Took the survey. Feels like I only very recently took the last one.
Nectanebo
I took the survey, and look forward to the results.
Let’s play the money as dead children game for a bit. Now, when the article was written you could plausibly save 1life for about $1000, but these days I think the number is a bit higher. Let’s say $10000 just to be safe.
Essentially, you’re saying that you would sacrifice the lives of 100 people in order to avoid a brief homosexual experience, using basic consequentialism. Perhaps you won’t change your mind even when thinking about the proposition from this perspective, but I know personally it would be too difficult ethically for me to refuse.
It doesn’t have to be lives, of course. If you’re more of a preferential consequentialist, you can help pay off your mates’ crippling student debt or mortgage, or donate to a longevity charity to help your chances of not dying, or even MIRI or something.
In any case, a million dollars has a lot of potential utility. Refusing because you’re not ‘materialistic’ is a bit short-sighted, I think.
The Metropolitan Man is finally complete. If you still haven’t read it and you’re on this site, I recommend you do. You likely won’t regret it.
This story was recommended in the last two media threads:
I was thinking recently that if soylent kicks something off and ‘food replacement’ -type things become a big deal, it could have a massive side effect of putting a lot of people onto diets with heavily reduced animal and animal product content. Its possible success could inadvertently be a huge boon for animals and animal activists.
Personally, I’m somewhat sympathetic towards veganism for ethical reasons, but the combination of trivial inconvenience and lack of effect I can have as an individual has prevented me from pursuing such a diet. Soylent would allow me to do so easily, should I want to. Similarly, there are people who have no interest in animal welfare at all. If ‘food replacements’ become big, it could mean for the incidental conversion of those who might have otherwise never considered veganism or vegetarianism to a lifestyle that fits within those bounds, for only their personal cost or convenience reasons.
Apart from the fact that they wouldn’t say anything (because generally animals can’t speak our languages ;)), nature can be pretty bloody brutal. There are plenty of situations in which our species’ existence has made the lives of other animals much better than they would otherwise be. I’m thinking of veterinary clinics that often perform work on wild animals, pets that don’t have to be worried about predation, that kind of thing. Also I think there are probably a lot of species that have done alright for themselves since humans showed up, animals like crows and the equivalents in their niche around the world seem to do quite well in urban environments.
As someone who cares about animal suffering, is sympathetic to vegetarianism and veganism, and even somewhat sympathetic to more radical ideas like eradicating the world’s predators, I think that humanity represents a very real possibility to decrease suffering including animal suffering in the world, especially as we grow in our ability to shape the world in the way we choose. Certainly, I think that humanity’s existence provides real hope in this direction, remembering that the alternative is for animals to continue to suffer on nature’s whims perhaps indefinitely, rather than ours perhaps temporarily.
Well, there’s a Lesswrong census every year, and that includes questions on political affiliation.
Other than that, I’m not sure how you would measure political bias.
Nor does it have good moderation.
I don’t think this is accurate as a blanket statement, since moderation quality and policy differs between subreddit to subreddit, with significant variation.
Austrian Economics.
I was fairly convinced too, so I am now very worried about how many other more blatant silly things I believe and may believe in the future. I’ve definitely been more at least a bit more wary than usual after realising this particular mistake.
I initially didn’t really want to make this post, but I recognised that it was for reasons perhaps relating to status ( I was embarrassed to admit I believed something comparatively less trivial and more obviously rubbish compared to others in this thread) but it was pretty was easy to get over it once I thought about it and also thanks to the fact that this kind of thing is exactly what the thread was probably looking for.
Index funds have been recommended on LW before. I have a hard time understanding how it would work investing in one, though. Do you actually own the separate stocks on the index of the index fund, or do you technically own something else? Where does the dividend money go?
I’m going to need some more examples, this sounds like it could be something but I’m not seeing how I could actually apply the concept to a situation.
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I took the survey, but unfortunately, when I saw “If you don’t know enough about the proposition to have an opinion, please leave the box blank”, I left all of the probability boxes blank afterwards because I just didn’t feel like I could give an answer I would be happy with, even for some of the questions that could be described as clear-cut. Maybe next survey I’ll be able to provide more useful details.
It doesn’t use whey for protein any more. Apparently the only issue for veganism (and vegetarianism) at the moment is fish oil for Omega 3s.
I also found Less Wrong after reading the Harry Potter fanfiction. Becoming a more rational person is something that I like to think I have strived towards for most of my life, even if I wasn’t aware of what it was called a lot of the time.
A lot of people who surround me in life aren’t very rational, so I looked towards the internet for a place to discuss things where a rational viewpoint is considered the optimal viewpoint. This is because I am aware of my ignorance across many fields and of the world, and I am also aware of my tendency towards irrationality in many circumstances, and want to somehow lessen this ignorance and this irrationality. Spending some time on this site seems like a good way to do that.
Here are a few things that I currently like the sound of that seem to have some kind of relevancy within a rational viewpoint. I think Altruism sounds pretty good, and it also seems like this site would be a good place to discuss how to make a positive impact on the world, and indeed work out what a positive impact could be considered to be. I do want to become immortal; it seems that one normal human lifetime is not nearly enough to achieve many of the things I want to achieve, and the prospect of unlimited time in order to ensure that these things can happen seems like a good idea. Transhumanism sounds great based on what I know of it.
I hope that my time here will assist me in becoming.. less wrong about everything. You know, this site is named very well.
Ok, I’ll go read the sequences now.
I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley the other day. It was pretty good, better than most ‘classics’ I’ve read. I probably liked it better than Nineteen Eighty-four as well, which it’s often compared to.
I found out later that Nick Bostrom explicitly used it as an example in some of his Existential Risk related writings, like this one, specifically, to illustrate what the ‘singleton’ or stable oppressive world government kind of existential risk may look like. If you aren’t too worried that you might generalize from fictional evidence, I’d say it’s worth a read if you somehow haven’t already.
I read that whole quote twice through and even thought about it for a few minutes as well, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to get out of it. Could anyone help me out?
A lot of the comments take a very consequentialist point of view, and they explain themselves fairly well, which is good.
Perhaps it is because I’ve seen many really bad reddit comments before (even in subreddits relating to fields usually sympathetic to rationalist ideals) and what I’m seeing here is of a different standard, but I find myself hoping to some extent that some of the people commenting here were idiots before reading HPMOR, and that somehow they became more insightful and eloquent as a result of being exposed to the fic and related content.
I think I might recommend the fic to some more people...
I think it’s possible that some of the comments have come from people already interested in the singularity coming to the article having been linked to it from various places, as you have done.
But it’s good to see some more people thinking it’s possible, in any case.
Took the survey. I always feel like I did the last one only recently.