I actually like this post and agree to most points you make. I'm not talking about the meta points about steelmanning and rhetoric tricks.

The obvious and clearly stated bias helped me to better insights than most articles that claim true understanding of anything.

I'm not sure whether this is due to increased attention to weak arguments or a greater freedom to ignore weak arguments as they are probably not serious anyways.

Can it be both? Was that effect intentional?

I would read a "Steelmanning counterintuitive claim X" series.

The "be a sheep" voting system is also known as assignment voting.

I like your solution to pascals mugging but as some people mentioned it breaks down with superexponential numbers. This is caused by the extreme difficulty to do meaningful calculations once such a number is present (similar to infinity or a division by zero).

I propose the following modification:

• Given a Problem that contains huge payoffs or penalties, try common_laws solution.
• Should any number above Gogol be in the calculation, refuse to calculate!
• Try to reformulate the problem in a way that doesn't contain such a big number.
• Should this fail, do nothing.

I would go so far as to treat any claim with such numbers in it as fictional.

Another LW classic containing such numbers is the Dust Speck vs. Torture paradox. I think that just trying to calculate in the presence of such numbers is a fallacy. Has someone formulated a Number-Too-Big-Fallacy already?

• Select one and only one cause to join that you really care about.
• Activism is useful for networking as already mentioned. Treat it as a tool, not as an achievement.
• Read to find out what really needs to change. What are the root causes? What keeps the movement from being effective?
• Again select just one of these according to your abilities.
• Edit: Oh and please just do it. Don't get lost in "I will be more effective by earning money and paying someone to do it." mindgames. You can't pay them to actually care, they will do a lousy job. Find something you can do and grow with the challenge!

My personal examples of hypocrisy:

I believe it is ethically better to be a vegetarian, or even better to be a vegan. Yet I am not a vegetarian, and to be honest, it's not even because I would love eating meat to much (veganism would be more difficult, because I love cheese), but merely because it would be inconvenient. If I had a vegan restaurant near my job, and enough practice with cooking different vegetarian meals, I probably wouldn't mind being vegetarian; it wouldn't even seem like having sacrificed anything.

(Okay, I took some steps to fix this, but this is not meant to be a thread about making excuses, it's about admitting hypocrisy.)

I believe I should spend less time on internet, because my spending too much time online is probably the worst obstacle at reaching many of my goals. Guess what I am doing right now?

Some LessWrong links that may be of interest:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1qq/debate_tools_an_experience_report/

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Debate_tools

Here are two projects that try to remove subvocalization. It's fun to try at least. http://www.spreeder.com/ http://learn2spritz.com/

I find the qualitative reflections most enlightening and especially that you said: "But never in the course of this experiment did I count something that turned out to be unimportant."

Your under-confidence in that point may be very common leading to thoughts like: "Yea noticing confusion is all nice but I usually do that already. I'm fairly certain that I'm only missing some irrelevant confusion." Your experience suggests that there is no such thing as irrelevant confusion. The art is to notice as many as humanly possible instead of just some.

I have never read a better motivation to go and actively try to notice confusion than this sentence. Thanks.

I really really like this comment. I really want more clarification now. But from my perspective, someone who has a categorical rule against lying is like learning I'm being graded on everything I say. I suddenly have the massive cognitive burden of making sure everything I say is true and that I mean all the implications or I can suddenly be shunned and outcast.

The problem is that such a policy logically requires also making a pre-game commitment to not answering the question "Are you a spy?" and also to not answer a question logically equivalent, and then the player has to keep track of logical implications and equivalences throughout the game, which leads to much poorer gameplay.

Also, if one doesn't make such assurances, then any "lying" during the game is simply gameplay, but with the assurance being made outside of the game, any in-game lying becomes out-of-game lying.