I've just started a job as a news writer at FiveThirtyEight (author archive here), I'm really looking forward to this, and I'd love for folks to think of me as a possibly-summonable research person. If you have a question/dataset/etc related to American news, send me an email (leahDOTlibrescoATgmailDOTcom) and I may wind up researching it and covering it.

How did it affect your desires for cookies? Did it stay the same? Lower? Higher?

How do you account for ideological Turing tests failing because of shibboleths? It's one thing to be unable to express or recognize the same ideas as a Christian, it's another to be unable to express or recognize in-group terminology.

One other approach to avoid constantly haggling with yourself (which I agree is draining and annoying) but without giving up the temptation completely is just to randomize whether you act on your urges.

At an old job, I used to want to go out to get a cookie in the afternoon a couple times a week. I didn't want to act on the urge every time I felt it, but I also didn't want to solve the problem by making afternoon cookies verboten forever. So, when I wanted a cookie, I went to random.org and set it to pick a number from 1-3. If it was a 1, I got a cookie, if not, not.

No decision fatigue, no being "bad cop" to myself, and I got to enjoy a thing I wanted intermittently!

I'm running an Ideological Turing Test about religion, and I need some people to try answering the questions. I've giving a talk at UPenn this week on how to have better fights about religion, and the audience is going to try to sort out honest/faked Christian and atheist answers and see where both sides have trouble understanding the other.

In April, I'll share all the entries on my blog, so you can play along at home and see whether you can distinguish the impostors from the true (non-)believers.

I'm doing a hashtag/image on social media of #LittleAngelsReadUp (a reference to Night Watch). I'm using it to ask friends who haven't ever read Pratchett to tell me, and then I'll buy/loan them a book. I'm getting three people books now.

If you want to join up, I've got the image to share here

I really like the Jesuit examen (a way to review your day and plan for the future) and I recommend Fr. Timothy Gallagher's book on this practice. Gallagher is great at outlining the practice and giving concrete examples of how Catholics have used this debugging-your-life ritual -- it helped me notice not just active errors I was making but ways I was passively letting opportunities to be kind slip by.

I passed the AMC 12B with a score of 144/150; that's 24 questions correct out of a total of 25 answered, for those not aware. That may not sound like much, but the problems are fairly difficult (in my opinion), and a major obstacle is the fact that you only get 75 minutes to answer all the questions, which comes out to an average of 3 minutes per question--hardly an easy task. (A stupid mistake on Problem 8 cost me a perfect score.) Overall, though, I feel I did pretty well!

I know its supposed to be considered a "dark art" here, but what about debate techniques and styles, persuasive writing, rhetoric, that sort of thing? Not to trick people into believing something that's false, but to effectively persuade people to believe something that's true, using time-tested methods of getting your point across. I don't believe anything is actually a dark art; anything can be good or bad depending on how you use it.

This seems like a good occasion to quote the twist reveal in Orson Scott Card's Dogwalker:

We stood there in his empty place, his shabby empty hovel that was ten times better than anywhere we ever lived, and Doggy says to me, real quiet, he says, "What was it? What did I do wrong? I thought I was like Hunt, I thought I never made a single mistake in this job. in this one job."

And that was it, right then I knew. Not a week before, not when it would do any good. Right then I finally knew it all, knew what Hunt had done. Jesse Hunt never made mistakes. But he was also so paranoid that he haired his bureau to see if the babysitter stole from him. So even though he would never accidentally enter the wrong P-word, he was just the kind who would do it on purpose. "He doublefingered every time," I says to Dog. "He's so damn careful he does his password wrong the first time every time, and then comes in on his second finger."

"So one time he comes in on the first try, so what?" He says this because he doesn't know computers like I do, being half-glass myself.

"The system knew the pattern, that's what. Jesse H. is so precise he never changed a bit, so when we came in on the first try, that set off alarms. It's my fault, Dog. I knew how crazy paranoidical he is, I knew that something was wrong, but not till this minute I didn't know what it was. I should have known it when I got his password, I should have known. I'm sorry, you never should have gotten me into this, I'm sorry, you should have listened to me when I told you something was wrong. I should have known, I'm sorry."