Evangelising Linux, you’re doing it wrong

Imagine an entirely hypothetical scenario. While using some piece of software – say, an operation system – you run into a number of annoyances, perhaps even serious problems. A friend, or perhaps a Google search, uncovers an name of a competitor, lauded as being way, way better. Disgruntled, you give it a go. However, soon you discover problems in that new product, or that it hinders your productivity by being incompatible with your existing knowledge or familiar software. You post about your not entirely positive experience, and to your dismay hear that it’s all your fault. Your fault for not Reading The Fine Manual, your fault for getting used to the competitor’s software, your fault for not being smarter, more curious, more open. Your fault for not living up to the system’s standards.

I don’t know the actual numbers, but I bet that most people who tried switching from Windows to Linux went back to Windows, and in no small part due to this widespread attitude that first lures you in with impossible promises and then blames any problems you may have on you, the user. This happens a lot in the FOSS community, and while I can certainly understand that the developers and users don’t owe anything to anybody, thinking this kind of attitude promotes the system is wishful at best.

I’ve had Linux hard-freeze on me (due to hardware issues), I’ve had my data eaten, I’ve had annoying bugs, I’ve experienced dumb design decisions, and I saw annoying bugs not being fixed for years. I’m not mad (well, I *am* mad at data loss), because as a developer myself, I know that software has bugs, that sometimes you need to be patient, experiment, or, yes, even read the manual.

But I also know that nobody likes to be talked down to. Nobody wants to feel stupid. Users just want to get their job done. They shouldn’t care about the developer’s philosophy, prejudices and grudges. And yet, so many Linux and FOSS evangelists flaunt their blind loyalty with pride. Take, for example, this post by a self-described “helpful albeit abrasive” author. I see his points, but this is just horrible marketing. Unfortunately, this is not the exception.

The take away lesson is clear: if you’re  a software evangelist, Don’t Do That. Emphasize your strengths, downplay your weaknesses, whatever it takes to get you users. But when you have them – don’t turn them away. Otherwise, you will end up like so many FOSS, including Linux – the bigger, better up-and-coming champion, for fifteen years straight and counting.

Practice

It’s been a while.

I’m staring at the WordPress post edit interface. The music swings between Kate Ryan’s cover of Ella, Elle La and Mark Knopfler’s Silvertown Blues. So is my state of mind.

I haven’t written in ages. I tried, I really did, as my drafts folder will attest. In a fit of rage, I decided that today I’m not going to bed until I write something sensible. Well, let’s just say I’m really sleepy right now.

William Zinsser, in On Writing Well, describes (non-fiction) writing as a difficult and lonely craft. You stare at the screen, thinking hard for hours; something clicks and you write a few paragraphs; if you’re lucky, you’ll get to keep some of it after you’re done editing. All the while, the deadline looms. The structure you envisioned keeps changing. There are too few paragraphs on the screen…

For Zinsser, writing is ultimately about finding your own voice. Anybody can write about anything, given sufficient knowledge. But the reader wants to be moved, and a necessary condition for that is a certain style and warmth of the text. That and plain old writing skills. No pressure on both counts, eh?

So, it’s been a while. I’m restarting this experiment of a blog. Hour by hour, word by word, practice makes perfect.

Grades are for sorting

Over on scienceblogs, Rhett Allain (a bad Ritalin pun?) called grades a mere shadow of the true light of learning. He went on to enumerate cases where folks confused the two and suggested raising grades instead of raising learning.

First, obviously “raising grades” doesn’t mean artificially inflating them any more than “raising sales” means buying one’s own products, so that’s a bit disingenuous.

Second, I suppose Prof. Allain does want some sort of objective estimate of his student’s performance, so the interesting (yet unaddressed) question concerns alternative methods to grades.

Third, it got me thinking about the utility of grades. If grades are dumb and possibly counter-productive to learning, why have them at all?

Grading: Now How by Why is an interesting and relevant article. Nevertheless, grades are here to stay, and the author mentions the reason for it – sorting. Consider, for example, that universities give great weight to an applicant’s matriculation GPA, even if the application is for a completely different major. But even if it’s the same, the student will re-learn all his High School material in much greater depth in a single semester. One’s level of knowledge in High School is mostly irrelevant for higher education.

A better view is that grades are a proxy not of immediate knowledge but of ability – a higher GPA means the student is intelligent or diligent or both – and thus are very valuable for employers (and other application reviewers). In this view, higher education demands learning lots of complicated material which is not directly helpful and which may be forgotten after the test, but it’s all good as long as it sorts the bright from the dull.

Of course, this still means that attempts to raise grades are misguided, for the market will eventually find other proxies to sort people by (SAT, GMAT and other g-loaded tests come to mind). But will improving learning help? Ultimately most people do not enter university to learn about the world, but rather to be ranked in society by their major’s difficulty and their own achievements in it. Grades then, are indeed mere shadows, but useful ones nonetheless, and so I don’t think Prof. Allain will be dropping them anytime soon.

Economic organization of a POW camp

Via Falkenblog, I stumbled upon this gem [EDIT: the previous link appears to be an abridged version, the full version can be found here]. RA Radford, whom I guess to be a British officer, writes about his experience in Nazi Germany POW camps from an economist’s perspective, describing the camp’s markets and their operations. (Fun fact: the Geneva Convention of 1929 forbids the detaining power from making officers work.)

In the camps, the prisoners received Red Cross and German rations and sometimes private parcels. Simple barter quickly evolved into a money-based economy, with cigarettes serving as the currency (at the permanent camp, a shop was set up that explicitly sold goods for cigarettes only). Prices emerged for the various products, fluctuating according to supply and demand, including the supply and demand of the new-found “money”. Radford describes monopolies, arbitrage, inflation and deflation, middlemen (and how most prisoners disliked them yet used their services), attempts at price-fixing, and in general the trade that took place.

This is a fascinating report of economic principles at work, as practical as it gets, yet very elegant and clear.

Would you rather be happy or rich?

Bryan Caplan, a libertarian American economist, recently visited Sweden and Denmark, and wrote up some of his opinions. His bottom line is a standard libertarian analysis: socialist system taxes the populace into relative poverty. He even takes a stab at the “happiest people on earth” by noting how many of them “miserably bike to work in the rain”. A Finnish friend of mine responded somewhat emotionally (as did many of Caplan’s commentators, both pro and contra) and this got me thinking.

Suppose Scandinavian countries, via their socialist policies, have (on average) happier citizens, but that the United States, via its capitalist policies, has (on average) wealthier citizens (the data in the link should roughly correlate with average income).

This is not a very preposterous assumption. In the positive psychology literature, a standard result is that while we think money will bring happiness, it doesn’t. First, it suffers from diminishing returns. Having enough money for necessities is much better than being poor, but being rich over being plain middle-class doesn’t add that much happiness. Second, people respond strongly to the incomes of peers, and would prefer to earn less in absolute terms as long as they earn more relative to others. Third, owning more stuff brings considerably less happiness than we imagine. All of the above give the socialist approach considerable hedonic weight.

On the other hand, many (most?) economists would reply that socialist policies distort the market severely, causing inefficiency and lack of incentives, slowing down economic growth (if not reversing it) in the long run. Empirically, at least, the US seems to have the lead over Europe economically.

On pain of appearing daft, I’d like to inquire about the usefulness of dollars if it doesn’t translate into hedons. As can be seen here, this is not a trivial question. As for myself, I’d like to speculate about the utility of wealth in the very long run.

Consider this finding. In hunter/gatherer societies (in which most of our evolution took place), if your survived childhood, you would have a reasonable, if tough (by today’s standards) life. But we were also very poor by economic standards – nomadic life doesn’t allow any appreciable accumulation of physical wealth. Agriculture changed this – we settled down and began accumulating wealth, at a considerable hedonic expense. We weren’t evolved for staple food diets or efficient utilization of domesticated animals, repetitive manual labour or (later on) big concentrations of people (which led to big slavery, big wars and big epidemics).

However, our wealth propelled us forward as a species. We spread around the globe, multiplied exponentially (indeed, Robin Hanson considers agriculture to be a technological singularity event), and in the last 50 years managed to outperform our savannah ancestors on many parameters. Today it appears that immortality, space colonization and utopia in general are mere problems of engineering (again see the technological singularity). If we don’t destroy ourselves in the process (which is disturbingly likely), in the evolutionary-near future (thousands of years) we will solve them and win the universe (at least until we lose to entropy).

Techno-utopian daydreams aside, things like basic science, space exploration, dental care, vaccines and sanitation, cheap, immediate entertainment and even safety from crime and war, require wealth to develop. I’ve already mentioned the technological singularity and existential risk, somewhat abstract and futuristic issues, for the development of which wealth is a necessary (although an insufficient) condition. But many important yet costly projects are very down-to-earth – for example, 90% of HIV vaccine R&D efforts in 2005 were funded by US tax payers. The nations that suffer most from AIDS just can’t afford those kinds of expenditures.

In short, I see a basic problem of saving now to have more later, but on the scale of civilizations and centuries. This analysis suggests that we can be happier by letting the welfare state protect us from the world and from ourselves. Or we can be wealthier by letting the invisible hand decide our fates for better or worse. The second path, however, has a better potential to increase happiness on aggregate in the future, even if it may be too late for us (unless…).

This begins to sound suspiciously like what the citizens of Soviet Russia were told for many years – that their generation’s poverty and suffering will lead to the utopia of future generations, and we all know how that worked out. But this analogy is horribly stretched, for neither are Americans unhappy nor are Swedes poor, and there’s just no comparing the USSR to any Western nation. Still, today’s heated debates on economic policy may suffer from a bias of short-term goals at the expense of the long-term development of humanity as a whole. And while I myself am prejudiced against the pursuit of wealth in exclusion to other, nobler enterprises, I can’t but conclude that it is indeed better to be rich than happy.

Politics and science: what does “cause of variation” mean?

One of the more controversial topics is intelligence – its measurement, causes, consequences, etc. While I would prefer to stay away from it, one thing I noticed is that experts usually favour some genetic determinism, and that this is a consensus position, while the public is against it.

One anti-genetic-determinism pundit is David Shenk, who writes The Genius Blog, where he argues that you, yes you!, can become the next Einstein, provided sufficient motivation and resources. This reincarnation of the blank slate hypothesis will die out eventually. What I’d like to address are Shenk’s comments on heritability, which I would probably ignore, if only he didn’t accuse scientists of confusion and congratulate himself on his keen analysis.

The piece boils down to calling estimates of genetic heritability “meaningless”. Consider:

“Cause of variation” is not remotely the same as “cause of trait.”

In discussing “heritability” in the media, scientists have allowed the public to confuse “causes of variation” with “causes of traits.” Heritability studies do not, and cannot, measure causes of traits. They can only attempt to measure causes of differences (or variation) in traits.

So, for example, a heritability study cannot even attempt to measure the cause of plant height. It cannot purport to tell you that some percent of plant height is caused by genes.

What it can attempt to do is measure the percentage influence that genes have on the differences in height in a particular group of plants. But the percentage would only apply to that particular group.

Now, strictly speaking, this is correct. The entire causes of a plant’s height are its entire genome and environment. A plant wouldn’t be a plant if its genome didn’t specify the various cells, their organization and operation in detail, and if the resources needed for its growth weren’t available (earth’s soil, air, water and sunlight). And even if all those exist, the plant can be eaten or trampled or buried under a landslide, and surely those must count as causes for whatever state the plant is in!

But when considering differences within a population, the perspective changes. Most of the genome is constant in a population – a cat can’t give birth to a dog. But a cat can give birth to kittens with different colouring patterns. Now, when we are interested in the causes of the differences between the patterns, we often shorten the language and ask what is the cause of, say, the uniformly black fur. When interpreted literally, the answer would also have to include the causes for the entire cat! But of course what we really want to know is why this cat is entirely black, instead of spotted or orange-striped.

In cases of colouring patterns, we accept the differences to be caused genetically, and we say this without much trouble. Differences in other traits may not be caused genetically. The particular differences between identical twins, for example, are entirely environmentally caused, because there is no genetic variation between them.

Let’s try the same but with numbers. Cystic fibrosis is a disease that is caused by a single gene, we are told. But this is strictly wrong: the entire causes of the whole disease must also include the causes of the human body! But recall that what we’re actually interested in are the causes of differences, in which case it is entirely appropriate to say that a single deleterious allele causes the disease. It is also appropriate to say that the variation in this trait is 100% due to genes. In cases where the population’s genome would have no variation, any variation in traits determined by those portions of the genome would have to be 0% genetic.

What does this mean about heritability? Well, if a variation in a trait is 100% genetic, then by knowing the genome of an individual you’d be able to say where he would fall on the variation distribution. Knowing the genomes of the parents you’d be able to calculate odds for the variation of that trait in their future kids. Conversely, if the variation is 0% genetic, you wouldn’t be able to do this at all.

Now, variation in many interesting traits is not determined entirely by genes. And in many cases, the alleles that give rise to variation can be numerous and their interplay complex. In studies all these effects are aggregated into a single number, which we may intuitively explain as “the degree to which genes influence the trait” or somesuch.Then, the best guess may be a confidence interval. For example, if intelligence is both highly heritable and fixed during a person’s lifetime, then a statement such as “if both parents have an IQ of 110, their kids are 90% likely to have an IQ within the 100-120 range” would make sense. I made up the numbers, but the principle should be obvious.

This kind of research is fine for disease, but is controversial for intelligence and personality. This is despite the fact that it’s just as sound empirically and theoretically. Still, the politics and emotion involved are strong enough to promote poor arguments against long-established expert consensus. Shame.

What I learned: Economics

When I was younger, I didn’t like the idea of economics. I didn’t like money (money being too material and mundane), and I thought economics was about money, so it wasn’t very interesting.

That obviously changed (or I wouldn’t bother to write this post), and I actually remember the conversation that sent the first cracks in my walls of ignorance. It was Michael Katsevman trying to explain the wonders of Facebook in economic terms, and me not understanding what the heck he was talking about. He kindly elaborated (in the following IRC dialog, Michael is procto and I am TFK):

<procto>    now I would use some economics to discuss here
<procto>    but you don’t like it
<procto>    I don’t know how a computer scientist can dislike economics
<procto>    the only reason I can think of is that you don’t know enough of it
<procto>    it’s one of my favourite things in the world
<procto>    proper economics, not just “stocks and bonds and stuff”
<procto>    things like
<procto>    game theory
<procto>    utility theory
<procto>    incentive structures
<procto>    information asymmetry
<procto>    etc.
<procto>    there’s a cool new branch called neuroeconomics
<procto>    which studies decision theory
<procto>    i.e. how people decide stuff
<TFK>    Those things don’t sound like economics per se, although may utilize concepts and methods from it.
<procto>    TFK: ok, want a definition of economics?
<procto>    ”Economics is the science of scarce resources and the decisions people make about them.”
<TFK>    Anyway… when put that way, it can be interesting.
<TFK>    But when people hear “economics” they usually equate it with “economics of business”.
<TFK>    Not abstract mathematical models on decision-making in a prisoner’s dilemma (which I do find interesting).
<procto>    that’s because most people are ignorant
<procto>    I use the term Finance to describe the former
<procto>    vis a vis the term Economics
<procto>    which is a more abstract science
<TFK>    Hmmm. I will henceforth adopt your distinction of terms.
<procto>    :D
<procto>    I like to divide that “type” of stuff into three categories: Accounting, Finance, and Economics
<procto>    in order of increasing abstraction

Economics, broadly construed, is very far-reaching. Many of our choices lay in its domain, obvious examples being what to consume, where to invest, how to spend our free time, how to navigate our careers, etc. Among those obvious examples, there is a lot of interesting research to be found. For example, positional goods – expensive but without apparent increase in utility compared to cheaper alternatives (for example, an original Picasso and an identical print). A most striking example is diamond jewelery, which rose to market prominence with ingenious social engineering by the De Beers group.

Positional goods are consumed conspicuously to display one’s wealth and status and are not limited to the rich. Fancy dressers and sports-car drivers are often not especially wealthy, but they will invest in those particular goods even at the cost of more useful expenditures (or simply saving).

Conspicuous consumption is an example of signaling. A signal is any communication or action which carries information about one’s abilities, desires, alliances. A most obvious example is a plain advertisement or a resume, but more interesting examples include education (covered in the Wiki). The idealistic view sees formal education as a grand endeavor of the soul, while economics sees it as a mere signal of abilities. (“Mere” because the students forget most of the material – it is not important in the workplace, but only for the coveted diploma.) I will have more to say to say on signaling, since it is a mind-blowing concept to learn for a utilitarian.

A much more known field generally associated with economics is game theory. Most famous is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a simple model of cooperation and defection. (I actually learned of it long before I knew its name – in evolutionary biology, it plays a huge role in the study of the evolution of altruism.) In PD, it pays to defect if you only play one game. But when an unknown number is to be played, a tit-for-tat strategy is best. These results are now classic; less known is Hofstadter’s superrationality, which leads to cooperation even in a one-off PD game.

Moving on to more prescriptive ideas, the efficient market hypothesis is one of the few things I’d like to see taught in schools. Broadly, it states that all available information is already reflected in the market prices. Practically, this means that any clever theory you may have about stocks that will rise or fall, and it happens to be true, then other folks are likely to have already thought and acted on it. Worse, markets are anti-inductive: any useful rule regarding their future will quickly be exploited and thus made obsolete. This insight has a wonderful practical application for investing. It also suggests a more serious observation regarding the economy in general and the current crisis in particular – neither crises nor periods of intense growth can be predicted. For if such knowledge existed, it would already be reflected in the prices! It thus makes no sense to rely on or criticize pundits and regulators for market failures (or praise them for market success, as a corollary).

The final important take-away is this – if you have true knowledge, buy now, or forever hold your peace. Very few folks bet against the recent bubble, even though the market allowed such bets. It is much easier to pontificate than to seriously stand behind one’s claims, and this is also material for a future post.

There is another usage for the efficient market hypothesis – prediction markets. In a prediction market, the traded “stocks” represent an outcome, and the price can be seen as a probability measure – how strongly the market believes the outcome will obtain. A most radical usage of prediction markets is futarchy – a style of government driven by prediction markets.

A final idea I’d like to report on today, which is pretty disturbing, is the economics interpretation of human values. We’d like to believe ourselves to be at least somewhat principled, carrying about various Big Issues, but in practice we contribute very little. Being a half-cynic, it always appeared to me somewhat hypocritical, but in economics the verdict is much more harsh – people’s values are measured by their expenditures in resources. After all, if one claims to care about poverty, but does nothing substantial about it – in what sense does one actually care? This type of care would actually be considered criminal negligence if a dependent was involved. And more disturbingly: once one decided to help substantially, which policies would work?

Economics occupies a strange place in academia. It is not considered a hard science – there are no economics blogs on ScienceBlogs.com (but there are psychology blogs). Neither is it a big hit in the social sciences. To what extent do historians, sociologists, anthropologists use economics, or are even familiar with it? In the popular mind, economics is conflated with finance. Yet it appears to be in the unique position of having a no-bullshit view of individuals and societies. Whether we’d like to hear such views, and what practical conclusions we might reach, is another question entirely.

But I, for one, am fascinated. And hope you are, too :-)

What I learned: an upcoming series

One observation about most fields of human endeavor is the impossibility of experiencing any given one completely. You can’t listen to all the music, even in a particular sub-genre; can’t read all the books on a particular topic; and no one knows what science doesn’t know. This raises the existential dilemma of possibly missing out on the most awesome things ever, due to the shortness of life. And it, like so many other silly questions, bothers me.

The standard solution is to consult the market. At any given time, there is a set of ideas the market considers the best. But this is not a general solution. After one has sifted through the “top 10″, examining less popular ideas carries diminishing returns. Alternatively, if 90% of everything is crap and you pick randomly, only 1 in 10 works will be of genuine value. Talk about inefficiency…

A case in point is ScienceBlogs.com. It has lots of good reading, but most of it is, well, standard. Now, I do subscribe to the view that settled science is much better than revolutionary science, in terms of usefulness for public knowledge. But reporting on settled science has a major flaw – its maximum depth.

Consider physics. There are a number of hot topics such as relativity and quantum mechanics, on which popularizations are consistently published. However, any new publication is unlikely to add any additional, unique information its predecessors missed. The more one reads and hears, the more difficult it becomes to find novel insight in popularization, and one’s understanding stagnates.

In the last couple of years, I’ve had the fortune to learn many great ideas which I seldom see in “traditional” channels. They’re neither obscure nor necessarily controversial, but for various reasons are not the consensus or not popularized enough.

In the upcoming series I hope to do them some justice. Not an easy task, since my own understanding is largely superficial. For this reason, I will try to confine myself to just reporting, so if I end up talking nonsense, I can always blame someone else ;-)

Buying books online – cheaper than local bookstores?

Practical money-saving advice for online book buyers not part of the civilized world (the US and wherever else Amazon has local sites):

If you buy from Amazon (or really any other site that charges for delivery), consider BookDepository, a UK-based online shop which ships books worldwide for free. Yes, that’s right, no shipping costs! Books are somewhat more expensive, but shipping + VAT (at least in Israel) is more expensive still. Case in point:

I want to make a purchase of 8 books (all popular non-fiction). Subtotal in Amazon was slightly less than US$100. If there’s only one shipment, that’s $7 for the shipment, plus $4 per item, that’s a total of around $140. Israeli VAT is 15.5%, so my final payment is around $160. If I want to avoid the VAT, I have to split into at least three shipments of less than $50 each, but the per-shipment cost makes this a pointless endeavor.

On BookDepository, the subtotal is roughly $120 – about 20% more expensive than Amazon. No shipping fees, so if sent in a single shipment, that’s about $140 after VAT. However, since shipping is free, I can split this into three separate shipments with no added costs, avoiding the VAT, saving me $40! Woo!

Furthermore, Israeli bookstores usually sell popular titles for NIS60-80, that is $15-20. Taking the cheaper price, that matches BookDepository. However, the titles I’m interested in are usually not available in Israel (unless translated, and I greatly prefer originals), and certainly the convenience of online shopping is much better than physically hunting obscure geek titles. I’m a bit miffed by the economics involved, but the numbers speak for themselves.

Another perk is the possibility to buy books on a whim, without waiting for the wishlist to fill up (this can actually be catastrophic if you’re impulsive, but hey…).

Mileage outside of Israel may vary, since VAT may be  lower or non-existent in other countries, but Amazon’s worldwide shipping charges are still more than 20% of popular titles.

One caveat is that I’m yet to actually buy anything, so can’t report on the gruesome details of the delivery. Still, I imagine it can’t get worse than standard international shipping, which I’d get in Amazon anyway.

Giant hat tip to Mark, who allowed me to cram more enlightenment into my salary.

If you know even cheaper online book deals, please let me know.

A closet survey survey

One of the more novel posts on Less Wrong is  Closet Survey #1, asking participants to voice their craziest opinions – ones which almost nobody holds, including the LW readership. The twist is that the resopndendts are self-professed (aspiring) rationalists, so one would expect a great deal of thought in them, not random nonsense. I skimmed the responses, and I offer a list of the interesting ones. Not all of them are as marginal as the survey asks for, but still pretty controversial.

On abortion:

Infants are not people because they do not have significant mental capacities. They should be given the same moral status as, say, dogs. It’s acceptable to euthanize one’s pet dog for many reasons, so it should be okay to kill a newborn for similar reasons.

In other words, the right to an abortion shouldn’t end after the baby is born. Infants probably become more like people than like dogs some time around two years of age, so it should be acceptable to euthanize any infant less than two years old under any circumstances in which it would be acceptable to euthanize a dog.

On war:

Civilians should be considered legitimate targets in warfare, with the decision whether or not to attack them based entirely on expediency. If a cause isn’t worth killing civilians over, it’s not worth killing soldiers over, either.

And a corollary:

Killing enemy soldiers is not much better than killing enemy civilians.

On the sexes:

That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false.

On life:

It is immoral not to put a dollar value on life.

On pedophilia (pretty disturbing, actually):

I don’t know if I actually believe this, but I’ve heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren’t necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:

“Child Sexual Abuse does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis regardless of gender.” Simplified, Rind et al. (1998) found that 3 out of every 100 individuals in a CSA population had clinically significant problems (compared to 2 out of every 100 in a general population).

Rind et al. contended that the degree of psychological damage was based on whether the child describes the encounter as consensual or not.

On race (this one is more popular than the others, but still very controversial):

That within human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations.

But:

I believe that people who try and sound all “edgy” and “serious” by intoning what they believe to be “blunt truths” about race/gender differences are incredibly annoying for the most part.

On the supernatural (this one is interesting because the author is an Overcoming Bias contributor, and a rationalist):

The nature of reality will turn out to be very different from what most people imagine. Supernatural events occur in the world, and supernatural beings walk among us, but they are very rare.

On information availability:

As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.

Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished. The same applies to laws on libel, slander and exchange of child pornography.

Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.

On western medicine (this is very shocking to the layman and less so for the expert):

It’s generally not worth your time to ask a doctor questions about treatments; the responses you’ll get will be soothing but non-informative.

Doctors probably cause more harm than good, considered over all interventions.

My own contribution is minor. I guess my most unorthodox thought is that bearing children is immoral, although I don’t think the human species should go extinct (don’t ask me how I reconcile that contradiction, I don’t know yet). I intend to write on this more later.

Any others?