I only see three options. Deny that anything is actually green; become a dualist; or (supervillain voice) join me, and together, we can make a new ontology.

Sure I'll join you; what color is the supervillain sidekick's uniform?

Upvoted for being a completely reasonable comment given that you haven't read through the entirety of a thread that's gotten totally monstrous.

However, I predict in advance that 1) this evidence is based on words that a man wrote in an ancient book,

Only partly right.

2) I will find this evidence dubious.

Of course you will. If I told you that God himself appeared to me personally and told me everything in the Bible was true, you'd find that dubious, too. Perhaps even more dubious.

Where, then, is the chain of entangled events leading from the state of the universe to the state of your mind?

Already partly in other posts on this thread (actually largely in other posts on this thread), buried somewhere, among something. You'll forgive me for not wanting to retype multiple pages, I hope.

When I search for keyword: rationality, I get HPMoR for #2, yudkowsky.net for #5, and What Do We Mean By "Rationality"? for #7. Not sure how much my search history is affecting this.

For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn't count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he's somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.

I tried typing those queries (and related ones) into google, to see if someone could easily find some sort of starting point for rationality. "How to think better" yields many lists of tips that are mediocre at best (things like: exercise, become more curious, etc). About halfway down the page, interestingly, is a post on CSA, but it's not a great one. It seems to mostly say that to get better at thinking you first have to realize that you are not naturally a fantastic thinker. This is true, but it's not something that points the way forward towards bayesian rationality. (by the way, "how to figure out what's true" provides essentially nothing of value, at least on the first page).

In order for someone to go down the path you've identified on their own, as a curious individual, they would have to have a substantial amount of luck to get started. Either they would have to have somehow stumbled upon enough of an explanation of heuristics and biases that they realized the importance of them (which is a combination of two fairly unlikely events), or they would have to be studying those subjects for some reason other than their instrumental value. Someone who started off curiously studying AI would have a much better chance at finding this path, for this reason. AI researchers in this instance, have a tremendous advantage when it comes to rationality over researchers in the hard sciences, engineers, etc.

Every time you applying the Litany of Gendlin to an unsubstantiated assertion, a fairie drops dead.

I think this is a joke, ish, right? Because it's quite witty. /tangent

You're doing it wrong.

I mentioned some evidence elsewhere in the thread.

I should probably point out at this point that Wiccans (well, at least those whom I'd met), consider this point of view utterly misguided and incredibly offensive.

That's a bizarre thing to say. Is their offense evidence that I'm wrong? I don't think so; I'd expect it whether or not they worship demons. Or should I believe something falsely because the truth is offensive? That would go against my values-- and, dare I say it, the suggestion is offensive. ;) Or do you want me to lie so I'll sound less offensive? That risks harm to me (it's forbidden by the New Testament) and to them (if no one ever tells them the truth, they can't learn), as well as not being any fun.

No one likes to be called a "demon-worshiper",

What is true is already so, Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.

especially when one is generally a nice person whose main tenet in life is a version of "do no harm".

Nice people like that deserve truth, not lies, especially when eternity is at stake.

flat-out calling a whole group of people "demon-worshipers" tends to inflame passions rather quickly,

So does calling people Cthulhu-worshipers. But when you read that article, you agreed that it was apt, right? Because you think it's true. You guys sure seem quick to tell me that my beliefs are offensive, but if I said the same to you, you'd understand why that's beside the point. If Wiccans worship demons, I desire to believe that Wiccans worship demons; if Wiccans don't worship demons, I desire to believe that Wiccans don't worship demons. Sure, it's offensive and un-PC. If you want me to stop believing it, tell me why you think it's wrong.

I'm standing by my 2011 prediction:

Wind power will provide more actual electricity than nuclear power by 2021, 80%

I could probably nudge probabilities one way or another if I checked extra year's worth of information, but since I didn't I have no idea which way it will go.

It's not precisely a threshold because it's not binary. The quality is "personhood". Defining personhood is obviously an incredibly difficult thing to do, so I've been avoiding doing so in this thread. However, any reasonable definition I can come up with does not include very young infants. If you think that newborns are people, I'd be interested in hearing why - but I haven't come up with a sufficiently good wording for what I think personhood is to have a debate about it.

Greets, all!

I'm a walking stereotype of a LessWrong reader:

I'm a second-year undergraduate student at a decent public university, double majoring in math and computer science and compensating for the relatively unchallenging material even at the graduate level by taking 2-3x the typical workload; this is allowed by my specific college, which is a fantastic program I'd strongly recommend to high school students who happen to be reading this. (I'll happily go in to more depth if for anyone even slightly interested.)

I'm white, male, atheist, libertarian. I intend to sign up for cryonics once I have a job, because I am having tons of fun and want to continue to do so.

I've been reading LessWrong for three or so years, and have by now read all of the sequences and nearly all of the miscellaneous posts, as well as the most highly-rated discussion threads. I've also read and loved MoR. I could not, at this point, tell you how I found either of them.

I read this site, and study rationality, because I want to win.

I hold almost no views which would be notably controversial with the mainstream here, except perhaps these, presented with the hope of inspiring discussion:

• Infanticide of one's own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren't yet people.
• Discrimination against youths aged 13 and above out to be viewed, in a reasonable society, in the same light as racism. Reason: broadly, discrimination based on group membership should be frowned upon if the variance within a group dominates the variance between groups. In such cases group membership is a bad predictor and is thus very unfair to individuals. Given this, and on the assumption that variance within the group of 13- to 21-year-olds dominates the variance between the groups of 13- to 21-year-olds and over-21's, we ought not to discriminate against youths.

(edit: formatting)

ETA: This is the first LW discussion I've participated in, so I hope you'll forgive my using this space to ask about the conventions of the community broadly. If you look below, a lot of my comments are getting voted down. For statements of opinion, this I understand, at least if the convention is "vote down things you disagree with" as opposed to "vote down things which don't contribute to the discussion". But why are my questions voted down? This one, in particular:

I'm curious now, though. What do you think defines an agent as a person, for the moral calculus? How is it that ten-month-old babies meet this definition? Do, say, pigs also meet this definition?

which as I type this is at -1.

Please interpret this as an honest question about community standards, not an implicit rebuke or anything like that.