Great post and discussion. Go Team Rational!
Eliezer, I think there’s a slight inconsistency in your message. On the one hand, there are the posts like this, which can basically be summed up as: “Get off your asses, slackers, and go fix the world.” This is a message worth repeating many times and in many different ways.
On the other hand are the “Chosen One” posts. These posts talk about the big gaps in human capabilities—the idea being that some people just have an indefinable “sparkliness” that gives them the power to do incredible things. I read these posts with uneasiness: while agreeing with the general drift, I think I would interpret the basic observations (e.g. CEOs really are smarter than most other people) in a different way.
The inconsistency is that on the one hand you’re telling people to get up and go do something, because the future is uncertain and could be very, very good or very, very bad; but on the other hand you’re essentially saying that if a person is not a Chosen One, there’s not much he can really contribute.
So, what I’d like to see is a discussion of what the rank-and-file members of Team Rational should be doing to help (and I hope that involves more than donating lots of money to SIAI).
Also, we need a cool mascot, maybe zebras.
“You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six foot long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I’ve read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one. But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that. . . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise.”
-- Cormac McCarthy, “No Country for Old Men”