In the classic "When Prophecy Fails", one of the cult members walked out the door immediately after the flying saucer failed to land. Who gets fed up and leaves first? An average cult member? Or a relatively more skeptical member, who previously might have been acting as a voice of moderation, a brake on the more fanatic members?

After the members with the highest kinetic energy escape, the remaining discussions will be between the extreme fanatics on one end and the slightly less extreme fanatics on the other end, with the group consensus somewhere in the "middle".

Why do we accept our own personal fears and hates, even as we suggest that others’ fears and hates are bad signs about them?

Relative to low status folks, high status folks have less occasion to fear or hate. Complaining that your opponents have a “politics of fear” or hate is really just complaining about their low status [ :) ]

Sympathy is for the historically disadvantaged, the poor, and people aligned with such groups.

On the other hand, when everyone is a victim, by definition you can't give yourselves a boatload of money, because it has to come from somewhere else.

Currently, the homeowners are changing the mortgage contract ex post because lawyers and politicians find them useful muckraking props for their power and profit grabs. Prior default curves for mortgage cohorts are now totally irrelevant because there is now little stigma for defaulting on a mortgage--rather the opposite--and you get to live rent free for a longer time if you stop paying.

Views may have a biological basis. Individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images (LOLWTF can you imagine the testing room?) were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control. The degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats. - cite

This transition [ from foraging to farming (= digging + herding) ] meant huge changes in attitudes and behaviors, supported by modest still-slowly-continuing genetic changes and huge cultural changes. I hypothesize that the cultural pressures which long ago pushed folks from more natural forager ways into then-more-functional farming ways work better on poor people, so that rich folk less feel their pressure. If so, as folks get rich they would tend to revert back to the natural-feeling forager ways.

Vipassana aims to break the habit of blindly making affective judgments about mental states, and reverse the damage done by doing so in the past. This habit may be at the root of many problems described on LessWrong, and is likely involved in other mental issues.

Four [simultaneous] aspects to the process:

1. Slowing the flood of affective judgments so one can distinctly observe them.
2. Learning to not compulsively make affective judgments.
3. Smoothing one's previously formed emotional gradients.
4. No longer forming strong emotional gradients.

[...]believes the right company "won" the social media wars: Its great rival, MySpace, founded in Los Angeles, "is about being someone fake on the Internet; everyone could be a movie star," he says. He considers it "very healthy," he adds, "that the real people have won out over the fake people."

Our technocratic elite told us to expect an ever-wealthier future, and science hasn't delivered. Except for computers and the Internet, the idea that we're experiencing rapid technological progress is a myth.

"People don't want to believe that technology is broken. . . . Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology—all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why."


Mr. Thiel delivers his views with an extraordinary, almost physical effort to put his thoughts in order and phrase them pithily. Somewhere in his 42 years, he obviously discovered the improbability of getting a bold, unusual argument translated successfully into popular journalism.


"All sorts of things are possible in a world where you have massive progress in technology and related gains in productivity," he says. "In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem."


And President Obama? "I'm not sure I'd describe him as a socialist. I might even say he has a naive and touching faith in capitalism. He believes you can impose all sorts of burdens on the system and it will still work."

The system is telling him otherwise. Mankind, says Mr. Thiel, has no inalienable right to the progress that has characterized the last 200 years. Today's heightened political acrimony is but a foretaste of the "grim Malthusian" politics ahead, with politicians increasingly trying to redistribute the fruits of a stagnant economy, loosing even more forces of stagnation.

Question: How can anyone know science and technology are under-performing compared to potential? It's hard, he admits. Those who know—"university professors, the entrepreneurs, the venture capitalists"—are "biased" in favor of the idea that rapid progress is happening, he says, because they're raising money. "The other 98%"—he means you and me, who in this age of specialization treat science and technology as akin to magic—"don't know anything."



But look, he says, at the future we once portrayed for ourselves in "The Jetsons." We don't have flying cars. Space exploration is stalled. There are no undersea cities. Household robots do not cater to our needs. Nuclear power "we should be building like crazy," he says, but we're sitting on our hands. Or look at today's science fiction compared to the optimistic vision of the original "Star Trek": Contemporary science fiction has become uniformly "dystopian," he says. "It's about technology that doesn't work or that is bad."

The great exception is information technology, whose rapid advance is no fluke: "So far computers and the Internet have been the one sector immune from excessive regulation."


A "higher education bubble":

"University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers," he says, "selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties."


"If the universities are dominated by politicians instead of scientists, if there are ways the government is too inefficient to work, and we're just throwing good money after bad, you end up with a nearly revolutionary situation. That's why the idea that technology is broken is taboo. Really taboo. You probably have to get rid of the welfare state. You have to throw out Keynesian economics. All these things would not work in a world where technology is broken," he says.

Perhaps it really does fall to some dystopian science fiction writer to tell us what such a world will be like—when nations are unraveling even as a cyber-nation called "Facebook" is becoming the most populous on the planet.

An unsmiling Katherine Heigl, at work on a new movie in this Pittsburgh suburb in August, stepped out of a chauffeured black S.U.V. and strode onto the set. She briskly filmed her scene and decamped to her air-conditioned trailer. “I admit that I’m particular about the way I work,” she said, stopping to stare at a stuffed rabbit on the floor. She continued her thought, but not before giving the bunny a swift kick.

True? Yes. But the morning could also be accurately described like this: Relaxing in her trailer between scenes, Katherine Heigl apologized for the mess — her daughter, Naleigh, had been playing with stuffed animals. Gracious and funny, Ms. Heigl talked about her struggle to balance work with family. “I guess everything in life requires some kind of compromising,” she said.

So which is it? Cold diva or likable mom?

As Ms. Heigl has learned the hard way, Hollywood and the news media aren’t big on nuance. Stars are supposed to come packaged with neat captions: bubbly (Julia Roberts), charming (George Clooney), quirky (Johnny Depp). When they step outside those assigned boxes, either in a film role or in real life, the machinery starts pushing them back.

Ms. Heigl, 31, has been assigned the diva box. Reporters are supposed to look for the smallest signal of imperiousness. (Bunny, kicked — scribble that down.) Forget that she’s warm and genuine in person.

Odds of Life on Nearby Planet '100 Percent,' Astronomer Says (Fox News)
UN 'to appoint space ambassador to greet alien visitors' (Telegraph UK)

There’s an alternative universe pretty close to ours where things went subtly different in 1975 or so...and the rednecks starting watching action/adventure/SF movies featuring airships and steampunkish trumpetguns, while the hipsters got more into Boris Valejo paintings with their massive barbarian swords.

…and in that world, someone just posted that the trumpetgun is “trying too hard” and the shark knife is “wonderful, whimsical, retrocool”.

Obama Says He Would Agree to Some Drilling (NYT)

Some background of teenage pregnancies in Texas:

The non-Hispanic white rate is 60 per 1,000, the black rate is 130 per 1,000 and the Hispanic rate is 145 per 1,000.

The rate at YFZ seems to be 45 per 1,000. Twenty[-five] percent lower than the rate for other Texas girls in the polygamous girls’ demographic cohort and more than [68%] lower than among Hispanic girls in Texas.

That indicates that underage girls at YFZ are 20 percent less likely to have sex than other white girls across the state and 60 percent less likely to have sex than Hispanic girls across the state.

The rate of teen pregnancy at YFZ is lower than the rate of teen pregnancy in more than three-quarters of Texas counties.

The best thing the state can do now is apologize. If they are sincere in wanting to protect teenaged women from getting pregnant, they ought to take lessons from YFZ, because they are doing a better job of it than the state as a whole.

In the majority of these cases the male was only a few years older than the female (i.e. the male partner was also a teenager).

And, I love that this is an international "law" argued to prohibit polygamy:

Polygamous marriage contravenes a woman’s right to equality with men, and can have such serious emotional and financial consequences for her and her dependents that such marriages ought to be discouraged and prohibited. The Committee notes with concern that some States parties, whose constitutions guarantee equal rights, permit polygamous marriage in accordance with personal or customary law. This violates the constitutional rights of women… (qtd. in ACLRC, 2004: 9). (Canadian blogger)