In addition to what everyone else said, I recommend Gwern's "Console Insurance". Also, Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme says the following about dental and vision insurance:
I don’t have dental or vision insurance. Paying insurance that covers “regular maintenance” like teeth cleaning or contact lenses which these kinds of insurance do makes no sense whatsoever. Suppose everybody pays $25/month for contacts. Now do you think that everybody paying those $25 through an insurance company will make it any cheaper? No, the insurance company will add a $5 administrative fee—they most definitely will not give away free money. As such this kind of insurance is nothing but a financing plan for people who can’t figure out how to save the money for a $200 dental visit. The point of insurance is to cover rare events with a six-figure cost, which dental or vision simply doesn’t have.
The beginning is too slow (I would not have read past the first paragraph if I had come across this story randomly on the internet; consider starting at the second paragraph), but the idea was interesting.
Since the post never came back (much less with "citations galore"), here's a mirror.
Everything looks fine now. Thanks once again!
Huh. I interpreted it as "not just women can't get sexual experience until marriage in a healthy patriarchy," but now that you mention it, your interpretation seems correct.
Not just women.
My understanding is that in the patriarchies of the past there were a small number of prostitutes and bad girls which young men could use to gain some experience and confidence before settling down and marrying nice, virgin girls.
Thank you! The book is fantastic. Combined with The Sequences ebooks that are already floating around (Eliezer Yudkowsky Blog Posts, 2006-2010: An Unofficial Compendium, Rationality: From AI to Zombies, and The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate) it is now possible for someone to get most of the insights of the rationalist community distilled into extremely efficient book formats.
Do let me know if anything's massively broken.
A large number of posts have extraneous > characters. The affected posts appear to be either SSC posts in which the > character appears at the start of a blockquote and LiveJournal posts in which the > character appears after and in between paragraphs. Examples of the former include "Meditations on Moloch," "Misperceptions on Moloch," and "Book Review: Red Plenty," while examples of the latter include "The Meditation on Creepiness", "The Meditation on Superweapons," and "The Meditation on the War on Applause Lights."
Also, the title of "We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalitiebs" should be "We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood, But Against Powers And Principalities". I normally wouldn't report a typo, but this one appears to have been introduced by the ebook process; the mistake is not in the original article, nor is it on the list of titles RobbBB provided.
Do you ever get an anarchist, a communist and a neoreactionary turning up to the same meeting?
So an anarchist, a communist, and a neoreactionary walk into a LessWrong meetup...
Should we eliminate all news sources like some advocate?
Yes.
What about the news that are relevant, e.g. changes in the tax code that you need to know about?
If you try to read the news, you will see far more proposed changes tax changes than actual changes, and far more useless political debate than practical ramifications. Much more efficient to just google "tax changes [state] [year]" once a year or ask an accountant you know.
I have noticed one more issue. In "Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others…" the symbol "£" is twice corrupted into "ÂŁ". This is not an ebook-wide problem, since "Searching for One-Sided Tradeoffs" and "A Modest Proposal" both use the correct symbol. Apparently this is simply a problem with the source; the copy of the post at the Effective Altruism Forum has this error, but the copy of the post at LessWrong, has the correct symbol.