One way to see how good different charities are is to imagine that after you died, you had to live the life of every creature on earth.

This implies that we should eradicate as many such species as we can, because creatures that don't exist don't count for this.

My own heresy is that I don't have a true rejection. Many ideas are things which I believe by accumulation of evidence and there's no single item which would disprove my position. And talking about a "true rejection" is really trying to create a gotcha to force someone to change their position without allowing for things such as accumulation of evidence or even misphrasing the rejection.

I also think rationalists shouldn't bet, but that probably deserves its own post.

This is the core reason why it is so difficult for ordinary people to pay their bills or raise families, despite earnings that would make them rich elsewhere or elsewhen. These productive actions are severely restricted, because if you are going to be productive then you have to do so ‘correctly’ and obey all sorts of rules and requirements.

There are plenty of good things that aren't restricted and bad things that are. But elites are human and aren't going to get it right every time, and you'll notice most the cases where they got it wrong.

No, because I have no way to improve my ability to see loopholes and flaws, so there's always going to be residual uncertainty that can't be reduced. Risk aversion does the rest.

Sorry, risk aversion.

Also, the usual situation of "if I think the main proposition is unlikely, bad outcomes will be dominated by cases where I miss loopholes in the bet or otherwise lose the bet for reasons unrelated to the truth of the proposition".

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• i.e slow down a little, you may be getting into a heated exchange.

I just got screwed over by this,  It strikes me as insane to be rate-limited to "slow down" and not get into a "heated exchange" when the limit is done by checking the user's karma for the last 20 comments from any time period.  20 comments from me go back months,  I can't get all that much slower.  And 3 downvoters and -1 is an awfully small limit, and easy to hit just out of bad luck.

Also, if you post from greaterwrong, and you hit the limit, your comment and the effort spent writing it is just lost.

But some of the writing in those old sacred texts is actually really good.

The Halo Effect (pun not intended) is very strong here.

I seldom see people who say thibnngs like this also say that the writing in the Koran is actually really good, for some reason. And not because there's some difference in how good the writing in the Koran and in the Bible is.

Reviewing WEIG on this blog provides another interesting point of contrast in The Categories Were Made for Man.

which in turn contrasts with Zack Davis' posts including The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions.

That statement is not nonsensical, but "nothing" is not being compared as a quantity either.