I went through the literature on background music in September 2012; here is a dump of 38 paper references. Abstracts can be found by searching here and I can provide full texts on request.

Six papers that I starred in my reference manager (with links to full texts):

• Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas, Montserrat Gomà-i-Freixanet, Adrian Furnham, and Anna Muro. 2009. “Personality, Self-Estimated Intelligence, and Uses of Music: A Spanish Replication and Extension Using Structural Equation Modeling.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 3 (3): 149–155. doi:10.1037/a0015342.
• Dobbs, Stacey, Adrian Furnham, and Alastair McClelland. 2011. “The Effect of Background Music and Noise on the Cognitive Test Performance of Introverts and Extraverts.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 25 (2) (March 23): 307–313. doi:10.1002/acp.1692.
• Hallam, Susan. 2012. “The Effects of Background Music on Health and Wellbeing.” In Music, Health, and Wellbeing, edited by Raymond A. R. MacDonald, Gunter Kreutz, and Laura Mitchell. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199586974.003.0032.
• Perham, Nick, and Joanne Vizard. 2011. “Can Preference for Background Music Mediate the Irrelevant Sound Effect?” Applied Cognitive Psychology 25 (4) (July 20): 625–631. doi:10.1002/acp.1731.
• Schellenberg, E. Glenn. 2012. “Cognitive Performance after Listening to Music: A Review of the Mozart Effect.” In Music, Health, and Wellbeing, edited by Raymond A. R. MacDonald, Gunter Kreutz, and Laura Mitchell. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199586974.003.0022.
• Waterhouse, Lynn. 2006. “Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review.” Educational Psychologist 41 (4) (December): 207–225. doi:10.1207/s15326985ep4104_1.

One-word summary of the academic literature on the effects of listening to background music (as of September 2012): unclear

Get RescueTime or something similar and flip a coin every day to decide whether or not to listen to music. After a while patterns might emerge.

Music randomizes emotion and mindstate.

Wait, where did "randomizes" come from? The study you link and the standard view says that music can induce specific emotions. The point of the study is that emotions induced by music can carry over into other areas, which suggests we might optimize when we use specific types of music. The study you link about music and accidents also suggests specific music decreased risks.

All the papers I'm immediately seeing on Google Scholar suggest there is no association between background music and studying effectiveness, or if there is, it's only negative for those that don't usually study to music. If that's accurate, either people are already fairly aware of whether music distracts them, they would adapt to it given time, or they don't know what kinds of music are effective for them due to lack of experience.

Music is one of the primary joys and pleasures in my life. It is not optional for me.

If you're just looking to maximize pleasure, perhaps you should schedule music fasts.

Obligatory link: http://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php

This not only includes noises like white, it also has soundscapes and music/noise hybrid things and a suprisingly effective isochronic generator.

Related only indirectly: for me, pink noise seems to work much more effectively in masking distractions than white noise, to the point that I can tolerate a much higher volume.

One distinction that might matter here is between instrumental music and music with lyrics.

Anecdotally, I think lyric-free music, as background music, distracts me less, and I've tried to remember to listen to e.g. instrumental jazz or prog rock when I want to hear music while studying something.

I don't really think that randomizing the the right word. Certain music has certain emotional effects on me. If I want to feel those effects I can play the music.

Certain Bachata music brings to my mind the emotions that I felt during dancing Bachata to those songs. Before dancing Bachata music did nothing for me.

Interesting question I have yet never seen. Sounds obvious in hindsight, but all good questions are.

Very well noticed. Music takes a lot of our time and attention (and a bit of money) for giving a bit of pleasure (and very little information). Music used to give lots of (but seldom) pleasure and associate this with social situations you had an impact on.

I listen to music only if I am in the mood for it. If the music I want to hear matches the feelings I have. But this happens only a few times a month. I like music (thus not being one of the 5% who can't) but I'm quite choosy and my preference doesn't align with popular trends. I think listening to it all the time is a waste of time and depreciates the value of the music (makes it everyday; nothing has a chance to stand out and do make an impact).

If you have time to kill I'd recommend listening to audio books instead. Not only stories (though there are some that contain valuable concepts esp. for younger listeners; I'd love to see an HPMoR audiobook). But maybe you can spend your time even better.

Music is one more domain of human preferrence that has been 'subverted' by our society. From whatever origin through a socially well-integrated function of bringing people together and increase social exchange it's major remaining effect (measured by person-time spent) is to direct attention into the sphere of music meaning and economics (what sounds good, who likes what, how to sell/buy and play it).

This actually reduces chances of social interaction because everybody in the bus/train/street is listening to (or reading) something. And you can't relate to that. But maybe that is a compensation for the masses of online-interactions that you have instead (which are less personal though).

Another consideration: earworms. I find getting a song stuck in my head to be somewhat aversive.

Edgar Allan Poe puts it this way:

It is quite a common thing to be thus annoyed with the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of the burthen of some ordinary song, or some unimpressive snatches from an opera. Nor will we be the less tormented if the song in itself be good, or the opera air meritorious.

I work at App Academy, and I'm very happy to discuss App Academy and other coding bootcamps with anyone who wants to talk about them with me.

I have previously Skyped LWers to help them prepare for the interview.

Contact me at bshlegeris@gmail.com if interested (or in comments here).

Maximizing your chances of getting accepted: Not sure what to tell you. It's mostly about the coding questions, and the coding questions aren't that hard—"implement bubble sort" was one of the harder ones I got. At least, I don't think that's hard, but some people would struggle to do that. Some people "get" coding, some don't, and it seems to be hard to move people from one category to another.

Maximizing value given that you are accepted: Listen to Ned. I think that was the main piece of advice people from our cohort gave people in the incoming cohort. Really. Ned, the lead instructor, knows what he's doing, and really cares about the students who go through App Academy. And he's seen what has worked or not worked for people in the past.

(I might also add, based on personal experience, "don't get cocky about the assessments." Also "get enough sleep," and should you end up in a winter cohort, "if you go home for Christmas, fly back a day earlier than necessary.")

Hey Jayson. What's your programming background?

I'm a current student who started two weeks ago on Monday. I'd be happy to talk as well.

Hey. I'm doing App Academy this summer, so I can't tell you about the program, but I can give you my thoughts on the interview. Based on what you said in the comments above, it sounds like we have somewhat similar backgrounds.

The interview was mostly pretty simple code problems. If you felt like you knew what you were doing in your cs classes and that you were keeping up with the other students, you'll probably be able to handle these. Just make sure you're comfortable with the ruby needed to do the practice problems.

Good luck!

List of affected sites with recommendations on which to change your password. Unfortunately, you should also probably change any other sites on which you use the same password.

It's a good time to do an Expected Utility calculation!

if you think that: p(having your accounts compromised) ( pain if accounts are compromised) > 1 (inconvenience of changing passwords), then change em!

Also, might be a good opportunity for you to start using a password manager like LastPass

specifically whether there is some good source of legally available cat images

ROFL...

There are lots of lolcat builders out there, but this is the only one I've used: http://builder.cheezburger.com/Builder

You're on your own for legally available images, though. I think the community consensus is that it doesn't matter because parody or whatever, which is not a legitimate legal defense, but I don't think anybody's been sued yet.

This meme is at least a decade old. If we're going to do rationality memes, we should do something more relevant...

The process of re-typing it word for word makes me actually re-process it, mentally speaking, and I often find myself compelled to actually re-write something upon having re-typed it.

I used to alternate between paper and computer for each draft for this reason. I don't do it much because it requires quite a bit of time, but typing and retyping this way might be faster without losing much of the benefit.

On a Mac, you can make the computer read your writing aloud: highlight the text, right-click and select 'Speech'. (Hat Tip: Kevin Simler)

Also, reading my writing out loud for myself---varying the tempo, varying the emphasis and so on---helps me understand its perceived impact.

Thanks for the tip about re-typing your writing.

Oooh, thanks for mentioning. I think I'll try this when I finish my first draft.

ROI-wise, the best first move seems to write a comment on Open Thread, asking: "Are there any rationalist houses with free capacity? Alternatively, are there any LessWrong users looking for an appartment (please write the locality)?"

If you get answers, you can put them in wiki afterwards. If you don't get answers... then making the wiki page would probably accomplish nothing.

There now exists a wiki page for this: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Listing_of_Rationalist_Houses

I don't think it really needs a new feature. We already have a Wiki. The problem is more about organising the information.

I can't speak for others, but I love HPMoR. I honestly believe it's one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read, so I'll try to describe my own reasons.

1. Tropes and Plot Devices: I've read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy and HPMoR avoids a lot of the downfalls of the genre such as dei ex machina, whiny/angsty heroes, and phleboninum/unobtainium. Eliezer is familiar enough with common tropes that he does a great job of applying them in the right contexts, subverting them interestingly, and sometimes calling them out and making fun of them directly.

2. The First Law of Rationalist Fiction: Roughly, that characters should succeed by thinking in understandable, imitable ways, not by inexplicable powers or opaque "bursts of insight" that don't really explain anything. After hearing this ideal stated outright and seeing it in practice, a lot of other fiction I've read (and, unfortunately, written) seems a lot less satisfying. Eliezer does a fantastic job at giving a look into the characters' minds and letting you follow their thought patterns. This makes it even more satisfying when they succeed and even more crushing when they fail.

3. Application of the Sequences: As someone who had read the sequences more than once before reading HPMoR, it was both fun and enlightening to see the ideas put into practice in a high-stakes scenario. As someone who was familiar with the ideas beforehand, I got to smile and "get the reference," yet also be surprised by the application. I honestly believe that I've started applying rationality to my real life more after reading MOR and seeing examples of how to do it.

4. Balance of Power: I think MOR does an excellent job of maintaining a balance of power between the characters. At times, you think your protagonist is horribly weak and at other times, they appear very strong, though perhaps in a different way from the other characters. The conflict is never one-sided.

5. The Characters: The characters are dynamic, multi-faceted, and sometimes morally ambiguous. You never fully understand their goals or motives, but they are there and they are consistent. Even the "dark" characters have certain insights to share that sound "bad", but are nonetheless seductive and often hard to argue with.

6. The World and the Lore: As a long-time Harry Potter fan, seeing this kind of adaptation of the world is just fun. It's a rich world in which to set a story and Eliezer does a great job expanding the lore, making some of it grittier, and making a lot of it much deeper and more mysterious. While he had a great platform to start from, the world-building is fantastic.

Overall, the story is incredibly entertaining and fun to read. It has a lot more to offer than most fiction out there. I love it.

I'm also somewhat confused by this. I love HPMoR and actively recommend it to friends, but to the extent Eliezer's April Fools' confession can be taken literally, characterizing it as "you-don't-have-a-word genre" and coming from "an entirely different literary tradition" seems a stretch.

Some hypotheses:

1. Baseline expectations for Harry Potter fanfic are so low that when it turns out well, it seems much more stunning than it does relative to a broader reference class of fiction.
2. Didactic fiction is nothing new, but high quality didactic fiction is an incredibly impressive accomplishment.
3. The scientific content happens to align incredibly well with some readers' interests, making it genre-breaking in the same way The Hunt for Red October was for technical details of submarines. If you are into that specific field, it feels world-shatteringly good. For puns about hydras and ordinals, HPMoR is the only game in town, but that's ultimately a sparse audience.
4. There is a genuine gap in fiction that is both light-hearted and serious in places which Eliezer managed to fill. Pratchett is funny and can make great satirical points, but doesn't have the same dramatic tension. Works that otherwise get the dramatic stakes right tend to steer clear of being light-hearted and inspirational. HPMoR is genre-breaking for roughly the same reasons Adventure Time gets the same accolades.

It's one of the only fictional works I can read without having to constantly ignore obvious things the protagonists should be doing. It's really, really funny.

It's fun and absurd and complicated and fulfills the inner need to overanalyze that a lot of geeky people like myself have. Me and a bunch of friends in college were reading it as it came out and speculating wildly on what would happen next, especially about motives, and especially around Azkaban. But it was just a popular fanfic with an absurd hilarious premise that we liked (and that would occasionally lead to me oversleeping and missing the first half hour of my astrobiology class). Another work of comparable interest that had quite a similar effect on several of my friends around the same time was Homestuck.

Nowdays we have nearly completely lost interest. Partially because we have learned of the existence of people who take it too seriously / have changed their life-pattern after reading it which adds an ugh effect and partially because it's become rather overdone / takes itself too seriously. My interest in it that remains has changed from fun to morbid fascination.

I can't speak for everybody, but some of us are judging it by comparison to other fanfiction instead of other fiction generally. I'd agree that HPMoR doesn't stack up against good Sanderson or Pratchettt, say, but judged in the reference class of fanfiction it's pretty extraordinary.

That it's top-quality for its field (fanfic). That it has an active proselytising fanbase. That some of said fanbase, it's the first thing they like that much that they've seen.

One more thing-- it's got is tremendous emotional range and intensity.

For some context: I got hooked on HPMoR because of its humor in the early chapters, and some then-mind-blowing characters, ideas and plot twists in the first half. That's how I ended up on this forum way back when. However, the story has gotten darker, more preachy and short on comic relief in the last half. This is pretty standard for multi-volume works and is probably intentional, but I still miss Comed-tea, soul-eating Tracey and frolicking woodland creatures.

HPMoR is "more than just a decent read" because it is a well-designed and successfully implemented device to gently introduce new people to the ideas of rationality and transhumanism. In that it is similar to what Atlas Shrugged did for Objectivism. It also helps that the story has no obvious plot holes and idiot balls.

Some people change their life-pattern after reading HPMoR. Why?

Probably after lurking or participating here, not just after HPMoR.

I wasn't aware that people have been changing their "life-pattern" after reading it. Are there any examples?

It is pretty good, and the plot picks up after Azkaban.

I don't count myself among the rabid, but I do enjoy the mysteries. It's very densely plotted, which is fun.

As I am agreeing with your confusion I want to extend the question to why Eliezer's writing is seen as so great in general. For me it is just exhausting to read, especially since most of the articles can be summarised in a couple of sentences.

Thanks for those answers; but they don't quite explain

• why some people are induced to change their life by it (perhaps only because it piques their interest for other material on LessWrong)
• why some readers get more enthusiastic about it than about some excellent non-fanfic books. (These readers are mostly not part of a group that might put social pressure on them to become fans.)
• why Eliezer has described his own work as "fictional literature from what looks like an entirely different literary tradition." (That's in the April Fool's post, but he has said similar things elsewhere. And though this bullet point could be explained as arrogance on the part of Eliezer, some comments I've seen suggest that many fans agree with him.)

The more complex a project is, the less likely are people to complete it successfully. The more meta a project is, the less likely is the model of its usefulness correct.

I expect a risk that people will vote on something very nebulous (more meta! more meta!) as the best idea, and at the end pretty much nothing measurable happens.

To avoid going too much meta, I would recommend adding an artificial constraint, such as "we must be able to complete the whole thing in one week". Sure, this drastically limits how useful things you can do. On the other hand, it allows multiple iterations and feedback.

It is very neat. There is no obvious way to apply these methods to nets with many hidden units (which means most useful deep learning nets). The visualization techniques are excellent though. It's a great blog post, and we'll see if it leads to some great research.

How to Get into Grad School for Math, Engineering or Computer Science

Juniors and seniors often ask me how to get into a Ph.D. program. Having looked at applications for three years now, I feel like I can offer some good advice. [This advice applies for masters students too.] The one-word version of that advice is: PUBLISH.

A corallary would be that if you could become immortal you'd probably be bored to death.

And I think this points in the other direction- I think this suggests that 'a century is but a blink in the eye in the life of an elf' might actually be accurate. You throw some dwarves in the dungeon, then go about your normal routine, and then say 'oh, didn't we just capture some dwarves?' and it turns out that you've done your weekly routine a few thousand times since then.

That is, if you're ten times as old, you only expect a tenth the number of 'new events' during the same period, and it's likely that anything faster would lead to a feeling of change happening too quickly. Hanson's talked a bit about minds (and thus ems) ossifying, which lines up with this- if you've been practicing a particular variety of corporate law for 300 years, you're probably very good at doing that law and not very good at picking up anything else.

It fits in a fanfic, but outside that it starts to look like generalizing from fictional evidence. We haven't seen what a supergenius did. We've only seen what a writer thinks a supergenius would do.

Here is a self-link to my meditation blog; this post has links to other posts:

http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/how-to-do-foregroundbackground-meditation/

The blog is a mixture of personal experience, unscientific references, and cherry-picked peer-reviewed research. I specifically talk about the dangers of meditation, with included citations, but unfortunately it's all mixed in with other stuff. Here is one place to start:

http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/dark-night-and-what-enlightenment-is-like/

The Relaxation Response focuses on the health effects of meditation. It doesn't cover too many different forms, but it has some good research on how a certain simple form of meditation affects your health. Very science-based, written by a doctor.

This is a good place to start for getting an idea about potential dangers of meditation.

What type of meditation are you interested in?

I have this one already.

I have a nagging voice in my head saying that I shouldn't bother learning biochemistry, because it won't be useful in the long term because everything will be based on nanotech and we will all be uploads. Is that a valid point?

Keeping in mind the biases (EDIT: but also the expertise) that my username indicates, I would say that is nearly exactly backwards - modifications and engineering of biochemistry and biochemistry-type systems will actually occur (and already are) while what most people around here think of when they say 'nanotech' is a pipe dream. Biochemistry is the result of 4 gigayears of evolution showing the sorts of things that can actually be accomplished with atoms robustly rather than as expensive delicate one-off demonstrations and the most successful fine-scale engineering in the future will resemble it closely if not be it.

everything will be based on nanotech

Maybe, some day. And as a "double major in biochemistry and computer science" you will be well positioned to help bring said nanotech from the realm of SciFi to reality. Certainly you have plenty of time, nothing as revolutionary is likely to happen in the next few years, and you will have your degree by then. I'd actually bet that "nanotech and uploads" are decades away, even being optimistic.

It seems likely we will have to learn more biochemistry to realize uploading.

I have a nagging voice in my head saying that I shouldn't bother learning biochemistry, because it won't be useful in the long term because everything will be based on nanotech and we will all be uploads. Is that a valid point?

No.

Think about the timelines involved.

Thank you to those who commented here. It helped!

Nanotech without biochemistry won't be able to help anyone medically. That's like saying you don't need to know about biology because farming is all going to be done with machines these days.

ALSO: Biochemistry and cell biology are the best existing examples we have of nanotech machines.

Biochemistry has tremendous world-saving potential. With both computer science and biochemistry in your arsenal, you could work in molecule modeling. The design and simulation of molecules is a key part of the development of new drugs and vaccines. Besides, we're running out of usable antibiotics. And as healthcare continues to prolong our working life years, we will need to improve our understanding of degenerative diseases like arthritis and Alzheimer's.

People with bio and algorithmic skills are in extremely high demand, but:

(a) there might be a biotech bubble

(b) it might be worthwhile to go after difficult to learn meta skills that help you learn other things more quickly (math, etc.), and just pickup whatever is in demand later.

...the most effective way to help the world.

This seems like the bottleneck question. Why don't you try to study that? After all, you should only prefer to be skilled and educated if you get this question right. If you get it wrong, it's either a matter of indifference, or actually better for everyone if you're as unskilled and uneducated as possible.

It would be quite difficult for a researcher to conclude 'MOOC's are/are not effective' due to the flexibility of the grading mechanisms. In terms of 'passing' a MOOC , some courses offer easy multiple choice quiz's where you can submit several times, while others require peer reviewed essays or a calculation to 4 decimal places.

To test the effectiveness of a course, you'd need to not only look at the course content / quizzes / exams, but also the student reviews to get an idea on how accurate/simplified the content testing actually is.

As a single data point, my personal experience is that MOOC's are massively more effective for my learning style than any traditional course I have taken.

I would care just slightly less than I would if my original body was sent instead (so I'd care a lot).

(I put a high probability on something along the lines of pattern identity theory being 'correct')

I would care as much as I would about any two random human beings, plus caring points for personal acquaintance.

Quite a lot, but mostly out of fear of being wrong; I believe that identity is such that I will not wake up in the spaceship, and given that I'm correct I would care very little about the fate of that copy of me, but my beliefs about identity are based on strong intuitions that aren't soundly philosophically based and merely seem "obvious". I'd guess I care about 5% as much as I would care if I were to be placed in the spaceship, although "5% as much as if I was to be put in a torture-can and shot into space" is really abstract and I have no idea how to convert that to actual amounts of caring.

Pre copying I would care greatly. Post copying I would mourn my body doubles suffering or celebrate their joy mildly.

From the future copy's and my experience we were once the same, so the present is invested in the well being of both. Post copy we have split and care for each other to the extent that kin and kind care for each other.

For example consider a lottery you have a 50% chance to win, before the draw you are greatly invested in the outcome. after the outcome you barely give a thought to the alternate timeline you that could have won.

If you look at the wikipedia page that describes fallibilism, the word probability doesn't directly appear. In the main body of the article.

People like Pyrrho were practicing fallibilism long before the kind of math that you need to think about probabilities that you can multiple with each other got invented.

There can be Bayesian evidence for non-falsifyable hypotheses. You might perhaps be interested in "Belief in the Implied Invisible "

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure. I can find old usenet comments - like my nethack YAFAP - from 2005 to 2008, but as far I can tell they were all made with Google Groups. I do vaguely recall using a newsreader, maybe trying to set up Thunderbird? It certainly would have been in character, "real men use newsreaders, and never top-post" kind of thing was a big part of the appeal. Possibly I could only get read-only access through whatever free provider I found.

At the time, the communities discussing interactive fiction and roguelike games were still centered on usenet (rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.roguelikes.* respectively) although iirc half the conversations were on the need to move on, to web forums or whatnot.

A belated analysis: hypothesis confirmed to my satisfaction - as expected, age is strongly related to Usenet-familiarity. (There's even a hint of a quick shift in the histograms.)

# https://www.dropbox.com/s/d5kddi1ckl3qbxk/2015-02-26-lw-usenet.csv

usenet <- read.csv("2015-02-26-lw-usenet.csv", header=FALSE)
usenet2 <- data.frame(Usenet=usenet[1:67,]$V3, Age=usenet[68:134,]$V3)
## the default LW poll encoding is yes=0, no=1; this is very confusing, so let's reverse it
usenet2$Usenet <- (usenet2$Usenet==0)
wilcox.test(Age ~ Usenet, data=usenet2)
#
#     Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction
#
# data:  Age by Usenet
# W = 183.5, p-value = 3.893e-06
g <- glm(Usenet ~ Age, data=usenet2, family="binomial"); summary(g)
# ...Coefficients:
#                Estimate  Std. Error  z value   Pr(>|z|)
# (Intercept) -7.33329350  1.93381008 -3.79215 0.00014935
# Age          0.24311715  0.06695693  3.63095 0.00028238

## alternative plot:
# with(usenet2, plot(Age,Usenet,xlab="Age",ylab="Probability of Usenet familiarity"))
# curve(predict(g,data.frame(Age=x),type="resp"),add=TRUE)
# points(usenet2$Age,fitted(g),pch=20)

library(popbio)
with(usenet2, logi.hist.plot(Age,Usenet,boxp=FALSE,type="hist",col="gray"))
## https://i.imgur.com/W6DT9Tu.png

## specific example: 51yo vs 20yo probabilities based on the model:    
predict(g, data.frame(Age=51), type="response")
#            1
# 0.9937299491
predict(g, data.frame(Age=20), type="response")
#             1
# 0.07791991187

(If anyone is curious, my original motive was wondering about Satoshi Nakamoto & Nick Szabo - both are familiar with and have used Usenet. We already know Szabo is old and very similar to LWers, so being Usenet-familiar turns out to be entirely ordinary as I guessed, but if Satoshi Nakamoto were a young college student as some people thought, then being Usenet-familiar is pretty surprising.)

I might have used it a bit but I voted "no" because I didn't use it in a significant amount to be able to say for sure that I used it.

Me, I used USENET a lot back in the late 1990s, mostly hanging out on alt.games.final-fantasy. Sad to say, my internet service provider back then was AOL. (The first newsgroup I tried reading was alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die...)

My impression is that USENET died because it lacked reasonable spam prevention measures?

What sort of help are you looking for? Do you have specific questions (like, do you want someone to explain the notion of amplitude) or are you looking for general resources on QM?

If the latter, then I highly recommend Leonard Susskind's lectures on quantum mechanics from his "Theoretical Minimum" series, available here. Susskind does assume that you know calculus. If you don't, then I suggest that you familiarize yourself with calculus before attempting a technical understanding of QM.

If you'd rather read than watch, the lectures are also available in book form, here.

If you have specific questions to ask, I'd be happy to answer them.

"Amplitude" just refers to a complex number corresponding to a given point in configuration space. The Schrödinger equation specifies how the field of these complex numbers evolves over time. The probability of being in a particular configuration is proportional to the square of this amplitude. Does that help?

I recommend that you first read popular or semi-popular books written by experts in the field (Eliezer isn't one). One of the more recent and highly praised semi-popular books which addresses many points Eliezer tried to get across is ScottAaronson's Quantum Computing since Democritus. Free lecture notes are also available, but not as complete. The book has a complexity-theoretic bend, but you can skip the parts you find too boring or too hard. Other classic semi-popular QM books are also available, including the venerable Feynman lectures. That one explains amplitudes very well, but is light on various ontologies, like MWI.

You could get more answers if you posted this to /r/rational, which is a subreddit entirely dedicated to rationalist and rationalist-esque fiction.

There's the obvious "Harry appears to be about to destroy the universe; Voldemort might be trying to stop him" one. But I don't know any real answers to your question.

No, it looks perfectly fine to me; "8 reds and 4 blues" is the same evidence as "10 red and 6 blues", or for that matter, as "104 reds and 100 blues" (in that context) - what counts is the difference, not the ratio.

What are you actually trying to say here? And this is the wrong way to respond to someone: If you reply to someone they are notified and can continue the conversation, and the conversation is also confined to the specific subthread.

Do you believe the nutritional etiology of scurvy?

WHY IS IT SO OFTEN REPEATED THAT SMOKING CAUSES CANCER?

Start here. Follow the references (and the references' references). If you are still not convinced then try here.

Smoking is not "accused" of being strongly correlated with negative outcomes. It is strongly correlated with negative outcomes, as a simple empirical fact. This is a statement about the joint distribution of the observed variables "smoking" and "negative outcomes", and it has nothing to do with causal inference. I cannot even imagine a scenario where the statement "Smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer" is false, short of a vast conspiracy among scientists and doctors

A slightly more interesting question is whether the correlation between smoking and cancer is due to causation. It is theoretically possible that an unmeasured confounder is responsible for the observed correlation. In fact, R.A. Fisher believed such a confounder was probably at work . One of the first uses of sensitivity analysis was to show how unrealistic Fisher's claim was. A sensitivity analysis is essentially a thought experiment that lets you play around with how "strong" a confounder has to be, in order to account for the observed correlation if the causal null hypothesis were true. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755131/.

In this case, I think any reasonable investigator who looks at the data and does some basic reasoning about possible confounders, will come away with a very strong posterior in favor of smoking causing lung cancer. However, the relationship between smoking and certain other negative outcomes is in some cases much more questionable, and it would not surprise me if publication bias accounts for many of the negative outcomes smoking has been connected to