That there is reason to believe that it is “relatively easy” (say if we survive x-risk and get a good singleton within a million years) to colonize billions of galaxies. That makes the expected (ignoring possibility of discovering new useful physics, creating universes etc) hedonic utility of x-risk reduction up to some 9-orders of magnitude greater than I had previously thought.
Jesper_Ostman
Nice post. It seems like a good summary of important results from happiness science, with interesting ideas about how to increase one’s social skills added. Some comments:
So which personality traits tend to correlate most with happiness? Extroversion is >among the best predictors of happiness,22 as are conscientiousness, >agreeableness, self-esteem, and optimism.23
I’m surprised that you don’t mention the trait neuroticism, which in many studies has the strongest correlation with happiness. (see eg) In general, neuroticism and extraversion are far better predicators of happiness than conscientiousness and agreeableness (even if the latter traits have some effect).
One benefit of religion may be that it gives people a sense of meaning and >purpose
Interestingly, religion doesn’t correlate with happiness in more athestic (compared to US) european countries like Sweden. One way to explain this is that much of the effect is socially mediated and that less of the effect is meditated by finding meaning in life.
Many people report that constantly checking to see if they are happy actually >decreases their happiness
Do you know of any studies showing that checking if you are happy reduces happiness? As far as I know very few empirical studies have been done and this idea is mostly based on philosophical speculation by people like J.S. Mill and Sigdwick (“The paradox of hedonism”).
In general: an unhealthy lifestyle. In the relevant context the overwhelming majority of people die of diseases when relatively old (and not accidents or violence).
Other than that: suicide is often underrated—it is often the main non-disease cause of death for males.
(Eg when checking the stats for my own demographic I had about a 6.55% risk of death the next 30 years. Out of this some 10% were from suicide, 5% from accidents and only 1.5% from infectious diseases but over 50% from malignant neoplasms and circulatory system diseases.)
Useful statistics: http://www.deathriskrankings.com/default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 Some useful tips: http://longevity.about.com/od/liveto100/tp/Avoid-The-Top-Five-Killers-Of-Older-Men.htm
Here’s a review of meta-analyses on CBT:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735805001005
Some support for hypothesis 4 (assuming a correlation between status and age):
Not only do studies show that fluid intelligence decreases with age but the psychological trait Openness to experience also declines with age. Openness is related to characteristics like curiosity, independence of mind and broad interests, which should facilitate the possibility of having an “intelligent conversation”.
Mail him and ask?
I’m curious about your musings on the connection between masturbation and risk-taking. Would it be mediated by testosterone levels?
I’ve heard several people mention the idea that frequent masturbation would lower testosterone levels. But after a very brief search, I found claims that no studies supporting such a relationship exists, and a study (admittedly with few subjects) which failed to find any effects from sexual activity on blood plasma testosterone levels. Know any results to the contrary?
Not unreasonable. Eg personality traits like openness have a decent heritability and are closely related to weirdness.
Why not both? Eg. optimizing for a few really close friends and many more useful acquaintances/friends?
Why it just something which made it easier to “alieve” (in contrast to just believing) in a singularity, or do you think this information was good evidence for updating towards that a singularity is more likely? (eg because it shows that billionaires might invest in such crazy projects)
No videocalls—what about the widespread skyping?
“Weirdness” is closely related to a high score in the psychological trait openness in the big5.
According to this meta-analysis the correlations between religiosity and openness are somewhat mixed:
“while Openness is negatively related to religious fundamentalism (weighted mean r=−0.14, P<0.01) and, to some extent, intrinsic-general religiosity (r=−0.06, P<0.01), it is positively related to measures of open or mature religiosity and spirituality (r=0.22, P<0.0001).”
Very useful info.
Creatine might also have additional cognitive benefits
Although the hellish world scenario seems unlikely it might be important to consider. At least according to my own values things like being confined to children’s books and being injected with heroin would contribute very little negative utility (if negative at all) compared to even 1 in 1000 of enduring the worst psychologically possible torture for, say, a billion years.
Interesting. Do you have a source on that?
You can get some 5.2GB free with dropbox—first they have a few small”quests” giving 0.2 extra. But then they also gave you up to 3GB more if you synced photos from mobile to dropbox (did this then removed the photos to get extra non-picture storage space).
Possible examples: Taking part in paid medical experiments. Selling kidney.
Nice. Just ordered it for my University Library, hopefully that might make it more likely that someone else reads it too.
It seems you are talking about high-functioning psychopaths, rather than psychopaths according to the diagnostic DSM-IV criteria. Thus the prior should be different from 0.03. Assuming a high-functioning psychopath is necessarily a psychopath then it seems it should be far lower than 0.03, at least from looking at the criteria: