So at any level, you’d better get used to asking stupid questions.
It’s probably just me but the Stack Exchange community seems to make this hard.
I think it would be nice if someone wrote a post on “visceral comparative advantage” giving tips on how to intuitively connect “the best thing I could be doing” with comparative advantage rather than absolute notions.
Yes, that would be nice. And personally speaking, it would be most dignifying if it could address (and maybe dissolve) those—probably less informed—intuitions about how there seems to be nothing wrong in principle with indulging all-or-nothing dispositions save for the contingent residual pain. Actually, just your first paragraph in your response seems to have almost done that, if not entirely.
I don’t think many people on the “front lines” as you put it have concrete predictions concerning merging with superintelligent AIs and so on. We don’t know what the future will look like; if things go well, the options at the time will tend to be solutions we wouldn’t think of now.
It may not be completely the same, but this does feel uncomfortably close to requiring an ignoble form of faith. I keep hoping there can still be more very general but yet very informative features of advanced states of the supposed relevant kind.
Yes.
I may just not know of any principled ways of forming a set of outcomes to begin with, so that it may be treated as a lottery and so forth.
But it would seem that aesthetics or axiology must still have some role in the formation, since precise and certain truths aren’t known about the future and yet at least some structure seems subjectively required—if not objectively required—through the construction of a (firm but mutable) set of highest outcomes.
So far my best attempts have involved not much more than basic automata concepts for personal identity and future configurations.