Would you kill babies if it was intrinsically the right thing to do? If not, under what other circumstances would you not do the right thing to do? If yes, how right would it have to be, for how many babies?

EDIT IN RESPONSE: My intended point had been that sometimes you do have to fight the hypothetical.

This is something I think about a lot. We all know pure rhetoric is never going to deconvert someone, but a combination of "dark arts", emotional vulnerability, and personal connection seems a likely recipe.

A quick summation of how I feel about religiosity: I hate the belief, but love the believer. I went through a long and painful deconversion process, so I can empathize with them. I know that religious people struggle with doubt and are probably terrified by the prospect of losing their faith. I've had the chance to go for the throat (so to speak) several times, but never had the conviction to do so.

So I guess the question you have to ask, is, what are you offering them in return? Keeping in mind that they are probably more of a "normal" than you are, how is it going to effect their social and psychological well-being? Do you anticipate that changing that one belief will manifest itself in greater mastery of rationality, or even a glimpse of the path? Or are you just stealing a childs safety blanket and telling them to grow up?

The only other mitigating factor I can think of is "raising the sanity waterline", specifically by decreasing the overall population of virulent religious memes. But aren't there probably better and easier ways of doing so that don't involve randoms going through bleak existential withdrawl?

That's a serious question, I'm not settled on the issue at all either. Of course, there are some people who will just need a push, a friend to tell them it's ok. If they seem like they can thrive as an athiest, due to humanist values, being contrarian, courageously facing the truth, or whatever, I don't see why not.

I believe I do indeed have a difficulty connecting with people in such a manner. Can that also be a psychological problem?

Of course. Doing low level stuff like brushing your teeth is boring. Going meta is fun.

Eventually you need to actually cash out your strategies and really brush your teeth, at which point going meta can be a form of procrastination that has the benefit of making you feel like you are being productive.

I try to mentally file metacognition under "enjoyable pastime", but I'm not sure if the low level resource manager agrees with the user. This produces an acute form of akrasia wherein, while attempting to be productive, I go really meta, encounter a stack overflow, resolve the issue, and then treat myself to a well deserved break because I'm such a brilliant meta-theoretician.

First of all, I highly recomend Good Eats. As a tv show, it's probably not the most efficient way to learn how to cook, but Alton Brown presents simple, useful recipes while managing to convey the high-level methodology of the process. More importantly, it's damn entertaining.

I agree with RomeoStevens; keep it simple at home. I enjoy cooking, but I found that trying to prepare homecooked meals every night for myself led to motivational breakdown. So when I'm home, I graze on things that are healthy and delicious. A little bit of some (good) cheeses, raw vegetables, baguette, fresh fruit. Stir-fried-whatever when I'm in the mood.

Also, while this probably applies to anything you want to do better, it seems especially true of cooking: learn to enjoy it. It's really very easy and quite relaxing when you get the hang of it.

I can read much, much faster than I can think words, and yet I still hear (at least some of) the words.

I can mentally replay any sense I've experienced. I sometimes get appropriate physiological responses, such as my mouth watering when imagining food. I can hear music, see movies. The resolution of any of this isn't very good. I wouldn't normally say I can actually experience these things, I do because I can't grok how else one would imagine a cow without "mentally seeing" something like a cow; but apparently this is the case (?).

I am bad at manipulating numbers. As far as I can tell, either I have something memorized (e.g. multiplication tables) or I graphically visualize writing the problem out, long-hand, on paper, complete with all the steps you learned in 3rd grade like crossing out digits when you borrow. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit this... the most inefficient virtual machine that ever was.

On the other hand, I have amazing (low-end at least) intuition. Actually, most all of the problem solving and "real thinking" I do is a complete mystery to me. This is causing problems for my research, as in lower education (which I consider as everything through undergrad) I never had to study, or even think methodically. I just squint my eyes and the answers comes out of the ether.

I have also found Eat That Frog to be an unusually good collection of the major productivity techniques. Incidentally, I also heard about the book from Patri via Divia.

For a shorter and more rationality-friendly version of the book, I summarized it here:

EDIT: http://becomingeden.com/summary-of-eat-that-frog/

Because I actually use the stuff I learn here to survive, and it is the most important thing I can do right now to increase the probability of a friendly singularity, which I have conditioned myself to have as my only goal.

I would probably make an excellent actual case study in akrasia. I'll try to quickly summarize a few issues.

instance:Weight lifting.

After a bad break-up, I pursued it rigorously for about 6 months, with great success, creating a postitive feedback loop. I was fueled by the progress, which inevitably plateaued, leading me to stagnation. In an attempt to get back on track, I purchased a squat rack and barbell, so that I could work out whenever was most convenient. In retrospect, this was a really bad idea. I find it virtually impossible to put in an adequate workout at home, because it is too easy to be distracted. My average workout duration dropped from over an hour to probably less than 15 minutes. Attempting to precommit to not to interact with anything that wouldn't be at a gym failed, because my mind won't accept artificial constraints like that. I speculate that it failed for another reason: working out in a public gym probably triggers the status seeking parts of my brain, incentivizing me to look good by working harder now, as well as reminding me what I'm working for in the long-run (not that anyone cares at all about what anyone else does in the gym).

• Do: Work out in public, measure progress in an objective way, reward yourself after a good work out
• Don't: Make it too convenient, fail to take into account diminishing returns

instance:Undergraduate research

Much of my akrasia stems from anxiety. I had originally impressed the professor of a class I was taking, and later in informal research. In both cases I enjoyed the work, which was occasionally greuling, but where the price of failure was nonexistent - I was in no danger of receiving less than an A in the class, and the research consisted of occasional, casual meetings and setting my own pace and direction. In time, they offered me a payed position, which came with deadlines, frequent status reports, and so on. I noticed that both the quantity and quality of my work decreased, for two reasons. The original work had convinced me to go to graduate school, which subsequently made my supervisors opinion of me suddenly important (letters of reccomendation). Because of this, I started making promises and accepting burdens that were probably not unreasonable, but personally unrealistic. I began to feel incredible anxiety about this, so much so that even doing the work, but especially corresponding with my supervisors caused significant duress. It was perceived as laziness and nonresponsiveness; and I knew this, which made the anxiety worse: so bad in fact that I would avoid checking my email and seeing them on campus. Sometimes I'd be sitting there, knowing that there was probably an unanswered email in my inbox, KNOWING that I would have to read and answer it eventually, and knowing that waiting could only possibly make it worse, and for some reason I still would put it off.

In general, I feel that I have destroyed my ability to precommit. For a particularly ludicrous illustration: I have trouble getting up. My record for most times hitting snooze is probably > 15. I tried literally taping a caffeine pill on top of the button. The next morning, I just peeled it off and went back to sleep. Me_sleeping is an evil bastard.

Sometimes I have a visual experience that is very hard to describe. It happens when a person is talking to me and I've been looking at them without interruption for several minutes. (Maybe they need to be looking at me too; I can't remember.)

What happens is that the person starts to seem very close to me and very small, as though I had my face pressed up to the window of a dollhouse and they were inside it. This is not exactly what it is like, but it's the closest I can come to putting it into words.

If I look away, the effect stops, but it easily starts again when I look back at the person. I can't make it happen at will, but once it starts I can turn it on and off to a limited extent.

I first noticed this when I was 13 or so.

(I don't think this is quite the type of thing Kaj is most interested in, but it's the only peculiarity of my mind that hasn't already been mentioned in other responses to this post. Indeed, I've never heard of it anywhere, so if anyone has, please share!)