it's a specific shade of light blue).

"Yet many highly intelligent people with normal rationality have terrible fashion sense"

Hrm, I'm not sure what evidence there is that highly intelligent people worse fashion sense than equivalent people [let's stick to the category of males, with which I'm most familiar]. It seems to me like "fashion" for males comes down to a few simple rules, that a monkey (or, for that matter any programmer or mathematician) can master. The problem seems to be that (1) one does need to master these rules (2) sometimes, it means one does not dress comfortably.

I would like to offer a competing hypothesis: nerds have just as much "innate" fashion sense as non-nerds, but they feel that fashion is beneath them, that dressing comfortably is more important than following fashion, or that they would prefer to dress to impress nerds (with T-shirts that say "P(H|E) = P(E|H)*P(H)/P(E)" for example) than to impress non-nerds. In other words, the much simpler hypothesis "dress is usually worn to self-identify as a member of a tribe" is enough to explain nerds' perceived lack of fashion sense.

[For the record, here is how a nerd male can "simulate" a reasonable facsimile of fashion sense: for semi-formal occasions, get a couple of nice suits and wear them. If nobody else would wear a tie, wear a suit without the tie (if your ability to predict whether people will wear a tie is that bad, improve it with explicit Bayesian approximation). For all other occasions, wear dark colored slacks and a button down shirt with a compatible color (ask a person you trust about which colors go with which, and keep a table glued to the inside of your closet. Any "nerd" has mastered skills tremendously more complicated than that (hell, correctly writing HTML is more complicated). One can only assume it is lack of motivation, not of ability.]

For myself as an example of nerd, I can definitely say the reason I dress "with a horrible fashion sense" is as a tribal identification scheme. In situations where my utility function would actually suffer because of that, I do the rational thing, and wear the disguise of a different tribe... (For example, when going on sales pitches to customers, I let the sales rep in charge of the sale to tell me what to dress down to the socks, on my wedding I let my wife pick out my clothes, etc.)

I'm not really sure how you can claim "techniques are value-neutral" without assuming what values are. For example, if my values contain a term for someone else's self-esteem, a technique that lowers their self-esteem is not value-neutral. If my values contain a term for "respecting someone else's requests", techniques for overcoming LMR are not value-neutral. Since I've only limited knowledge of the seduction techniques advanced by the community, I did not offer more -- after seeing some of the techniques, I decided that they are decidedly not value neutral, and therefore chose to not engage in them.

I cannot answer for Eliezer, but I can (perhaps) explain why the belief is "visibly insane".

1. There is footage of the airplanes flying into the building.
2. In hindsight, several engineering organizations that investigated the phenomena, decided that a collapse from the fires started was likely (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_World_Trade_Center )
3. In order to be a conspiracy, there would have had to be 3a. Someone who planted the explosives in a way to cause an organized collapse. 3b. People who shipped the explosives. 3c. People on the inside of FEMA and the other investigating organizations who looked into it. 3d. People on the inside of the FBI who swept under the rug the evidence for explosives. 3e. Nobody in the group of 3a-3d who had a change of heart and decided to come clean.

For 3 to be true, too many things to be true. For the non-conspiracy explanation, all that's needed is the (perhaps slightly surprising) fact that the fire caused a specific kind of collapse. Most "truthers" know about as much about physics as me (highschool mechanics, some basics in college). So for a given truther to believe that, the truther needs to assume a high degree of certainty for his or her intuitive physics estimation in the fairly subtle area of civil engineering. In fact, they'd have to have a degree of certainty so high that all the elements in 3 are not enough to sway them the other way. That degree of certainty should be reserved for actual trained civil engineered, and perhaps not even then...

It's not that costly if you do with university students: Get two groups of 4 university students. One group is told "test early and often". One group is told "test after the code is integrated". For every bug they fix, measure the effort it is to fix it (by having them "sign a clock" for every task they do). Then, do analysis on when the bug was introduced (this seems easy post-fixing the bug, which is easy if they use something like Trac and SVN). All it takes is a month-long project that a group of 4 software engineering students can do. It seems like any university with a software engineering department can do it for the course-worth of one course. Seems to me it's under $50K to fund?

Did anything come of the discussion? I would like to know, since there's a school in San Bruno I would love to give a talk at.