Given how long it took me to conclude whether these were Eliezer’s true thoughts or a representation of his predicted thoughts in a somewhat probable future, I’m not sure whether I’d use the label “candid” to describe the post, at least without qualification.
While the post does contain a genuinely useful way of framing near-hopeless situations and a nuanced and relatively terse lesson in practical ethics, I would describe the post as an extremely next-level play in terms of its broader purpose (and leave it at that).
I think I’m more motivated by the thought that I am going to die soon, any children I might have in the future will die soon, my family, my friends, and their children are going to die soon, and any QALYs I think I’m buying are around 40% as valuable as I thought, more than undoing the income tax deduction I get for them.
It seems like wrangling my ADHD brain into looking for way to prevent catastrophe could be more worthwhile than working a high-paid job I can currently hyper-focus on (and probably more virtuous, too), unless I find that the probability of success is literally 0% despite what I think I know about Bayesian reasoning, in which case I’ll probably go into art or something.