When you work in log odds, the distance between any two degrees of uncertainty equals the amount of evidence you would need to go from one to the other. That is, the log odds gives us a natural measure of spacing among degrees of confidence.

It’s the Communists who were the defective transhumanists. “New Soviet Man” and all that. The Nazis were quite definitely the bioconservatives of the tale.

A clear argument has to lay out an inferential pathway, starting from what the audience already knows or accepts. If you don’t recurse far enough, you’re just talking to yourself.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. —Eugene Gendlin

You might ask: Maybe the aliens do have a sense of humor, but you’re not telling funny enough jokes? This is roughly the equivalent of trying to speak English very loudly, and very slowly, in a foreign country, on the theory that those foreigners must have an inner ghost that can hear the meaning dripping from your words, inherent in your words, if

Darwin suspected a non-standard Creator for studying Ichneumon wasps, whose paralyzing stings preserve its prey to be eaten alive by its larvae: “I cannot persuade myself,” wrote Darwin, “that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Cater

Instrumental rationality: systematically achieving your values.

Not as a moral point, but as a strict question of prior probability, we should ask what the Enemy might believe about their situation that would reduce the seeming bizarrity of their behavior. This would allow us to hypothesize a less exceptional disposition, and thereby shoulder a lesser burden of improbability.