But, if we cut to what I believe is the heart of your point, then yes, she absolutely should. Let's scale the problem up for a moment. Say instead of 5 it's 500. Or 5 million. Or the entire rest of humanity aside from the mother and her baby. At what point does sacrificing her child become the right decision? Really, this boils down to the idea of shut up and multiply.

Never, in my opinion. Put every other human being on the tracks (excluding other close family members to keep this from being a Sophie's choice "would you rather..." game). The mother should still act to protect her child. I'm not joking.

You can post-facto rationalize this by valuing the kind of societies where mothers are ready to sacrifice their kids, and indeed encouraged to save another life, vs. the world where mothers simply always protect their kids no matter what.

But I don't think this is necessary -- you don't need to validate it on utilitarian grounds. Rather it is perfectly okay for one person to value some lives more than others. We shouldn't want to change this, IMHO. And I think the OP's question about donating 100% to charity, at the detriment of themselves, is symptomatic of the problems that arise from utilitarian thinking. After all if OP was not having internal conflict between internal morals and supposedly rational utilitarian thinking, he wouldn't have asked the question...

These six principles are true as far as they go, but I feel they're so weak so not to be very useful. I'd like to offer a more cynical view.

The article's goal is, more or less, to avoid being convinced of untrue things by motivated agents. This has a name: Defense Against the Dark Arts. And I feel like these six principles are about as effective in real life as taking the canonical DADA first year class and then going up against HPMOR Voldemort.

With today's information technology and globalization, we're all exposed to world-class Dark Arts practitioners. Not being vulnerable to Cialdini's principles might help defend you in an argument with your coworker. But it won't serve you well when doubting something you read in the news or in an FDA-endorsed study.

And whatever your coworker or your favorite blog was arguing probably derives from such a curated source to begin with. All arguments rest on factual beliefs - outside of math anyway - and most of us are very far from being able to verify the facts we believe. And your own prior beliefs need to be well supported, to avoid being rejected on the same basis.

Advice solicited. Topics of interest I have lined up for upcoming posts include:

• The history of life on Earth and its important developments
• The nature of the last universal common ancestor (REALLY good new research on this just came out)
• The origin of life and the different schools of thought on it
• Another exploration of time in which I go over a paper that came out this summer that basically did exactly what I did a few months earlier with my "Space and Time Part II" calculations of our point in star and planet order that showed we are not early and are right around when you would expect to find the average biosphere, but extended it to types of stars and their lifetimes in a way I think I can improve upon.
• My thoughs on how and why SETI has been sidetracked away from activities that are more likely to be productive towards activities that are all but doomed to fail, with a few theoretical case studies
• My thoughts on how the Fermi paradox / 'great filter' is an ill-posed concept
• Interesting recent research on the apparent evolutionary prerequisites for primate intelligence

Any thoughts on which of these are of particular interest, or other ideas to delve into?

Maybe? But consider that the opposite of what you just claimed sounds just as plausible to an outside observer. "Do what I mean" doesn't sound all that complicated -- even to someone with a background in computer science or AI specifically. "Do what I mean" translates as "accurately determine the principles which constrain my own actions and use those to constrain the AI's, or otherwise build a model of my thinking which the AI can use to evaluate options." Sub-goals such as verifying that the model matches reality fall easily out of this definition.

It's not at all clear, even to a practitioner within the field, that this expansion doesn't work, if in fact it does not.

As I understand it, if I buy a chicken in a supermarket, this causes approximately one chicken to be killed; and similar for beef etc, adjusting for the amount of meat versus the size of the animal.

Does anyone know how this number changes with discounts? I'm specifically thinking of the thing where my local supermarket reduces the price of things when they're approaching their expiry date.

Matrix multiplication

Could somebody explain to me, in a way I'd actually understand, how to (remember how to) go about multiplying a pair of matrixes? I've looked at Wikipedia, I've read linear algebra books up to where they supposedly explain matrixes, and I keep bouncing up against a mental wall where I can't seem to remember how to figure out how to get the answer.

I'm having trouble sending a text message with an ipad and iphone? The recipient isn't receiving the text. What are the sources of error other than wrong number? Also, are you supposed to input the 1 before the 10 digit number? It's U.S. to U.S.

I feel it's important to note that he was talking about writing styles, not philosophy.

Do you think how one reasons in writing about a subject has nothing todo with philosophy?