LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yes, I think that framing would help. I doubt it would shift public opinion that much, probably not even close to more than 50% in the current epistemic environment. The issue is that we really don't know how hard alignment is. If we could say for sure that pausing for ten years would improve our odds of survival by, say, 25%, then I think a lot of people of the relevant ages (like probably me) would actually accept the framing of a heroic sacrifice.

LessWrong readers concerned with existential risks should certainly care, as frameworks of this nature send dangerously mixed signals about acceptable behavior in high-stakes conflicts. Similar views have grown increasingly influential in global policy contexts. Leaving states uncertain about how their actions will be interpreted or responded to encourages brinkmanship and destabilizes diplomacy and deterrence strategies. Existing crisis management protocols are already fragile, and the last thing you want to do is to add more uncertainty and lack of consistency to the mix, especially when nuclear-armed states are concerned.

Your post is vastly more complete. Nice work!

As my 2 cents, the phrase 'deadname' to me sounded like it caught on because it was hyperbolic and imputes aggression – similar to how phrases like trauma caught on (which used to primarily refer to physical damage like the phrase "blunt-forced trauma") and notions spread that "words can be violence" (which seems to me to be bending the meaning of words like 'violence' too far and is trying to get people on board for a level of censorship that isn't appropriate). I similarly recall seeing various notions on social media that not using the requested pronouns for transgender people constituted killing them due the implied background levels of violence towards such people in society.

Overall this leaves me personally choosing not to use the term 'deadname' and I reliably taboo it when I wish to refer to someone using the person's former alternative-gendered name.

I don't think "deadname" is a ridiculous term just because no one died. The idea is that the name is dead: it's not being used any more. Latin is a "dead language" because (roughly speaking) no one speaks or writes in Latin. "James" is a "dead name" because (roughly speaking) no one calls that person "James" any more.

This all seems pretty obvious to me, and evidently it seems the opposite way to you, and both of us are very smart [citation needed], so probably at least one of us is being mindkilled a bit by feeling strongly about some aspect of the issue. I don't claim to know which of us it is :-).

Is there a salient reason LessWrong readers should care about John Mearsheimer's opinions?

Another piece of evidence against practical CF is that, under some conditions, the human visual system is capable of seeing individual photons. This finding demonstrates that in at least some cases, the molecular-scale details of the nervous system are relevant to the contents of conscious experience.

Mostly saying the same thing twice, a rhetorical flourish. I guess just really doubling down on how this is not good, in case the reader was like "well this sucks incredibly but maybe there's a good upside" and then got to the second part and was like "ah no I see now it is genuinely bad", or vice versa.

Apologies if I gave the impression that "a selfish person should love all humans equally"; while I'm sympathetic to arguments from e.g. Parfit's book Reasons and Persons^[1], I don't go anywhere that far. I was making a weaker and (I think) uncontroversial claim, something closer to Adam Smith's invisible hand: that aggregating over every individual's selfish focus on close family ties, overall results in moral concerns becoming relatively more spread out, because the close circles of your close circle aren't exactly identical to your own.

1. ^{^}

   Like that distances in time and space are similar. So if you imagine people in the distant past having the choice for a better life at their current time, in exchange for there being no people in the far future, then you wish they'd care about more than just their own present time. A similar logic argues against applying a very high discount rate to your moral concern for beings that are very distant to you in e.g. space, close ties, etc.

Yeah i'm confused about what to name it. we can always change it later i guess.

also let me know if you have any posts you want me to definitely tag for it that you think i might miss otherwise