I can't speak for others, but I was in category d).

Heh, I learned to program when I was six, I don't happen to remember it being hard -- and I think I therefore pretty much suck at teaching programming.

I rock at explaining specific concepts to programmers -- libraries, techniques, tools -- but I cannot teach a non-programmer to program. "What do you mean? You just write functions! They accept arguments, and do stuff...ummm...it's like subroutines?"

In the real world, you can sell your old stuff. People just don't.

You can sometimes sell your old stuff but for many people it's not worth it for most items - the return vs. the time investment isn't worth it vs. just throwing it out.

Even giving stuff away for free is generally too much effort to be worth it over throwing stuff out though you might think people who had a use for free stuff would have an interest in making it easier to give it to them than to drop it in the garbage.

This thread wouldn't be complete without a link to this Ctrl+Alt+Del comic

Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.

-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Twinkle, twinkle, little star -
I know exactly what you are:
An incandescent ball of gas,
Condensing to a solid mass.

Twinkle, twinkle, giant star -
I need not wonder what you are,
For seen through spectroscopic ken
You're helium and hydrogen.

-- Peter Marshall

(Quoted in Robert Ettinger's "The Prospect of Immortality." Ettinger says that Gene Lund credited it to Peter Marshall. I haven't been able to find a more direct source that confirms this.)

Edit: How do you force a line return so that a poem will read correctly? Thanks, fixed now.

If there were no free television, people would still have a lot of low-intensity timekillers available-- gossip, unambitious games, drinking.

If they had to pay for television, they might have been so accustomed to paying for content that they'd have subscribed to google.

The more interesting question is how different would people need to be for advertising to not be worth doing. I think it would take people being much clearer about their motivations. I'm pretty sure that would have major implications, but I'm not sure what they'd be.

There are people who try to raise their kids to be advertising-proof, but I haven't heard anything about the long term effects.

I scored 36 on the test, which was way higher than I was expecting. I think I can do a pretty decent impression of a normally social person. Perhaps my responses are skewed by my having programmed for the last 7 hours. Maybe I should take the test again after spending a couple of hours interacting with my wife and kids.

Applied rationality April Edition: convince someone with currently incurable cancer to sign up for cryonics: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1239055

Hacker News rather than Reddit this time, which makes it a little easier.

I'm not entirely sure that this is worthy of a top-level post

It seems marginal to me. In its favor, it is an idea that should be said out loud. But it should be better supported.

I think this article would benifet from some real world examples of people playing the "life experience" card in support of a wrong position, or that "life experience" conveniently tends to support policies that favor those with lots of "life experience" at the expense of those with less. Or if, by some improbability, the "life experience" argument is only ever made in support of correct positions, then it would still be good to illustrate how a more detailed argument, entangled with the actual issue being discussed, is more likely to convince the other than an appeal to general "life experience".