Yes, but only in the sense that by my best efforts, using the brain I actually have, I believe the thing to be the case.

This all seems to rest on an idea that an empty box labeled "truth" was dropped in my lap in the platonic land of a priori mental emptiness, and I'm obligated to fill it with something before I'm allowed to begin thinking. But obviously, that's not what happened. Rather, as I grew up, the abstract label called "truth" was invented and refined by me to help me make sense of the world and communicate with (or win approval from) others. So I end up at the same answer, pragmatism, but I deny that there was ever any problematic circularity. The problem instead seems to come from a notion of transcendent epistemic justification which is unmotivated and flawed--what good does this idea of justification do? What's the problem if I do something without justification?

This seems like it would be pretty easy to DIY with small drops of superglue.

GreaterWrong has the ability to automatically collapse comments from a given user. I could make it hide posts too if there's a desire for that.

Do you feel that way about all the themes? Ideally I'd like it to have something for everyone.

I really dislike the central example used in this post, for reasons explained in this article. I hope it isn't included in the next LW book series without changing to a better example.

Is it possible to insert a question using the markdown editor, or does it require using the new editor?

If the goal is to figure out how murderous the Mormons are, comparing their murder rate to the murder rate of non-Mormons, or some other reasonable base rate, is exactly what you would do. Surely this would be obvious in any other context.

It's striking that these numbers are always stated alone, and never compared to the number killed by capitalist governments using a similar methodology. (Which is clearly not zero, just two examples off the top of my head put it well into the millions [1] [2])

I think this is fundamentally not possible, because the world does not come pre-labeled with rules and win/lose conditions the way a sport or game does. Any attempt to do this would require you to take certain concepts as presumptively valid and unquestionable, but the main point of being an intellectual is to question accepted concepts and develop new ones.