If you want to convince people on the street that corporations are to blame, you should probably start with things that are simple to understand, such as "supermarkets lace 80% of their product with sugar" and "up to 90% of the food displayed at a child’s eye level in checkout lines is unhealthy".
To help average people improve their situation, I think it would help to make a cookbook of extremely simple healthy recipes, and to make a YouTube channel demonstrating them. At least, I remember that I procrastinated with starting to cook because everything seemed so complicated. Now that I cook semi-regularly, I understand that maybe 3-5 ingredients in the recipe are essential, and 10 more are just "nice to have, maybe". Some recipes are sensitive to how much of an ingredient you put there (also some ingredients are sensitive, e.g. salt), but sometimes using 50% or 200% of the recommended thing is still okay. Time is sometimes sensitive and you can easily burn things, and sometimes again anything between 50% and 200% is okay-ish. So as good cook, you need to temporarily suppress the impulse to show off, and provide an easy recipe with few and not too sensitive ingredients (and then maybe make an separate optional "full" version thereof). For example, to cook a potato soup, you only need water, potato, and little salt, those are literally all the necessary ingredients for the basic version; but try googling for the recipe, and you get dozens of ingredients; and yes, they make the result taste better, but they also discourage the beginner from trying.
Nutri-Score is a simple system to rate food. Fiber and protein good; salt, sugar, and fat bad; the result is on a scale from A to E. I expect the food industry to oppose it just as forcefully as the online advertising industry opposes GDPR.
For exercise, I found Convict Conditioning useful. Ignore the motivating story; it is a set of exercises you can do at home, with progressively easier and more difficult versions of each. (There is some criticism online, most of it is of type "perfect is the enemy of good".) For poor people, or people with kids, exercising at home is more realistic than going to the gym.
I wonder if online shopping could make it easier to resist the temptation in food shops, especially if you could make browser bookmarks for the healthy and useful stuff, so your shopping procedure would just be like "click this bookmark, add to cart, click that bookmark, add to cart, proceed to checkout".
I can imagine going much further and making an independent front end for food shopping, where you could just select "no sweets" as a filter. This could be developed as open source. But would require too much work. I am not sure how actively the supermarkets would fight against it -- on one hand, it's obviously not what they want, on the other hand, sabotaging the system unilaterally means sending the users to the competitors.
I think it would also be good to create a simple brochure with food advice, updated for recent developments, because the food companies adapt to exploit your simple heuristics. (For example, some people had a heuristic "brown sugar is better than white sugar", and companies reacted by making brown sugar by simply adding brown color to white sugar. Similarly for "dark bread is better than white bread"; if you don't check the ingredients, often the dark bread sold at your shop is just white bread with added color.)
Important thing is to keep it simple. Yes, people will object against this in the name of greater precision. But a simple guide that an average person can use is preferable to a complex guide they don't have time to study.
(One thing I find discouraging as a rationalist is that for some reason "health advice" often attracts people interested in various crazy things, so if you tried to rely on volunteers to provide good advice, soon the advice would consist of cleaning your chakras and watching crystals, plus homeopathy etc.)
I guess the point is that they're talking
Yes, that's how they signal good relations. Also, it keeps the communication channels open, just in case they might want to say something useful in future.
Seems okay. Maybe a bit too long; especially the Pascal triangle is too large.
With alcohol, you can see what other people say and do when their self-control is impaired. It's like a mild form of mind-reading.
Rewriting the sequences to make them shorter would be very useful IMHO. But I prefer reading normal text to bullet points, especially if it would be a long text (such as rewriting the entire sequences).
Similar here: calendar notifications, special place on the table (phone, keys, etc.).
Also, "inbox" for important documents that need to be filed, which I process once in a few months.
I agree. The best advertisement for having kids is to see other people having kids. Not only because people instinctively copy others, but also because you can ask the parents the things you are curious about, or you can try to babysit their kids to get an idea what it would be like to have your own kids.
Also, the more places are parent-friendly, the less costly it is to become a parent. If your friends mostly socialize in loud places with lots of alcohol, starting a family will make you socially isolated, because you would not want to bring your kids to places like that. If instead your friends meet at a park, you can keep your social life and bring your kids along with you.
If many people meet at the same place, it can make sense to have a room specifically for kids, at least with some paper and crayons, so that the kids can play there and leave their parents alone for a moment. Also, one big box where people can bring toys they no longer need at home.
yet we still don't have anything close to a unified theory of human mating, relationships, and child-rearing that's better.
We even seem to have a collective taboo against developing such theory, or even making relatively obvious observations.
I approve of the militant atheism, because there are just too many religious people out there, so without making a strong line we would have an Eternal September of people joining Less Wrong just to say "but have you considered that an AI can never have a soul?" or something similar.
And if being religious is strongly correlated with some political tribe, I guess it can't be avoided.
But I think that going further than that is unnecessary and harmful.
Actually, we should probably show some resistance to the stupid ideas of other political tribes, just to make our independence clear. Otherwise, people would hesitate to call out bullshit when it comes from those who seem associated with us. (Quick test: Can you say three things the average Democrat believes that are wrong and stupid? What reaction would you expect if you posted your answer on LW?)
Specifically on trans issues:
I am generally in favor of niceness and civilization, therefore:
But I also value rationality and free speech, therefore:
All politically correct beliefs should go to the hat. Plausible deniability for everyone.
(And maybe everyone should pick two or three beliefs. Bonus points for making a convincing claim that one of them is a logical outcome of the other. Oops, you actually can't get bonus points, that would ruin the deniability.)