Do you have any views on edition 1 vs edition 2? My library doesn't have ed 2 so I'm wondering whether the differences are important.

Does anyone want to make a small study group to read one of these books at a relatively slow pace?

• Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference
• Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (Gelman has been recommended over Jaynes here I'm flexible but I'd rather read Jaynes)
• Martin Peterson - An Introduction to Decision Theory
• Anything else similar/LW relevant

I've been meaning to read these (which I learned about from LW) for a long time and just now have the time.

Causality looks like the best option: the entire first edition is freely avaiable on Pearls site here. There is an overview of 2nd ed. chapters here

I expect government to introduce bureaucracy and pervert good ideas, but I expect private companies to come with good ideas if given proper financial incentives... and someone else expects government to act in the interest of powerless opressed masses, and expects rich and powerful individuals to destroy everything for their own profit

In other words, you're a thoughtful individual with deep and rational reasons for believing what you believe... while those silly people are naive, impractical and narrow-minded, with an unrealistic and one-sided view of the world?

Nice.

Sorry, we don't live in a should-universe, either. If your goal is to influence a religious person's perception of his/her faith, you do what it takes to get through, not complain that the other party is not playing by some real or imaginary rules. But hey, feel free to keep talking about logic, rationalism and respect. That's what two-boxers do.

I'm not sure why you think you're corrected. Your quote seems to imply that larger cars for safety is defection because they increase safety for their occupants while reducing safety for people in smaller cars.

Are you sure you linked the right comment? That's just someone talking about centripetal vs centrifugal.

You can determine if you're spinning without reference to the outside world.

Technically, no you can't. Per EY's points on Mach's principle, spinning yourself around (with the resulting apparent movement of stars and feeling of centrifugal stresses) is observationally equivalent to the rest of the universe conspiring to rotate around you oppositely.

Einstein's theory further had the property that moving matter would generate gravitational waves, propagating curvatures. Einstein suspected that if the whole universe was rotating around you while you stood still, you would feel a centrifugal force from the incoming gravitational waves, corresponding exactly to the centripetal force of spinning your arms while the universe stood still around you.

The c.g. of the earth/sun solar system would likewise lack a privileged position in such a world.

Why privilege the center of mass as the reference point? Do we need to find the densest concentration of mass in the known universe to determine what we call the punctum fixum and what we call the punctum mobile?

As far as I can tell, most of the local universe revolves around me. That may be a common human misconception, seeing as I'm not a black hole, if we only go by centers of mass. But do we have to?

(Also, "densest concentration of mass" would probably be in the bible belt.)

I realize this imposes some costs on you, but I'd recommend that you just say you're going to be at a place and time with a sign, and that people should come. This avoids the whole "I'm not sure I should come because everyone else might not come because they're not sure..." cycle.

You might want to choose the date/time based on feedback here, but honestly I've had a lot of trouble scheduling meetups based on feedback about time, and I eventually just started dictating meetup times.