I highly recommend Hanabi. It's a cooperative game about common knowledge.

Rules are here: http://www.cocktailgames.com/upload/produit/hanabi/regles/regle_en_hanabi.pdf

To me this just looks like a bias-manipulating "unpacking" trick - as you divide larger categories into smaller and smaller subcategories, the probability that people assign to the total category goes up and up. I could equally make cryonics success sound almost certain by lumping all the failure categories together into one or two big things to be probability-assigned, and unpacking all the disjunctive paths to success into finer and finer subcategories. Which I don't do, because I don't lie.

Also, yon neuroscientist does not understand the information-theoretic criterion of death.

Well, for one thing, we don't know how many round there are, ahead of time.

If you believe that there's a unique standard model of the reals, you must also believe that the continuum hypothesis has a definite truth value. Some people don't believe that.

Actually my revised opinion, as expressed in my reply to Tyrell_McAllister, is that the authors' analysis is correct given the highly unlikely set-up. In a more realistic scenario, I accept the equivalences A~B and C~D, but not B~C.

I claim that the answers to E, F, and G should indeed be the same, but H is not equivalent to them. This should be intuitive. Their line of argument does not claim H is equivalent to E/F/G - do the math out and you'll see.

I really don't know what you have in mind here. Do you also claim that cases A, B, C are equivalent to each other but not to D?

I also reject the claim that C and B are equivalent (unless the utility of survival is 0, +infinity, or -infinity). If I accepted their line of argument, then I would also have to answer the following set of questions with a single answer.

Question E: Given that you're playing Russian Roulette with a full 100-shooter, how much would you pay to remove all 100 of the bullets?

Question F: Given that you're playing Russian Roulette with a full 1-shooter, how much would you pay to remove the bullet?

Question G: With 99% certainty, you will be executed. With 1% certainty you will be forced to play Russian Roulette with a full 1-shooter. How much would you pay to remove the bullet?

Question H: Given that you're playing Russian Roulette with a full 100-shooter, how much would you pay to remove one of the bullets?

I agree that you should pay the same amount.

It feels as though you should be willing to pay twice as much in case 2, since you remove twice as much "death mass". At this point, one might be confused by the apparent contradiction. Some are chalking it up to intuition being wrong (and the problem being misinformed) and others are rejecting the argument. But both seem clearly correct to me. And the resolution is simple - notice that your money is worth half as much in case 1, since you are living half as often!

Blocking the Unblockable Curse.

This is mostly related to canon, but also a bit to HPMoR.

I've always wondered why the killing curse counts as "unblockable". In "Order of the Phoenix", Dumbledore blocks it by moving a statue in its path. Seems to work nicely. There is other evidence that solids stop the killing curse -- if it went through it, you could accidentally kill somebody behind a wall when missing your target. Prof. Moody would surely have mentioned that danger when talking about the killing curse, if that was the case. So you could carry around a steel plate strong enough to block the curse, and quickly move it into its path. Not easy, but possible.

There are also several instances where simple spells conjure animals (I remember bats and small birds). I wonder if you could simply conjure an animal into the way of the killing curse. It might need to have a minimal size to work, but a powerful wizards should be able to do that.

I also wonder if there are ways to combine charms: one detection charm that triggers another one. For example one that detects killing curses, and enables apparation or a portkey.

So, one proven way to block a killing curse, one conjectural, and another conjectural way to escape it. I can't believe the wizards still call it "unblockable" :-)

I think realistically, most people burn out if they don't spend some time relaxing. If your argument had been more extreme, it might argue that people should sacrifice a couple of hours of sleep each day as well, right? But it's plausible that for most people, going off of 6 hours of sleep per day will decrease their cognitive ability and productivity drastically. Or that exercising 1 hour a day has sufficient physical and mental health benefits to justify it. Could some amount of recreation be worth it? I think so. I think I couldn't function without some recreation, although I agree that I should actively work to decrease the dependency.

But of course, you have a point. Everyone is wasting some time. Nobody is being perfectly altruistic, and making the best choices at all times. I don't think anyone ever thought they were...

Is it seriously possible to make $5/hr filling out surveys online? I thought those websites were all scams?

If someone can teach me how to make $5/hr filling out surveys, I'll give the first $10 I earn to the SIAI.