This is often a good idea in mathematics. Two concepts that are equivalent in some context may no longer be equivalent once you move to a more general context; for example, familiar equivalent definitions are often no longer equivalent if you start dropping axioms from set theory or logic (e.g. the axiom of choice or excluded middle).

"Your third arrest, you go to jail for life." "Why the third?" "Because in a game a guy gets three times to swing a stick at a ball."

Hunter Felt

Columbus's "genius" was using the largest estimate for the size of Eurasia and the smallest estimate for the size of the world to make the numbers say what he wanted them to. As normally happens with that sort of thing, he was dead wrong. But he got lucky and it turned out there was another continent there.

If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed.

I like the sentiment. I disagree that it is (always) the worst you can say about it. And there are also true things that are actively constructed to be misleading---I certainly go about suppressing those where possible and plan to continue.

By this metric, the distance between levels becomes smaller at the higher levels of skill.

Probably not by very much. One of the main motivations behind the grading system is to allow people of different grades to easily calculate the handicap needed to produce a fair game - e.g. see here:

Skill in the traditional board game Go is measured by a number of different national, regional and online ranking and rating systems. Traditionally, go rankings have been measured using a system of dan and kyu ranks. Especially in amateur play, these ranks facilitate the handicapping system, with a difference of one rank roughly corresponding to one free move at the beginning of the game.

You may be right that the system is flawed - but I don't think it is hugely flawed.

“It seems to me that often dumb people believe x, smart people believe y, really smart people believe x.”

-- Attributed to Gregory Cochran

On intellectual hipsters.

The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.

--Albert Einstein

Mandatory for science, generally advisable for anything else.

Yes, this entire scenario is based around scenarios where there is benefit to cooperation. In the edge case where such benefit is '0 expected utilons' the behavior of the agents will, unsurprisingly, not be changed at all by the considerations we are talking about.

Part of the output of your quizzes is a line of the form "Your chance of being well calibrated, relative to the null hypothesis, is 50.445538580926 percent." How is this number computed?

I chose "25% confident" for 25 questions and got 6 of them (24%) right. That seems like a pretty good calibration ... but 50.44% chance of being well calibrated relative to null doesn't seem that good. Does that sentence mean that an observer, given my test results, would assign a 50.44% probability to my being well calibrated and a 49.56% probability to my not being well calibrated? (or to my randomly choosing answers?) Or something else?

If I'm not mistaken, that rate was based on the number of people who live to teenage years and then kill themselves during their teenage years, not the number of teenagers who kill themselves per year.

Of course, it's entirely possible that the wizarding resilience to illness and injury also makes them more resilient to mental illness, and that's why suicide rates are lower.

Interesting idea.