Indeed: the background probability of a sane leader launching an unprovoked trade war on the rest of the world is near zero.  10% would be unsettling, 30% would be (and was!) alarming.

30% was already a ridiculously high risk, and should have already been decisive if this was the deciding issue for a voter.  You don't have to know that the bullet is in your chamber to decide not to play russian roulette.

I think this might have been intended more in the purple dragon sense than anything: focus on how they know exactly what experimental results they'll need to explain, and what that implies about their gut-level beliefs.

That seems to be conceding the point that it has moral weight.

I teleport a hostage about to be executed to a capsule in lunar orbit. I then offer you three options: you pay me 1,000,000,000$, and I give him whatever pleasures are possible given the surroundings for a day, and then painlessly kill him; I simply kill him painlessly; I torture him for a day, and then painlessly kill him, and then pay you 1,000,000,000$.

Do you still take the money?

This strikes me as a pretty stark decision, such that I'd have a really hard time treating those who would take the money any different than I'd treat the babyeaters. It's almost exactly the same moral equation.

Last time I played, I just used pennies and nickles.

I really want to try it with a bucket of generic lego pieces some time.

It's a permanent mark that easily leads to tearing.

How... what...

People on the internet aren't from Saskatoon, that's my city!

Beetle-sized (of the beautifully blue sort), at least.

Note also that the body the mind wears apparently (according to quirrel) does have an impact on the mind.

[...] Often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to find someone who's saying something that seems clearly, manifestly wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong people provide a fertile source of research ideas.

-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)