Isn't The Least Convenient Possible World directly relevant here? I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet.

I think the praise appetite in western civilization is now filled by people like Tom Brady and Lebron James and Lady Gaga. When you go to a National Football League stadium on a fall Sunday afternoon, you see a communal ritual of adoration and submerging of self into group. It is fundamentally not rational.

I do not think rationalists have anything in this dimension. The closest that comes to mind is from Cosmos and Carl Sagan is standing on his star-trek-style set gazing at images of galaxies and whatnot and he has this look on his face of sex- or drug- or rock-and-roll- induced glow. Carl Sagan was a great rationalist and that television series was one of the greatest, but I found and continue to find that image disgusting.

Kind of how I imagine a Philadelphia Eagles fan and dog lover feels about rooting for Michael Vick today.

One thing I've personally witnessed is people claiming to have had the exact same vivid dream the night before. I'm talking stuff like playing scrabble with Brad Pitt and Former President Carter on the summit of mount McKinley, so it seems unlikely that they were both prompted by the same recent event. Assuming that these people haven't been primed until after the fact, I would expect even stronger effects to be possible for those who have.

Whenever you enter deep sleep you lose continuity of consciousness. Whence your intuition that continuity is important? Are you not impressed by timeless physics, nor Tegmark's multiverses? In a spatially infinite universe with particles being indistinguishable and whole Hubble volumes also being indistinguishable (the standard cosmological position), in what sense are different 'you's actually different people, even if there is no causal connection between them?

The fact that there is a copy of me going around does not change the fact that this instance of me is dead.

But does it even matter? If it looks like a you, thinks like a you, cares about all the same things you do, then your utility function should probably just consider it a you.

I am extremely poor at visualization, can't even picture a line or a circle (I just tried it) and I don't remember images from my dreams. Strangely, when I was a child, I was sometimes able to visualize, but only with extreme effort. More recently, I have experienced what I would call "brain movies", involuntary realistic visualizations, under the influence of opiates.

It seems I am fundamentally capable of visual thinking, but my brain is just not in the habit, though I wouldn't mind being able to summon the ability. It sounds kinda cool.

There are definitely cases where there is little hope of proving "100% intended performance". For example, RSA only works as intended if factoring is hard. Most computer scientists strongly believe this is true, but this is not likely to be proven any time soon.

Low dose ketamine has been shown to promote synaptogenesis in the prefrontal cortex. (in rats) Link to abstract

It is currently being investigated as a potential antidepressant in humans, but based on anecdotal evidence, it seems likely that it's also a nootropic.

Alexander Grothendieck used the analogy of opening a nut to illuminate two different styles of doing mathematics. One way is to strike the nut repeatedly with a hammer and chisel.

I can illustrate the second approach with the same image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months—when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!