Link: Appeals to evidence may decrease donations among donors primarily seeking warm fuzzies: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2421943 hat tip http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/04/does-greater-charitable-effectiveness-spur-more-donations.html
My understanding, you might believe in some continued life after death, something about human souls, any sort of supernatural things, but not believe in a personified interacting deity who gave humans orders like worship me, do this/that etc., nor be a deist who thinks there is such a being but doesn't give orders for some reason.
Wait, what? This might be a little off topic, but if you assert that they lack evidence and are drawing conclusions based on motivated reasoning, that seems highly relevant and not ad hominem. I guess it could be unnecessary, as you might try to focus exactly on their evidence, but it would seem reasonable to look at the evidence they present, and say "this is consistent with motivated reasoning, for example you describe many things that would happen by chance but nothing similar contradictory, so there seems to be some confirmation bias" etc.
Fighting has a huge signalling component: when viewed in isolation, a fight might be trivially, obviously, a net negative for both participants. However, either or both! participants might in the future win more concessions for their willingness to fight alone than the loss of the fight. As humans are adaption executers, a certain willingness to fight, to seek revenge, etc. is pretty common. At least, this seems to be the dominant theory and sensible to me.
Take the leadership feat, and hope your GM is lazy enough to let you level them. More practically, is it a skills problem or as I would guess an agency problem? Can impress on them the importance of acting vs not? Lend them the Power of Accountability? 7 habits of highly effective people? Can you compliment them every time they show initiative? etc. I think the solution is too specific to individuals for general advice, nor do I know a general advice book beyond those in the same theme as those mentioned.
[link] XKCD on saving time; http://xkcd.com/1205/ Image URL (for hotlinking/embedding): http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it_wor Though it will probably be mostly unseen as the month is about to end.
I have always had an animal fear of death, a fate I rank second only to having to sit through a rock concert. My wife tries to be consoling about mortality and assures me that death is a natural part of life, and that we all die sooner or later. Oddly this news, whispered into my ear at 3 a.m., causes me to leap screaming from the bed, snap on every light in the house and play my recording of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” at top volume till the sun comes up.
-Woody Allen EDIT: Fixed formatting.
It's even worse than that, the function for the maximum number of nodes you end up before they start going down, if you play using the worst possible strategy, increases faster than any function which Peano arithmetic can prove to be total (i.e., it grows faster than any Turing machine run on various inputs, which Peano arithmetic can prove to halt for any input). To say that this grows faster than the Ackermann function is putting it very mildly.
It depends on what you mean by "disaster" and "over specified." I will add that the IPCC, a body I accept as reputable, predicts a large range of possible outcomes with probability estimates, some of which I think can be fairly categorized as "disastrous." Global warming is a large potential human misery-causer, but not even close to an existential threat. For certain countries, such as the US, it probably won't be that bad, at least until the second half of this century.
I believe it is true as an environmental engineer engaged in atmospheric modeling. Atmospheric modeling is a field in which the standard scientific method seems to be working well, that is, there is a large benefit to researchers who are right and/or can prove others wrong. This means that there is a lot of effort going into improving models that are already quite accurate, to the limits of the data you input. For example, the 1990 model of climate change does quite well if you give it better data, and at least correctly predicts the temperature trend wit...
Book Recommendation; Fiction; AI; While this might be the kind of scifi book to merely annoy experts, I found it enjoyable. It surrounds military use of potentially FOOM AI's which are wiped periodically to prevent the foom. Soiler: vg snvyf. It is also part of a series, in which some overlapping events are told from different perspectives, which I also found enjoyable. http://www.amazon.com/Insidious-Michael-McCloskey/dp/1440192529
Similarly, there was that time US soldiers fired on a camera crew, even laughing at them for being incompetent terrorists when they ran around. Or they just capture and torture them with a poor explanation.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/06/us-iraq-usa-journalists-idUSTRE6344FW20100406
24, I would also be willing to help. Several people seem concerned that special effort to reach out to teenagers and help them address their problems will interfere with the status-quo style and quality of less wrong. I would encourage being sure that isn't the case, and explaining why. If it would require current users to wade through teenage problems, I would vote not to do that. But I see no reason we can't expand as per John_Maxwell_IV's comment. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/fch/proposal_lesswrong_for_teenagers/7sfk
Thanks for suggesting UniversityTutor. Personal Anecdote: In Houston, people will come to me and pay at least $30 an hour for tutoring. I was surprised. I particularly enjoy the light on one student's face when I explained why doing something to both sides of an equation was the only way to get the right answer. I might not have supposed that this was missing if it hadn't appeared on LessWrong.
Like: Houston though