When I reverse the genders, or make the branch lifters those with blonde hair, the story still works. I disagree with your statement.

Even if I am not setting out trying to disparage a spiritual person's spiritual experiences—even if I am trying to be as charitable to them as possible—it is difficult to see how I could have a conversation with them about information (their own subjective spiritual experiences) that is not publicly accessible to me. It boils down to them telling me about their private experience and me replying, "Cool story bro." Once again, not because I WANT to sound flippant or dismissive...but what else can I say about it? I'm glad they had their experience.

Usually spiritual people start with their story, and then they proceed with a conclusion that, "Because I had this experience, you should believe X and do Y." I don't see how that follows, especially when the story sounds implausible.

It is a little different if someone said to me, "I saw a rabid dog across the street, so don't go over there or else you gonna get bit." A rabid dog sounds plausible based on what I have previously concluded about the world. I could go and check for myself that the dog is there (it is, in theory, publicly-accessible information), or I could take the person's word for it if they seem like a trustworthy person with a good handle on reality. But most spiritual beliefs are much more implausible than this. Naturally, I would want to check for myself. But spiritual people are usually not able to explain to me how I could check for myself. "You just gotta believe" is not an operation that I can execute. It's not that I don't want to believe. I might very well want to believe, especially if their story sounds convenient or fortunate to me (such as, "We all go to heaven when we die.") But I really don't know how to just "believe" something.

Maybe some children are raised with the skill of "just believe this..." (For example: https://youtu.be/KPFUr1Nnk4k ) but for me (and my Unitarian background), it DOES NOT COMPUTE.

The situation is different with drug-induced experiences. In those cases, someone can tell me, "I had this profound experience. As of now, it is known only to me, but it is in theory publicly-accessible to you too IF you follow this well-defined set of steps: measure out 3 grams of psilocybin mushrooms...etc." Then I could have the experience, or at least AN experience, and we could move beyond just "Cool story bro." If my experience ended up being very similar to theirs...well, then I would naturally start to search for explanations to explain the correlation. Maybe their report of their experience before I had mine primed my brain for having a similar experience. For me to consider my experience to be evidence in favor of some supernatural reality, it would have to be very similar to theirs AND independently-arrived at. So, if they had an experience, wrote down a description of it (maybe with winning lottery numbers communicated to them by Poseidon), and then I had the exact same experience as them after following their instructions, but without having heard anything specific about their experience beforehand (and especially if I had been given the same winning lottery numbers that I independently wrote down immediately afterwards before talking to my friend), then WOW, that would be outstanding evidence in favor of some underlying spiritual reality of practical use.

If a spiritual person could tell me, "If you kneel and face Mecca 5 times a day and cry out, "Allah Ackbar!" you will achieve great contentment in life.", that is an operational instruction that I understand and could execute. Now, I'm pretty skeptical that it would work, and in order for me to expend the trivial inconvenience and social embarrassment involved with actually trying it, I would have to be pretty desperate for a feeling of contentment in my life...but in theory it is something that I could try.

But just telling me, "Pray to God with ALL YOUR HEART and you will find the strength to do X, Y, Z...", that's still too fuzzy for me.
Me: "Am I praying will all my heart?"
Friend: "You will KNOW when you are praying with all your heart."
Me: "Okay, I must not be praying with all my heart. How do I pray with all my heart?"
Friend: "Think of the thing in the world that you want or cherish the most. Think of that intense yearning. Apply that feeling to your desire to connect with God."
Me: "Okay...hmmmm...I'm sorry, I'm having trouble applying that feeling to something that just feels silly, I can't help it."
Friend: "Stop thinking it is silly, you have to really try and believe!"
Me: "I know, I'm trying, but it's just not working."

It's not just prayer. I have the same problems with meditation. Maybe it is just me, personally, but I don't find most recipes for making people's private spiritual experiences publicly-accessible to me to be very specific or comprehensible or operational. Is this typical-mind fallacy, or do others feel the same way?

Note that I'm not demanding that the experiences themselves be easily describable. I understand that the experiences themselves might not be the sorts of things that can be put into words. For example, people's mushroom experiences might be ecstatic and ineffable. But at least they could give me a clear recipe of how to get there so I could see for myself.

What's impressive is, the mushroom recipe would not require FAITH WITH ALL MY HEART. I could be thinking, going into it, "Man, this is all a bunch of hippy-dippy BS. I ain't gonna feel a thing." And then, BAM! That's impressive.

Don't push this all on the girls! Any boy could dress up as a girl convincingly enough to fool the magic and lift the branch himself. The only reason they did not was because they would take a similar status hit as the girls would for giving away their magic for free.

(More practical advice from an unwillingly celibate lesbian who is as disgusted with the idea of getting touched by dudes as you: learn to masturbate, and/or seek ways to relieve or avoid other types of stress that exacerbate the problem.)

This is a proposal to replace (or supplement) the tagging system with a classification system for content that would be based on three elements: subject, type, and organization.

For me, one of the problems with current LessWrong is that it has too many interesting distractions in it. Ideally, I would want to follow just a few things, with highly groomed content. For example, I'd like to see a section devoted to summaries of recent behavioral psychology articles by someone who understands them better than I do. I suspect that other people would like to see other things that I'd prefer to filter out. Examples: artificial intelligence research, effective altruism, personal productivity. I'm not knocking these subjects; but when I allocate time, I'd like to be able to allocate 100% to what I want to see and 0% to what I don't.

That suggests that one area where Less Wrong could be improved is at the top level of organization. I'd suggest that content be organized in subjects, like Behavioral Psychology, Effective Altruism, Personal Productivity, and Artificial Intelligence. Now you might say that the tagging system does this. It kind of does, but it is insufficiently prescriptive. An article on effective altruism could have no tags, or many, or not the ones I think of.

Currently, the content is also classified by type, in Main and Discussion. Frankly, the difference between the two makes little sense to me. But I think there is another classification that would be helpful when combined with prescriptive subjects. I'd classify content type more like this: * Research, used for summarizing a publication elsewhere, with the summary provided by someone who know something about it * Link, used for identifying some information that might be of use to the community * Commentary, used for the normal kind of stuff that shows up in discussion * Sequence, assigned by moderators to the original stuff that made this site what it is, or at least was * Reading, used for reading groups for specific books * Meetups, used only to announce Meetups * Organization, used to announce and promote organized action

Then a third classification of content is by organization. The community needs to remain connected to the organizations it spawned. So the third content classification would be by organization, which could be empty. Possible initial values would be MIRI, CFAR, FLI, etc. I'd hope that those organizations would ensure that at least their own research got into the relevant subject under a Research classification, and that their own blog posts got thrown over into the relevant subject under a Link classification.

This would make it easier for me to justify coming back to read Less Wrong daily, because I wouldn't expose my self to wonderful distrations in order to find the things I'd like to keep up on.

I don't come here much because there is not too much content. I'd come here more often if there was links to content that is nice. Even if it is just a sidebar with links to off-site posts. I mean, there is the blogs people who used to post here now post at, there's other rationality blogs, there's the occasional reddit thread of interest.

I have no problem with the 'ghosts haunting the dead site' staying around.

1. Trying to make their ideology more dominant (aka spreading Islam in general)

I find this the least likely as the main goal. Also, if this was the case, they are counterproductive. So far Islam was very successful in the last few decades to gain a bigger and bigger foothold in the Western world, helped both by demographics and by the predominantly left-leaning political elite in Europe encouraging the acceptance of and submission to Islamic culture in Europe instead of encouraging the immigrants to abandon their culture for the culture of the host nations. However, the recent terrorist attacks, and the many atrocities committed by the recently arrived asylum seekers, while hurting European economy, will probably lead to Europe being more skeptical regarding Islam, which might reduce the chances of Islam peacefully and silently spreading. So these events, if indeed orchestrated by ISIS, might have been successful in harming the economy of their enemies, but I don't know what an effect they had on the spreading of Islam. I'm tending on believing in a negative effect, but I just don't know enough factors to know it for sure. I believe the violent attacks in the Western world are done mostly to show their own followers at home how powerful they are and how weak their enemies are.

In fact, these results make it hard on the Islamic people who wouldn't join ISIS. This makes ISIS more attractive to these people. If a government oppresses a group than every anti-government group seems less oppressive to that group, both because oppression is relative and because of in-group vs. out-group dynamics.

Hello, I am new to most of this, and this is valid. I guess I'll have to go back and think more about how to see things from other people's point of view to create something that has more persuasive power.

Thanks!

We could double humanity's genetic "shuffle rate" by allowing couples to have one child naturally but requiring men to donate their sperm to a central bank, and women to carry and give birth to "randomly-fathered" children.

Obviously the institutional and logistical (not to mention ethical) challenges make this impossible in any present society. But for a planned community of fixed size (e.g. a small colony of humans attempting to rapidly populate a planet, or a starship designed to support the minimum possible human population with the highest possible genetic diversity), such measures may be a practical necessity.

I suspect this has been explored in Science Fiction, though I've never read anything in which this idea was put into practice.

In "My absolute dictatorship," yes.

In "My moderate dictatorship where people would actually want to live," I have to recognize that, no matter how much utilitarian sense they may seem to make under conditions of overpopulation, nobody likes forced abortions, plus their implementation is prone to ugly policy manipulation from various fringe interests.

In "My misguided dictatorship where I try to adjust the rules on a case-by-case basis, and end up being creepily intrusive in everyday affairs," the obligatoriness of the abortion would take into account how much emotional investment is already attached to that pregnancy.

In "My dictatorship when I'm having a bad hair day and I'm feeling grumpy," I would take that emotional investment into account and write it off as a sunk cost.

Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar.