I managed to unintentionally do something valuable -- I arranged to carpool with some coworkers, forcing me to get up at about 8:45 every day, instead of sleeping in and working later, as I could do. What I really need to do, though, is train myself to go to sleep closer to midnight than 2 AM; I know it makes me happier the next day, it's just hard to stop reading or doing stuff. I've never in my life been able to stop staying up so late.

No concrete plan on that one yet, I'm consuming plenty of my willpower with other things. Just pontificating.

Yes, you probably think you care about believing truth – but isn’t it more plausible that you mainly care about thinking you like truth? Doesn’t that have a more plausible evolutionary origin than actually caring about far truth?

Imagine I told Robin Hanson I liked the way chocolate tastes. Do you think he'd reply: "Yes, you probably think you like the taste of chocolate – but isn’t it more plausible that you mainly care about eating calorically dense foods so you can store up fat for the winter? Doesn’t that have a more plausible evolutionary origin than actually caring about the taste of chocolate?" Of course not, because that would sound silly. It's only for abstract intellectual desires that someone can get away with a statement like that.

If evolution "wants" you to eat calorically dense foods it doesn't make you actually want calories, it just makes you like the way the foods taste. And if evolution "wants" you to appear to care about truth to impress people the most efficient way for it to accomplish that is to make you actually care about the truth. That way you don't have to keep your lies straight. People don't think they care about the truth, they actually do.

I know that that's Hanson's quote, not yours, but the fact that you quote it indicates you agree with it to some extent.

I enjoy meditation, especially group meditation. It calms me down and helps me stay a bit more focused. I just want to do without the new age hippy bullshit. My eyes start to glaze over when people start to talk about God, chakras, and auras.

I'm not sure if this is really the way upvotes are supposed to be used, but I voted you up from -1 because I don't think "Can you explain why?" is a question that should be censured.

all sorts of science that isn't getting funded

It's important to avoid the if-not-for-the-worst-waste-of-money-in-the-budget-the-most-worthy-unfunded-program-would-have-been-funded argument.

Public user karma graphs for users as well as posts seem an interesting if slightly cluttering user interface addition [a neat little graph icon next to the quote bubbles and the chain link], that might help combat this while having the neat benefit of making it easier to infer all sorts of things.

This sounds a lot like the Scouting merit system, in a good way. I learned more life skills from Scouts then I ever did from public education.

I was prepared to let him walk. He really had offended us.

If you've already pointed them to Three Worlds and HPMR and they are interested, they will likely start poking around themselves. So, unless they've asked specifically for suggestions, it isn't clear to me that such suggestions are a good idea.

Assuming they have shown that they are amenable to such suggestions, one slightly Dark Artish but potentially useful idea is to send them first to things they are more likely to agree with. So for example, if they are an agnostic or atheist, sending them to the religion related posts (like the Mysterious Answers sequence) will get them more likely to feel that the website is worth reading. This is because they will be exposed to a combination of arguments they've seen versions of before and ones they have not seen before and all those arguments will likely support their pre-existing viewpoint. This is a very effective way of making people sympathetic and willing to read more.

The link "summary" and the link "Here is a little more expanded text" seem to point to the same place, in my browser at least.