On the other hand I'd think it would be easier for autistics to study social reality than NTs - for NTs, since much of that stuff "comes naturally" it's going to be harder to decompose and explain.

Consider the classic problem of determining whether a person with whom you're interacting is sexually interested in you. An NT would (I assume) simply have to make an opaque intuitive judgment. An autistic would (I assume) have to go through a checklist involving eye contact, amount of touching, conversational subject matter, posture, whether the subject has already initiated intercourse, etc.

I like Ebon Musings: Foundations of Sand for this application; it lists many verses that nontrivially contradict one another.

I remember from my intro micro-econ class in college, there were two versions: Econ H200A (with differential calculus as a pre-req), and Econ H200 (without).

I took the former; they explained the concept of "marginal" with one word: "derivative". The latter apparently had to spend rather more time discussing that concept.

It's not obvious to me how to do this and still gather information from the user without interfering with the scores for their chosen category. Having them guess after the fact how well the "slacker" horoscope would have worked for them seems clearly sub-optimal, especially since there's an obvious pressure for them to say that it wouldn't've.

Take 'social effectiveness' as an example, and pretend you know almost nothing about it.

Sorry, you lost me here. This was too difficult.

Speaking personally, if I can create some part of myself that "believes" that, then yes, absolutely. I actually find a great deal of benefit from learning "magical" / New Age techniques for exactly that reason.

Is this something you can explain? I'm looking into this kind of stuff now and trying to find out the basics so that I can put together a 1) maximally effective and 2) epistemically safe method.

It's hard to find people into this kind of stuff that even understand the map-territory distinction, so input from other LWers is valued!

I shall attend.

Weirdly, though I think that bitcoins will succeed (and accordingly have some) I don't think Calacanis' article is well-founded. To focus just on the points I feel I can judge with some merit:

Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution.

I don't think this is true. Shutting down of all legitimate currency exchanges would tend to increase the barrier to investment by legitimate investors and be likely to decrease interest in Bitcoins. Anecdote: I would get less interested in bitcoins if this happened. Also, a focused government campaign against it might succeed in branding it as evil in public eyes, again reducing interest. I do recognize that these factors wouldn't destroy bitcoin, but they would reduce the chances of it "changing the world".

Bitcoins will change the world unless governments ban them with harsh penalties.

Again, I'm not so sure of this. Can anyone give me any legitimate reasons to anticipate this? So far I've just people on the bitcoin forums saying that the dollar/euro will collapse and bitcoin will attain worldwide dominance.

Basically, I predict they'll find a decent niche, won't replace any currency system in any major country and won't increase in value to insane levels.

I don't completely understand that story. Why didn't they start babysitting for half a coupon?

I like Avery but I thought his critique was an ill-thought-out mess.

1) I'm not informed enough to judge whether the gold standard is a fundamentally good idea or not, but I can see that Avery is even less informed than me. Some of his (bolded!) statements like "Gold is a stupid inconvenient currency that's worse than paper" are basically nonsensical; that has nothing to do with the economic argument for a gold standard. Much of the rest seems to be non sequiturs, bringing up only briefly (and then dismissing mockingly) any real reasoning for a gold standard. Anyway, if we really wanted to, we could add inflation to Bitcoin too.

2) I think that governments will try to squash it, but I'm not sure if they can succeed. Bitcoin exchanges are starting to proliferate in multiple countries around the world, and the USG can only do so much to stop people from using them. In the future, I think it could continue to thrive even if the USG tried to seize American Bitcoin-related assets and prevent Americans from transferring money directly to Bitcoin exchanges. There are just too many ways around those laws -- c.f. online poker legislation. I think this is the most powerful point Avery makes, though. If the USG acted now to attack Bitcoin users, I could envision people drastically losing confidence in the currency and a resultant death, but the government is slow to act.

3) I share Avery's fundamental skepticism but Bitcoin is really pretty simple; it's pretty hard to imagine a mystery vulnerability in it short of busting SHA-256. I agree that it's a little bit unnerving to imagine our entire financial system sitting on something like Bitcoin, but I'm not sure whether it's rational to reject it based on that. If Bitcoin's benefits really are significant, I think we could probably do further work to prove its security. Avery should actually take half an hour and figure Bitcoin out before he makes such a critique.

4) Somehow he managed not to even point out why it's important for a currency to work offline. Credit cards don't usually work offline, and we use those often enough. What's the big deal? If this turned out to be really important, one could imagine middlemen with reserves of Bitcoin issuing physical currency, similar to how a currency backed by the gold standard would issue physical currency that represents quantities of gold -- as much or as little physical currency as we care about.

(edit: in the spirit of jim's disclaimer above, I also own a very small handful of bitcoins, so I may be biased.)