Will Newsome has suggested that I repost my tweets to LessWrong. With some trepidation, and after going through my tweets and categorizing them, I picked the ones that seemed the most rationality-oriented. I held some in reserve to keep the post short; those could be posted later in a separate post or in the comments here. I'd be happy to expand on anything here that requires clarity.

Epistemology

1. Test your hypothesis on simple cases.
2. Forming your own opinion is no more necessary than building your own furniture.
3. The map is not the territory.
4. Thoughts about useless things are not necessarily useless thoughts.
5. One of the successes of the Enlightenment is the distinction between beliefs and preferences.
6. One of the failures of the Enlightenment is the failure to distinguish whether this distinction is a belief or a preference.
7. Not all entities comply with attempts to reason formally about them. For instance, a human who feels insulted may bite you.

Group Epistemology

1. The best people enter fields that accurately measure their quality. Fields that measure quality poorly attract low quality.
2. It is not unvirtuous to say that a set is nonempty without having any members of the set in mind.
3. If one person makes multiple claims, this introduces a positive correlation between the claims.
4. We seek a model of reality that is accurate even at the expense of flattery.
5. It is no kindness to call someone a rationalist when they are not.
6. Aumann-inspired agreement practices may be cargo cult Bayesianism.
7. Godwin's Law is not really one of the rules of inference.
8. Science before the mid-20th century was too small to look like a target.
9. If scholars fail to notice the common sources of their inductive biases, bias will accumulate when they talk to each other.
10. Some fields, e.g. behaviorism, address this problem by identifying sources of inductive bias and forbidding their use.
11. Some fields avoid the accumulation of bias by uncritically accepting the biases of the founder. Adherents reason from there.
12. If thinking about interesting things is addictive, then there's a pressure to ignore the existence of interesting things.
13. Growth in a scientific field brings with it insularity, because internal progress measures scale faster than external measures.

A friend of the Singularity Institute is seeking to hire someone to research trends and surprises in geopolitics, world economics, and technology - a brainstorming, think-tank type job at a for-profit company.  No experience necessary, but strong math and verbal skills required; they're happy to hire out of college and would probably hire out of high school if they find a math-Olympiad type or polymath. This is a job that requires you to think all day and come up with interesting ideas, so they're looking for people who can come up with lots of ideas and criticize them without much external prompting, and enough drive to get their research done without someone standing over their shoulder.  They pay well, and it obviously does not involve sales or marketing. They're interested in Less Wrong readers because rationality skills can help.  Located in San Francisco.  Send résumé and cover letter to yuanshotfirst@gmail.com.  Writing sample optional.

From Michael Anissimov on the Singularity Institute blog:

Thanks to generous contributions by our donors, we are only $11,840 away from fulfilling our $100,000 goal for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. For every dollar you contribute to SIAI, another dollar is contributed by our matching donors, who have pledged to match all contributions made before February 28th up to $100,000. That means that this Sunday is your final chance to donate for maximum impact.

Funds from the challenge campaign will be used to support all SIAI activities: our core staff, the Singularity Summit, the Visiting Fellows program, and more. Donors can earmark their funds for specific grant proposals, many of which are targeted towards academic paper-writing, or just contribute to our general fund

[Continue reading at the Singularity Institute blog.]

I really liked Robin's point that mainstream scientists are usually right, while contrarians are usually wrong. We don't need to get into details of the dispute - and usually we cannot really make an informed judgment without spending too much time anyway - just figuring out who's "mainstream" lets us know who's right with high probability. It's type of thinking related to reference class forecasting - find a reference class of similar situations with known outcomes, and we get a pretty decent probability distribution over possible outcomes.

Unfortunately deciding what's the proper reference class is not straightforward, and can be a point of contention. If you put climate change scientists in the reference class of "mainstream science", it gives great credence to their findings. People who doubt them can be freely disbelieved, and any arguments can be dismissed by low success rate of contrarianism against mainstream science.

But, if you put climate change scientists in reference class of "highly politicized science", then the chance of them being completely wrong becomes orders of magnitude higher. We have plenty of examples where such science was completely wrong and persisted in being wrong in spite of overwhelming evidence, as with race and IQ, nuclear winter, and pretty much everything in macroeconomics. Chances of mainstream being right, and contrarians being right are not too dissimilar in such cases.

This idea has been mentioned in several comments, but it deserves a top-level post.  From an ancient, ancient web article (1995!), Stanford philosophy professor John Perry writes:

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

The insightful observation that procrastinators fill their time with effort, not staring at the walls, gives rise to this form of akrasia aikido, where the urge to not do something is cleverly redirected into productivity.  If you can "waste time" by doing useful things, while feeling like you are avoiding doing the "real work", then you avoid depleting your limited supply of willpower (which happens when you force yourself to do something).

In other words, structured procrastination (SP) is an efficient use of this limited resource, because doing A in order to avoid doing B is easier than making yourself do A.  If A is something you want to get done, then the less willpower you can use to do it, the more you will be to accomplish.  This only works if A is something that you do want to get done - that's how SP differs from normal procrastination, of course.

So I'd intended this story as a bit of utterly deranged fun, but it got out of control and ended up as a deep philosophical exploration, and now those of you who care will have to wade through the insanity.  I'm sorry.  I just can't seem to help myself.

I know that writing crossover fanfiction is considered one of the lower levels to which an author can sink.  Alas, I've always been a sucker for audacity, and I am the sort of person who couldn't resist trying to top the entire... but never mind, you can see for yourself.

Click on to read my latest story and first fanfiction, a Vernor Vinge x Greg Egan crackfic.