what if there was a $10 buy in where if we win we get our money back but if we lose the money is donated to some pre-agreed upon charity?
I feel like this structure could be improved, as I don't think it would press the right psychological buttons. If I'm enthusiastic about the charity, it's strange to be (effectively) playing against it -- especially if there's a relatively large amount of money at stake, most of it conditionally donated by people other than me, so the altruistic benefit of losing the game clearly outweighs the selfish benefit of winning it. And if I'm not enthusiastic about the charity, I have no strong motive to put any money up, when the best I can personally do is break even.
If you're expecting the participants to be enthusiastic about the charity, maybe a better structure would be to ditch the idea of giving the players their money back, and find someone (or offer yourself) to match (or at least significantly augment) the donation if the human team wins. That way they're all working together for a good cause.
(If you wanted to go in the other direction and appeal to their selfish motives, you could stick with something similar to the original plan but make the winning outcome better than breakeven -- either by putting some extra money in the pot, or by breaking the humans up into two teams and giving some of the worse-performing team's money to the better-performing team while donating the rest to charity.)
The only scenario in which an individual congressperson has power is a close vote in a contested district where the party can't take the risk of a primary challenger.
The last condition (party can't risk a primary challenge) is only necessary when the congressperson plans to run again and can't even credibly pretend to be willing to risk their nomination. Right now there are 54 congresspeople who have already announced that they won't be recontesting their current seat; many of those are running for a different office, but a little over half are simply retiring. (And I don't think that count includes any senators who aren't up for election in 2026.)
And, of course, any congressperson can decide at any time that they care enough about a vote to risk losing their party's support and getting a new job when their term is up. So unless there's some kind of truly scary behind-the-scenes coercion, I think it's a big exaggeration to say that they're powerless even when a vote is close.
There is no reason at all to take any idea/worldview less than seriously.
I think this is too absolute, at least for flawed humans as opposed to ideal rationalists. Some possible counterexamples:
Certainly all three of those reasons can be misapplied; they are convenient excuses to protect one's own flawed worldview, hang on to comforting delusions, or toe the line on politically charged issues. But sometimes doing those things really is better than the alternative.
The human mind is a substrate-independent computer program. If it was implemented in a non-biological substrate, it would keep its subjective experience.
This is conjecture. OP's contrary statement was obviously overconfident, and they should probably think and read more on the topic. But the paper you linked to support your claim is ultimately just a more sophisticated set of appeals to intuition. You may find substrate-independence far more plausible than the alternative, but you haven't given any good reason to hold it with the level of confidence you're projecting here.
This is probably just me being an idiot, but the initial instructions tell me my job is to identify whether the note I hear matches the target pitch, which I take to mean a specific frequency (i.e. this particular F, not just any F). But then I'm told I'm wrong for rejecting some notes that are definitely different from the target pitch, but which I guess must be an F from a different octave. So, assuming that's not a bug and I'm actually being asked to identify any F, I think it would be good to make that clear. (And if you're targeting musical idiots like me, it might be good to start even simpler, because it is completely non-obvious to me when two different frequencies are the same note in different octaves.)
Good stuff! It reminds me of the fun I had playing a very different style of FPS: Quakelikes, aka arena shooters. People tend to think of Quake and its descendants as mindless action games, but if you go beyond the super casual/noob stage they are largely about controlling space, reading your opponent's mind, and confounding their attempts to read yours. (Well, that and executing the basic mechanical skills like moving and aiming; but as long as you're not completely dominated in those respects, you can win on most maps by outthinking your opponent.)
I don't know whether this will be interesting to anyone completely unfamiliar with the game, but there's a great retrospective self-commentary here, by one of the world's best players, in which he explains his thought process throughout a crucial 10-minute game (with liberal use of slow-mo to give him enough time to fit his explanations in).
In the case of Calibration Trivia, my gut reaction is that you're being a bit unfair to the 'clever fellow' (or at least to the hypothetical version of him in my head, who isn't simply being a smartarse). It sounds like you're presenting Calibration Trivia as a competitive game, and within that frame it makes sense to poke at edge cases in the rules and either exploit them or, if the exploit would clearly just be tedious and pointless, suggest that the rules are preemptively tweaked to unbreak the game. I know the ultimate purpose of the game is to train a real skill, but still, you've chosen gamification as your route to that goal, and maybe there are no free lunches on offer here; to the extent that people derive extra motivation from the competitive element, they're also going to be focused on the proxy goal of scoring points rather than purely on the underlying goal of training the skill.
It's quite simple. Voting is irrational.
This depends on a couple of assumptions:
For someone who feels good about voting, it can be a rational thing to do even if the probability of affecting the result is negligible or zero. And for someone who finds voting annoying but cares a significant amount about others who will be affected by the result, it's entirely possible for voting to be rational. Generally, the smaller the probability of one vote affecting the result, the greater the number of people who will potentially be affected by it, so these factors can balance out even in very large elections. (You may argue that there are higher-impact ways to be altruistic, which is probably true but doesn't necessarily matter; usually the choice isn't "vote xor make an effective donation", it's simply "vote xor don't bother voting".)
(I know you went on to talk about the possibility of voting as "a charitable or recreational activity", and I know the main point was to describe why people won't bother becoming informed voters. But I still think it's worth pointing out that your opening claim is far from obviously true.)
so deep that the animal always says "this experience is good actually" no matter how you ask, so deep that the animal intelligently pursues the experience with its whole being, so deep that the animal never flinches away from the experience in any way
This is very different from your original claim, which was that an experience being worse than a neutral or null experience "fully boils down to whether the experience includes a preference to be dead (or to have not been born)."
edit: if you do stand by the original claim, I don't think it makes much sense even if I set aside hard problem-adjacent concerns. Why would I necessarily prefer to be dead/unborn while undergoing an experience that is worse than the absence of experience, but not so bad as to outweigh my life up until now (in the case of 'unborn') or expected future life (in the case of 'dead')?
Yes, sorry -- 'magically find more money' was not exactly a helpful suggestion! (I think I was more confident in the negative part of my critique, but wanted to at least try to offer something constructive.) I do think it could potentially work for quite small values of 'significantly augment', though, if that is an option; just enough to take the game from from zero sum to non-negligibly positive sum.