I would dearly like citations for everything—I would really like to know if I am still terrible at estimating how awful the world is.
blashimov
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.
I have taken the survey, including all questions.
All the extra credit questions!
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 with bad data. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/1990-ipcc-report_n_2270453.html Similar to comments below, the IPCC is an enormous body, and I find invalidating their arguments to require an implausible conspiracy theory. You can look up the executive summary for the various reports at your leisure, they are quite readable.
I will do 20.
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.
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.
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
I see what you mean.
[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.
You might be remembering the times you are correct more clearly than the times you are wrong.
While I’d be happy to take a look, I have to honestly predict that you won’t hear anything you haven’t heard before, and you are unlikely to change your mind.
Frankly, I am surprised you have even Facebook friends who would recommend drinking bleach.
I know I might feel glad because I feel like I have a lot more control over whether I am right or wrong than the relative idiocy of the average person. On the other hand, being a person, I’d probably just be glad either way. The upside of being cynical.
Are you going to have fish be sentient? Are all animals sentient Disney-style? If you are trying to make an at all coherent world, I’d just ditch the sentient fish part. Otherwise, I will honestly never read this because I won’t be able to get over the horror of billions of sentient death just constantly. MOR!Harry panic about snakes right there. That is a really, really, weird world where humans haven’t noticed as well. Fish are really, really, stupid. Hence we eat them en masse before we even started farming.
Apologies if sidetracking a hypothetical into the real world: kickstarter attempts to solve this problem.
Under family religious views: Could you either allow us to select all that apply, or add something to the instructions about whether you want some sort of strange average, pick the best you can, or write in other? (Example: one christian parent of some sort and one atheist parent, what should I choose?)
Are ranges acceptable on some questions to reflect uncertainty, such as IQ?
Bonus questions ( or even main questions to add): Has reading something on less wrong caused you to change your mind? (Add qualifications here if desired, e.g. you updated your probability estimate by x, decided to collect more evidence then updated by x, etc.)
So you would like people to post crackpot theories so that we can practice on them? I was trying to help by pointing out that there is a step between “physics journal” and nothing physics related. Perhaps I should have held my tongue and moved on with Mitchell_Porter and shminux ’s comments being sufficient.
I took all of it!