I expect that MIRI would mostly disagree with claim 6.
Can you suggest something specific that MIRI should change about their agenda?
When I try to imagine problems for which imperfect value loading suggests different plans from perfectionist value loading, I come up with things like “don’t worry about whether we use the right set of beings when creating a CEV”. But MIRI gives that kind of problem low enough priority that they’re acting as if they agreed with imperfect value loading.
No, mainly because Elon Musk’s concern about AI risk added more prestige than Thiel had.
There’s no particular reason to believe all of his predictions. But that’s also true of anyone else who makes as many predictions as the book does (on similar topics).
When you say “anticipate the future the way he does”, are you asking whether you should believe there’s a 10% chance of his scenario being basicly right?
Nobody should have much confidence in such predictions, and when Robin talks explicitly about his confidence, he doesn’t sound very confident.
Good forecasters consider multiple models before making predictions (see Tetlock’s work). Reading the book is a better way for most people to develop an additional model of how the future might be than reading new LW comments.
See Seasteading. No good book on it yet, but one will be published in March (by Joe Quirk and LWer Patri Friedman).
I suggest reading Henrich’s book The Secret of our Success. It describes a path to increased altruism that doesn’t depend on any interesting mutation. It involves selection pressures acting on culture.
There used to be important differences between stocks and futures (back when futures exchanges used open outcry) that (I think) enabled futures brokers to delay decisions about which customer got which trade price.
It has nearly the opposite effects for ideas I haven’t yet bet on but might feel tempted or obligated to bet on.
The bad effects are weaker if I can get out of the bet easily (as is the case on a high-volume prediction market).
Peer pressure matters, and younger people are less able to select rationalist-compatible peers (due to less control over who their peers are).
I suspect younger people have short enough time horizons that they’re less able to appreciate some of CFAR’s ideas that take time to show benefits. I suspect I have more intuitions along these lines that I haven’t figured out how to articulate.
Maybe CFAR needs better follow-ups to their workshops, but I get the impression that with people for whom the workshops are most effective, they learn (without much follow-up) to generalize CFAR’s ideas in ways that make additional advice from CFAR unimportant.
I disagree. My impression is that SPARC is important to CFAR’s strategy, and that aiming at younger people than that would have less long-term impact on how rational the participants become.
Another factor to consider: If AGI is 30+ years away, we’re likely to have another “AI winter”. Saving money to donate during that winter has some value.
I’ve felt that lack of curiosity a fair amount over the past 5-10 years. I suspect the biggest change that reduced my curiosity was becoming financially secure. Or maybe some other changes which made me feel more secure.
I doubt that I ever sought knowledge for the sake of knowledge, even when it felt like I was doing that. It seems more plausible that I had hidden motives such as the desire to impress people with the breadth or sophistication of my knowledge.
LessWrong attitudes toward politics may have reduced some aspects of my curiosity by making it clear that my curiosity in many areas had been motivated by a desire to signal tribal membership. That hasn’t enabled me to redirect curiosity toward more productive areas, but I’m probably better off without those aspects of curiosity.
For Omnivores:
Do you think the level of meat consumption in America is healthy for individuals? Do you think it’s healthy for the planet?
The level is healthy for individuals. But that includes way to much meat that has been processed dangerously (bacon, sausage), and not enough minimally processed seafood.
It’s not good for the planet. I want to deal with that by uploading my mind. Some large changes of that nature will make current meat production problems irrelevant in a few decades.
How do you feel about factory farming? Would you pay twice as much money for meat raised in a less efficient (but “more natural”) way?
Most factory farming (other than for bivalves) produces less healthy meat. I often pay twice as much for pasture-raised chicken/beef. With seafood there’s little need to pay extra to get properly raised food.
Are there any animals you would (without significantly changing your mind) never say it was okay to hunt/farm and eat? If so, what distinguishes these animals from the animals which are currently being hunted/farmed?
I’m confused about what rules I should use for primates, octopus, and dolphin. But since I haven’t had a convenient opportunity to eat any of those for years, I’ve procrastinated about deciding.
If all your friends were vegetarians, and you had to go out of your way to find meat in a similar way to how vegans must go out of their way right now, do you think you’d still be an omnivore?
I would definitely go out of my way for seafood. I don’t trust nutrition science enough to tell me how to safely go vegan. Seafood is a good source of B12, high zinc/copper ratios, iodine, and omega-3. I probably wouldn’t go much out of my way for chicken, beef, etc.
For Vegetarians:
If there was a way to grow meat in a lab that was indistinguishable from normal meat, and the lab-meat had never been connected to a brain, do you expect you would eat it? Why/why not?
“never connected to a brain” doesn’t seem like quite the right criterion. I expect there’s some technology that would satisfy my ethical criteria (Drexlerian nanotech?), in which case I would eat moderate amounts of meat (if it’s not too expensive).
Indigenous hunter gatherers across the world get around 30 percent of their annual calories from meat. Chimpanzees, our closest non-human relatives, eat meat. There are arguments that humans evolved to eat meat and that it’s natural to do so. Would you disagree? Elaborate.
Evolution creates enormous amounts of suffering. Natural should in most contexts be interpreted as amoral or immoral.
Maybe we’ve evolved to be healthier if we eat some animals, but most of the evidence I’ve seen suggests that bivalves are a much more effective way of getting the relevant nutrition than cruelly farmed vertebrates.
Do you think it’s any of your business what other people eat? Have you ever tried (more than just suggesting it or leading by example) to get someone to become a vegetarian or vegan?
Yes, it’s my business whether you are cruel to innocent beings who can’t defend themselves.
A culture of cruelty can have widespread effects beyond current nonhuman animals. We’re on the verge of creating many new forms of digital life. I want to set good precedents for how they are treated.
I haven’t yet actively tried to persuade anyone yet. I feel a little guilty about that, but it seems like a lower priority than x-risks. Also, I’ve only been vegetarian for seven months. I expect that eventually I’ll find a context in which I feel comfortable enough to actively argue for vegetarianism.
What do you think is the primary health risk of eating meat (if any)?
Too much of that meat has been processed in ways that create or add new chemicals that we’re poorly evolved to handle. E.g. smoking (bacon), and nitrates (sausage).
A less drastic health risk that’s harder to avoid comes from mycotoxins on poorly stored grain that factory farmed animals eat.
Yes, for strategies with low enough transaction costs (i.e. for most buy-and-hold like strategies, but not day-trading).
It will be somewhat hard for ordinary investors to implement the inverse strategies, since brokers that cater to them restrict which stocks they can sell short (professional investors usually don’t face this problem).
The EMH is only a loose approximation to reality, so it’s not hard to find strategies that underperform on average by something like 5% per year.
One of the stronger factors influencing the frequency of wars is the ratio of young men to older men. Life extension would change that ratio to imply fewer wars. See http://earthops.org/immigration/Mesquida_Wiener99.pdf.
Stable regimes seem to have less need for oppression than unstable ones. So while I see some risk that mild oppression will be more common with life extension, I find it hard to see how that would increase existential risks.
Some of the discussion has moved to CFAR, although that involves more focus on how to get better cooperation between System 1 and System 2, and less on avoiding specific biases.
Maybe the most rational people don’t find time to take surveys?
Signing up didn’t bring me peace of mind, except for brief relief at not having the paperwork on my to-do list.
I’ve heard other cryonicists report feeling something like peace of mind as a result of signing up, but they appear to be a minority.
In Chinese grocery stores and restaurants, I see about as much veggie fish/shrimp as veggie beef/chicken, and it tastes about as good. But the veggie fish and shrimp take less like real fish/shrimp than veggie beef/chicken taste like real beef/chicken. So it may be that similar effort went into each, and many cultures were less satisfied with the results for fish.
See discussions of utility monsters. Don’t assume that many people here support pure utilitarianism.
My equivalent of this document focused more on the risks of unreasonable delays in uploading me. Cryonics organizations have been designed to focus on preservation, which seems likely to bias them toward indefinite delays. This might be especially undesirable in an “Age of Em” scenario.
Instead of your request for a “neutral third-party”, I listed several specific people, who I know are comfortable with the idea of uploading, as people whose approval would be evidence that the technology is adequate to upload me. I’m unclear on how hard it would be to find a genuinely neutral third party.
My document is 20 years old now, and I don’t have a copy handy. I suppose I should update it soon.