I associate the Important Nouns with the Winne-the-Pooh stories, where they are used for a certain humorous effect.

Christopher Robin was sitting outside his door, putting on his Big Boots. As soon as he saw the Big Boots, Pooh knew that an Adventure was going to happen, and he brushed the honey off his nose with the back of his paw, and spruced himself up as well as he could, so as to look Ready for Anything.

It does suggest something like a specific concept, a recognized pattern; while also suggesting perhaps a pompousness and self-importance.

Falling in love isn’t just about romance. It’s about discovering new parts of yourself.

If an adult wrote this couple of sentences, I could ask them what they were talking about, and maybe hear a story about their personal love life.  That would almost certainly be interesting--even if expressed in clunky language.

If a nine-year old wrote the same, I wouldn't be so sure they knew what they were talking about, but I'd hold out hope for a charming anecdote about what they learned from their first crush.

But if I learned the nine-year-old had concluded it solely based on skimming all the books about love in their school library, then I would smile to myself and think, "Ah, how innocent: to write about love without having experienced it for oneself."

(one liner - for policy makers)

Within ten years, AI systems could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons.  The research required for this technology is heavily funded and virtually unregulated.

Thanks for this post. I've seen the term inadequecy before (mostly on your Facebook page, I think) but never had such a clear definition in mind.

There was one small thing that bothered me in this post without detracting from the main argument. In section IV, we provisionally accept the premise "grantmakers are driven by prestige, not expected value of research" for the sake of a toy example. I was happy to accept this for the sake of the example. However, in section V (the omelette example and related commentary about research after the second world war), the text begins to read as though this premise is definitely true in real life. This felt inconsistent and potentially misleading.

(It’s not like anyone in our civilization has put as much effort into rationalizing the academic matching process as, say, OkCupid has put into their software for hooking up dates. It’s not like anyone who did produce this public good would get paid more than they could have made as a Google programmer.)

I appreciated this throwaway example of inadequacy. It gave me a little lightbulb and propelled me forward to read the rest of the post with more interest.

It is done. (The survey. By me.)

I have taken the survey, including the digit ratio question.

Since there was a box to be included in the SSC survey, I just a little bit disappointed there wasn't a question for favourite SSC post to go with the favourite LessWrong post question.

Making things happen with positive thinking requires magic. But myths about the health effects of microwaves or plastic bottles are dressed up to look like science as usual. The microwave thing is supposedly based on the effect of radiation on the DNA in your food or something -- nonsense, but to someone with little science literacy not necessarily distinguishable from talk about the information-theoretic definition of death.

I'm not sure that signing papers to have a team of scientists stand by and freeze your brain when you die is more boring than cooking your food without a microwave oven. I would guess that cryonics being "weird", "gross", and "unnatural" would be more relevant.