I feel like plugging filker Julia Ecklar. Here's a song of hers LWers may like. I couldn't find that one in particular on Youtube or I'd have linked there.

I suppose I could if I were in a hurry -- honestly rather do the job myself in this case.

I used to say about Marx when I was a Marxist.

Is your nick from those times? Or a memory of them?

Debating with Block would turn any rationalist off of Austrian econ. No one got it comletely right except Mises himself. Actually not even him, but he was usually extremely rational and rigorous in his approach - more than any other economist I know of - albeit often poorly communicated.

In any case, any non-ideologically motivated rationalist worth their salt ought to be able to piece together a decent understanding of the epistemological issues by reading the first 200 pages of Human Action.

You don't say?

WARNING: the below is arational.

The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell

I don't know how to talk of this book. Let's start with a new angle, popular on LW now: the author is your traditional virtuous bleeding-heart liberal, and for his unacknowledged humanist quasi-theocracy he has written THE account of woe, perdition and apocalypse - it has been called the Nazi Life and Fate, yet I'd say it resembles the Book of Job as told by Satan.

Yes, it's a gratuitous and grotesque fictional account of the Holocaust, but it's also a work of literary research, trying to puzzle out the implications of this convoulted nightmare - like Dostoevsky foresaw much of the things to come in his works. And if it doesn't give you nightmares of your own, you haven't been reading it right. I'm long done with it (a couple of years or so), yet occasionally it still haunts me.

The question is, what, exactly does the industrialization of murder say of us as a species? Viktor Frankl famously abjured the notion of "collective guilt" after his liberation. Yet, with all the mounting evidence, might we all indeed have contacted the taint in some way? Or were we damned to begin with? Do you care to find out?

We may need to update just how much of a mind-killer politics is here. The Krugman discussion stayed civil and on-topic.

This kind of drama is an incredible waste of time, and absolutely should not be allowed to cross over into Less Wrong proper. Still, since this post exists, I guess I'll contribute my position.

Whether the kick and ban was warranted should be the question for discussion. Not the concept of moderation itself. Moderation policy is and should be established by precedent and discussion, not operator fiat.

The discussion going on between Burninate_ and Anubhav_ C, as cited by Jach, was not spam, was mildly interesting, and certainly should not have warranted kicks for either of them. Anubhav_C insulting Peacebringer was even less deserving of any operator activity, especially because the entire point of having an anonymous mod-bot is presumably to prevent the interference of ego and reputation! I believe that will be the consensus position. If such a consensus is established, I suggest that the operator who kicked them back down, admit an error, and stop this whole set of nonsense before it gets any worse. If the opposite consensus is reached, I suggest Anubhav back down, and likewise stop this ridiculous affair.

So, technology is getting more powerful over time, right? That is, as time goes on, it gets easier and easier to do more and more. If we extrapolate that to its logical extreme, and obviously there are some issues there but let's just pretend, eventually we should be able to press a button and recreate the entire world however we want.

This is a little too utopian-sounding, and would probably provoke automatic reactions along the lines of Malthusianism and environmentalism and such. Perhaps if it's made a little more vague, it could get past any filters along the lines of "Uncontrolled progress will cause a disaster!" that your audience might have.

Should I care more about making money or doing something that I have a "passion" for?

Depends on what your passion is. If it's something that allows you to make a lot of money, and doesn't otherwise obstruct you from taking part in other things that you enjoy, then your best bet would probably be to choose that - even if there is another, passionless option, which gives you more money.

If on the other hand the things that you are passionate about you do not make money (which will hamper your ability to produce utilons in a variety of ways), then your best bet will probably be to become wealthy by means of doing something you're not passionate about. With something like tech entrepreneurship you can become a millionaire in 5-8 years, and then focus on producing utilons at optimal exchange rates for your entire life.

Personally, I'm not passionate about any careers that make a ton of money, so my current plan is to become a millionaire through tech entrepreneurship, and then focus on studying/writing philosophy and dancing afterwards.