Great post. Some cases of "attempted telekinesis" seem to be similar to "shoulding at the universe".

To stay with your example: I can easily imagine that if I were in your place and experienced this stressful situation with CFAR, my system 1 would have became emotionally upset and "shoulded" at the universe: "I shouldn't have to do this alone. Someone should help me. It is so unfair that I have so much responsibility".

This is similar to attempted telekinesis in the sense that my system 1 somehow thinks that just by becoming emotionally upset it will magic someone (or the universe itself) into helping me and improving my situation.

Shoulding at the universe is also a paradigmatic example of a wasted motion. Realizing this helped me a lot because I used to should at the universe all the time ("I shouldn't have to learn useless stuff for university because I don't have enough time to do important work."; "This guy shouldn't be so irrational and strawman my arguments"; etc. etc.)

Two words: Interindividual differences.

They also recommend 8-9 hours sleep. Some people need more, some people need less. The same point applies to many different phenomena.

I think Bostrom puts it nicely in his new book "Superintelligence":

A colleague of mine likes to point out that a Fields Medal (the highest honor in mathematics) indicates two things about the recipient: that he was capable of accomplishing something important, and that he didn't.

I translated the essay Superintelligence and the paper In Defense of posthuman Dignity by Nick Bostrom into German in order to publish them on the blog of GBS Schweiz.

He thanked me by sending me a signed copy of his new book "Superintelligence". Which made me pretty happy.

This link does not work for me (it redirects to my event list). I am not sure if it is because of privacy settings or anything else? In any case: what is its full name as it appears on FB?

I am interested, but not sure if I will be available on that date (40%?). Do you want to create a FB event? From my experience as an organizer of various stuff it works for seeing who is interested; of course it will attract more newbies and casual readers (I am in this category: up to date, my most serious interaction with LW is this post: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/28067/entropy-based-refutation-of-shalizis-bayesian-backward-arrow-of-time-paradox/28634#28634).

On a general level me and tkadlubo are interested, but not this time. AFAWK there are just over a dozen Polish LWers, scattered around the country and that makes any meetup difficult.

We are going to the Berlin Meetup in 3 weeks, Maybe see you there?

making physical backups of data

Oh boy, is this ever a good example.

I used to work retail, selling and repairing Macs and Mac accessories. When I'd sell someone a computer, I'd tell them — no, beg them — to invest in a backup solution. "I'm not trying to sell you anything!", I'd say. "You don't have to buy your backup device from us — though we'd be glad to sell you one for a decent price — but please, get one somewhere! Set it up — heck, we'll set it up for you — and please... back up! When you come to us after your hard drive has inevitably failed — as all hard drives do eventually, sure as death or taxes — with your life's work on it, you'll be glad you backed up."

And they'd smile, and nod, and come back some time later with a failed hard drive, no backup, and full of outrage that we couldn't magic their data back into existence. And they'd pay absurd amounts of money for data recovery.

Back up your data, people. It's so easy (if you've got a Mac, anyway). The pain of losing months or years of work is really, really, really painful.

Great post of course.

If it took a mutant to do monstrous things, the history of the human species would look very different. Mutants would be rare.

Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't it read: "Mutants would not be rare." ? Many monstrous things happened in human history, so if only mutants could do evil deeds, there would have to be a lot of them. Furthermore, mutants are rare, so no need for the subjunctive "would".

Meta-analysis on cognitive effects of modafinil (my bachelor thesis)

Well, meta-analyses certainly are an area of interest to me, and I was disappointed in 2012 by "Cognition Enhancement by Modafinil: A Meta-Analysis" (Kelley et al 20120) which used only 3 studies, and so was not very informative. A new meta-analysis would be great. But... I read quickly through it, and I saw no meta-analysis. Just a literature review. What's with the post title?

Modafinil significantly improved performance in 26 out of 102 cognitive tests, but significantly decreased performance in 3 cognitive tests.

Nitpick: I really hate this use of 'significantly' and I ban it from my own writing. Is this referring to effect sizes or p-values?

Notably, modafinil appears to have detrimental effects on mental flexibility. Although 4 studies employed the Intra/Extradimensional Set Shift task (ID/ED), no performance improvements could be detected. Performance was even reduced in a study by Randall et al. (2004). Furthermore, Müller et al. (2012) found that subjects on modafinil had lower flexibility scores in the Abbreviated Torrance task for adults.

Eh. Absence of improvement != damage. Randal 2004 didn't find a statistically-significant decrease (and it's not clear whether it should, given that it reports 25 datasets for 3 groups, so hunting for decreases incurs worries about multiplicity). And I have to point out, as far as Müller et al 2012 goes, the decrease didn't reach p<0.05 (just 0.053), and if you're willing to accept just trending, then you should also be accepting the increase in the GEFT/Group Embedded Figures Task (p=0.08).

How important are these observations...? Well, as you found out, it can be hard to compare or meta-analyze psychology studies since studies may cover the same topic but use different sets of tests, frustrating the most obvious approach 'just univariate meta-analyze everything!'

Reprinted from Baranski et al. (2004) without permission.

Hah.