Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015

I have not read your story yet, but if I wait till I get around to it, I will forget to inform you that I have been known to accept commissions.

I suggest doing #1 and #2 in parallel.

As you said, the story is mostly done and just needs editing. That will require help from other people and can happen while you do other things. It will be good for you to be able to say "Behold, I have finished this thing."

At the same time, as you tackle the full story as a separate thing, it may be worth giving it your best effort (by pulling in #2) so that after a few months, you can say "I tried really hard and it didn't work. Alas. Time to stop." or the opposite, without having to wonder if you just didn't try hard enough.

Interesting. Great that you shared it. Have never heard of something like this. To me it looks like one basic fear pattern matching gone wrong (wired differently than usual in the brain). I mean there must be some pre-wiring of object recognition in the brain that triggers on e.g. spider-like and snake-like forms. Why should such a wiring go wrong (mutation or whatever) and pattern-match against small-ringlike.

See also What universal experiences are you missing without realizing it. Where people mention a lot special things and maybe by now you can find something comparable to yours.

I'm not a doctor, but this sounds like Mikrophobia. I do recognize you're describing your feelings as a kind of revulsion, not fear proper, but still that'd the best pattern match I got.

I suggest you talk to a psychiatrist or psychotherapist about it, because if it is that, your issue is very solvable. Phobias are one of the easiest-to-treat psychological issues; desensitization and cognitive-behavioral therapy work quite well.

My housemate has this exact problem- right down to the issues with jewelry in particular. If she has to shake hands with somebody who's wearing a metal ring, she has to sort of ritualistically wipe off her hands afterwards. Metal in general seems to trigger the reaction much more strongly, so she'll have problems with loose coins but not stickers.

It's been persistent throughout her life, I understand, but exposure therapy has reduced its severity.

Maybe childhood training against choking hazards.

I was once hospitalized for months at 5 years old, and the had exhibitions on the wall of the small stuff kids stuffed into their noses or ears and had to be removed surgically. It was scary. I was afraid of them. The fact I still remember it means it may be traumatic, may have been something like that for you.

How do you handle eating or cooking lentils?

I'd look for a good headhunter in your field (assuming it is not too niche). Let them get the commission for finding you a job.

• Update your linkedin profile and see if any contact you.
• Talk to a recruiter in a company that is a near fit for you even if they aren't hiring now and ask if they have worked with any headhunters in the past.
• Go to a Job fair in the US - not for job but to interview headhunters

and then she did it and acted hurt and told me she is tired of always needing to tell me

That's pretty classical passive-aggressive behaviour. I don't think it has much to do with guess-vs-ask cultures.

But I agree that there is probably some gender correlation.

I think it would be wrong to generalize from that example, so I'd like to report the opposite. My mother would also ask me to do specific, clearly defined task when she wanted them done and ask again when I forgot. My dad, on the other hand, would just get angry when things weren't done according to his requirements without making those requirements clear.

The problem is he starts with false premises that it is impermissible (or at least impolite) to question in public, such as that homeless people are perfectly normal people who are down on their luck. (Most homeless, especially long time homeless have a mental illness.) And then he proceeds to reason from them and expects people to agree.

Any better takers?

I think I dislike this sort of articles because they assume I'm a stupid mark easily to manipulate by crude emotional-blackmail methods. AND the author is someone who thinks that manipulating other people this way is an excellent idea.

Why even read left wing articles if they upset you?

My take is that if the public space was skateboarder and homeless friendly, the author could easily write a similar article on how that scares [insert other victim group] away from the public space.

As for why it is written that way, Kling's book The Three Languages of Politics is a good explanation. The left likes to think in oppressed verses oppressor terms.

Thanks for posting this article. There is a park being planned near me and there are certain architectural features I now want it to consider ...

upvote for noticing a (possibly) uncharitable reaction in yourself and taking steps to do better.

Anyway, the way I can best parse my emotions is that I find Mr. Howell condesdencing or pretentious because he is pretending to be surprised we are not saints.

"We" is a bad word. "We" don't design public spaces. Certain architects do. Those architects do engage in certain rhetoric. They also do promise certain things to governments who hire them to build public spaces.

Congratulations on seeing a case where your emotions may mislead you. Now, what makes you think the author of that article "is pretending to be surprised we are not saints"? Looking at it, I get the exact opposite impression - he starts off by saying,

There was something heartening about the indignation expressed by Londoners this week against the “anti-homeless” spikes placed outside a luxury block of flats in Southwark.

suggesting that he finds their reaction surprising. So if anything, his article gives me a sense of self-satisfied cynicism, learnedly explaining to such people how the world works and why he thinks their indignation is rare.

Were I uncharitable, I could read your own (parent) comment as showing off cynicism in the exact same way.

Was expecting weekly world news :)

What this article really opened my eyes on is how impactful Nick Bostrom (or Bostrum) has been.

I like this.

I can think of this one and, especially, section B of this one.

Interestingly, both concepts seem worthwhile to me... and I mostly advocate a combination of hedonistic and preference utilitarianism.

This seems to point to a difference in how people's motivational systems appear from the inside: maybe for some, "pleasure" is an obvious, atomic concept which they can constantly observe as driving their behavior,

Remembered pleasure and pleasure felt in the moment are two distinct things, towards which is the "obvious" one?

My immediate idea of the terms pleasure and suffering is that "pleasure" is an emotion while suffering is more of an activity. The opposite of "suffering" would for me be "enjoying".

There a state where you laugh and a state of warm relaxation. Both feel good but both are different. How does pleasure relate to that? Life satisfaction is another variable in that space.

There are interactions I might have with another person where the person is going to laugh and feel energy but where the person would answer "No" if I would ask them whether they want to engage in a certain action.

If you come from preference utilitarians it's important to ensure consent. If you just care about hedonics and are skilled enough to predict the results of your action and know the actions produce pleasure, consent isn't an issue anymore.

The difference matters if you analyse what some PUA people do.

I think "pleasure" and "suffering" are very meaningful and that the prospects of finding decent metrics for each are good over the long term. The problem I have with hedonistic utilitarianism is that hedons are not what I want to maximize. Don't you ever pass up opportunities to do something you know will bring you more pleasure (even in the long run), in order to achieve some other value and don't regret doing so?

I'd like it as well, if you still have any. (email: king.grimmm@gmail.com)

I'd be happy to take you up on this if it's still available, my email is jam.br4nd@gmail.com. Many thanks for the kind offer either way!

martin.malette@gmail.com (it's a friend I want to introduce to these topics, and he loves audiobooks)

For most of the work stuff I find it easier to remember where to find things rather than the things themselves. The hard stuff is the undocumented and constantly changing locations and procedures where a search is likely to find out of date junk.

It works now! It just required waiting a bit. Thanks for the help Gunnar_Zarncke.

It takes some time for the Wiki accounts to get in sync with the LW account, just wait some time (a day?). I guess its some Troll protection.

"Let's see if each of us posses any characteristics that would make us incompatible" seems socially unacceptable.

It's considered rude to say that out loud during a date. However, it is considered good practice to be alert for such characteristics.

The point of a dating conversation isn't primarily to exchange information. It's to create good feelings and see whether one can create a feeling of connection.

How do you account for ideological Turing tests failing because of shibboleths? It's one thing to be unable to express or recognize the same ideas as a Christian, it's another to be unable to express or recognize in-group terminology.

One thing I noted when doing this. Most of my true answers were more specific than my made up answers, which might give them away. I look forward to reading the results!

These questions are quite difficult and will require effort. I'll try to submit an entry.

Edit: Completed. :)

I just took the "root of all sins" test and I tried to distinguish the answers of the Christians and non-Christians entirely based on shibboleths. Disordered love? Christ is a blinding searing light? Humans are finite beings who naturally desire the infinite? Maybe. But the decision was not "would a Christian have those ideas" but "would a Christian phrase the ideas that way".

Of course I can't just go count the shibboleths; it's possible that non-Christians might overcompensate and actual Christians don't talk about Jesus' blinding light much at all, at least not actual Christians of the type who answer such surveys.

But either way, I didn't feel that the most likely way to figure out which answer came from Christians was to look at the content of the answer. So I think that the test has already failed.

On top of this is the question of what type of Christian the non-Christians are trying to imitate. Are they trying to imitate average Christians, average survey-answering Christians, average blogging Christians, average Christians who are knowledgeable about Christianity? Trying to imitate the wrong kind of Christian can mean that knowing too much about Christianity can make your imitation fail.

I think to back up the hunch you'd need to poll some people, see if their akrasia comes from being weak on some points rather than others - if that's the case, and they're not consistently the same points, then probably it does work that way. I personally feel like I'm bad with respect to all the modules listed.

Would anyone here care to offer their opinion?

Sure :-D Smartwatches are computers miniaturized to the point of uselessness because of the tiny screen and UI issues. Specifically for camping or backpacking you'd be much better off with a bigger-screen device like a regular smartphone. In fact, if you're serious about backpacking I would recommend a dedicated GPS unit.

For a long time I've wanted to want a smartwatch so badly I was forced to buy it, but the actual advantages of owning one never amounted to the desired threshold. In the end, and quite sadly, I've decided that there will probably never be enough reasons.

I think it's happening the same to you: you want to want to buy a wrist-phone, but are rational enough to know that there's no reason to do such a thing. I suggest you to meditate on the fact that you probably already know what's the right course of action, it just sucks to follow.

Allow me to join the chorus of commenters who suspect that you've been persuaded by advertising, peer pressure, etc. that you have to have the latest cool gadget, and that you'd be better off if you could overcome that urge. It's a useful habit to break if you have a longer-term preference for having more money :-).

Not directly answering your conundrum on wrist computers, but—I go trail running frequently (in Hong Kong), so I've thought a bit about wearable devices and safety. Here are some of my solutions and thoughts:

• I use a forearm armband (example) to hold my phone in a position that allows me to use and see the touchscreen while running. I find this incredibly useful for checking a GPS map on the run while keeping both hands free for falls. I worry that the current generation of watches are nowhere near as capable as my phone.

• I rely a lot on Strava's online route creation tool and phone app for navigation.

• Digital personal locator beacons on the 406 MHz channel (example) are the current gold standard for distress signals.

• Sharing your location through your phone (e.g., on Google+) can give some peace of mind to your family and friends.

• An inactivity detector based on a phone's accelerometer might be a useful dead man switch for sending a distress SMS/email in the event of an accident that renders you incompetent. I haven't gotten around to setting this up on my phone, but here's an (untested) example of an app that might work.

• In case of emergency, it might be useful to have a GPS app on your phone that can display your grid reference so that you can tell rescuers where to find you.

Could you give a specific example of this foggy thinking? In which ways is it different from an Ugh field ?

[On second thought, deleted — the example I pulled up is arguably more "wooden and thick like normal stupidity" than "foggy".]

Have you discovered the neoreactionaries yet? :-)

Study existing literature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Flyvbjerg this guy got a lot of good press in germany, apparently he has written extensively on big infrastructure projects and cost overruns. I find Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

Reference class forecasting: get a list of previously constructed nuclear power plants, look up how much they were delayed and over budget, then use the empirical probability distribution of delays and cost over-runs. (Bent Flyvbjerg, cited by Tripitaka, turns out to be very keen on RCF.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

I believe that is the genetic fallacy.

It's "explaining away" or "intercausal reasoning" applied to the "good reasons → belief ← bad reasons" Bayes net, and it's not really a fallacy. It doesn't invalidate arguments directly but it should still make us decrease our belief, because (1) we need to partly undo our update in favor of the belief caused by observing that the other person holds that belief, and (2) we need to compensate for our own increased desire to believe.

It's often rude, because it implies that the other person is either dishonest or stupid, since it suggests that the other person's expressed belief is either not genuine (e.g. lies or belief-in-belief) or genuine but not due solely to truth (e.g. influenced by subconscious signaling concerns).

Since this reasoning pattern is rude, i.e. status-lowering, people often claim that it's logically invalid when it's used against a belief that they hold. (See what I did there?) This status-lowering property also means we must be careful to apply it to our own beliefs too, not only our opponents' beliefs.

That's kind of a Hofstadter-esque question. I think the answer is "no", but the reason why depends on what meta-level you're looking at: if the label refers only to the object-level question, then it's straightforwardly true or false; but if you construe it as applying to the entire context of the question including its labeling, then it's possible to imagine a trick question that's transparent enough that labeling it as such exposes the trick and stops it from being tricky. It can be a self-fulfilling or a self-defeating prophecy.

"Tricky" means "the other person is operating at a higher level than I am".

If you answer a question at a lower level than it was posed, you get marked down for failing to level up. If you answer at a higher level than the question was posed at, and the teacher fails to level up, you get marked down for what failing to level up felt like to the teacher -- misinterpreting the question, nitpicking, showing off, whatever. The task in an exam is to figure out what level each question is being asked at, and address it on the same level.

I don't whether it is tricky or not, but it is the sort of thing I think my students would get legitimately annoyed by. While teaching students to be confident of their answers can be important, I'm not sure in this context that would be helped by this.

So is it always accurate to label a question as "tricky"?

If every question is tricky, then the label of "tricky" ceases to be meaningful.

But it occurred to me that if the question had been identical to one given in class but I still labeled it as "tricky" the "tricky" label would have been accurate because the trick would have been students thinking that the obvious answer wasn't correct when indeed it was.

I believe the word you're looking for is "cruel".

Only if you do it once (or a few times) and only after they have seen lots of tricky ones by now.

Reminds me of Vizzini's battle of wits in the Princess Bride X-)

One variation: "Gravity trains", going round and round in circles.

Used on my "New Attica" setting, as can be seen at http://datapacrat.deviantart.com/art/The-Grav-y-Train-343866014 .

Am I mistaken in thinking that all you'd need to do is build the centrifuge with an angled floor, so the net force experienced from gravity and (illusory) centrifugal force is straight "down" into it?

Sure, this would work in principle. But I guess it would be fantastically expensive compared to a simple building. The centrifuge would need to be really big and, unlike in 0g, would have to be powered by a big motor and supported against Mars gravity. And Mars gravity isn't that low, so it's unclear why you'd want to pay this expense.

I recall a SF story that took place on a rotating space station orbiting Earth that had several oddities. The station had greater than Earth gravity. Each section was connected to the next by a confusing set of corridors. The protagonist did some experiments draining water out of a large vat and discovered a coriolis effect.

So spoiler alert it turned out that the space station was a colossal fraud. It was actually on a massive centrifuge on Earth.

The flight analogy, or at least some variation of it, is pretty standard in my experience. (Incidentally, I heard a version of the analogy just recently, when I was reading through the slides of an old university course - see pages 15-19 here.)

Seems to be a working memory aid for me.

If I have to manipulate equations mentally, I'll (sort of) explain the equation sub-vocally and assign chunks of it to different fingers/regions of space, and then move my fingers around or reassign to regions, as if I'm "dragging and dropping" (e.g. multiply by a denominator means dragging a finger pointing at the denominator over and up). Even if I'm working on paper, this helps me see one or two steps further ahead than I could do so using internal mental imagery alone. I don't remember explicitly learning this.

I move my fingers (and hands or a prop wand if I'm carrying one) to "write" stuff in the air when I'm doing serious thinking. The way that helps me is that I can keep more thoughts in my head. This doesn't (just) apply to math problems (since I hardly know any math and can't do much calculations in my head). My current hypothesis for why this works is that it couples certain actions to certain ideas and repeating the action makes it easier to recall the idea. If I'm right about that it might be learnable and useful, to a similar extent as mind palaces. By coincidence, I've been thinking about trying to formalize this technique in some way since Saturday.

I have the belief that I solve math, design, and logic problems more rapidly when standing/pacing in front of a whiteboard with a marker in my hand, far out of proportion to any marks I actually make (often no marks), possibly because the physical motions put me in the state of mind I developed during university.

(I don't know if it actually helps; I have not tested it)

None currently known. But I suggest that this is not a very high-priority problem at the moment; if you solve the more pressing ones, you'll have literally billions of years to figure out an escape path from the universe.

I'm always confused when people talk about 'avoiding/conquering/ending death', as if death were one thing. It's rather emphatically not. It's even worse than the stereotypical-by-now adge that theres no such thing as a 'cure for cancer' because every type of cancer and indeed every individual tumor is unique and brought about by unique failures and internal evolution.

I think that a solution might be possible. According to string theory our universe is likely to be only metastable since its cosmological constant is positive. It means that eventually we get false vacuum decay and the formation of a new universe. If the new universe has zero or negative cosmological constant, its asymptotic temperature will be zero which should (I think) allow avoiding heat death (that is, performing an infinite computation). Now, I think the half-life of spontaneous nucleation within a cosmological horizon is usually predicted to be much longer than the relaxation time. However, this leaves the possibility of heterogeneous (induced) nucleation. Now, I'm not aware of any research about artificially induced false vacuum decay, but I don't know of any physical barrier either. If we manage to induce such a decay and find some way to transmit ourselves into the new universe (which probably requires the new universe to be physically universal), avoiding death is a possibility.

Here is a different answer to your question, hopefully a better one.

It is no coincidence that the prior that requires log(x)+1 bits of evidence for length x does not converge. The reason for this is that you cannot specify using only log(x)+1 bits that a string has length x. Standard methods of specifying string length have various drawbacks, and correspond to different prior distributions in a natural way. (I will assume 32-bit words, and measure length in words, but you can measure length in bits if you like.)

Suppose you have a length-prefixed string. Then you pay 32 bits to encode the length; but the length can be at most 2^32-1. This corresponds to the uniform distribution that assigns all lengths between 0 and 2^32-1 equal probability. (We derive this distribution by supposing that every bit doing length-encoding duty is random and equally likely.)

Suppose you have a null-terminated string. Then you are paying a hidden linear cost: the 0 word is reserved for the terminator, so you have only 2^32-1 words to use in your message, which means you only convey log(2^32-1) bits of information per 32 bits of message. The natural distribution here is one in which every bit conveys maximal information, so each word has a 1 in 2^32 chance of being the terminator, and so the length of your string is Geometric with parameter 1/2^32.

A common scheme for big-integer types is to have a flag bit in every word that is 1 if another word follows, and 0 otherwise. This is very similar to the null-terminator scheme, and in fact the natural distribution here is also Geometric, but with parameter 1/2 because each flag bit has a probability of 1/2 of being set to 0, if chosen randomly.

If you are encoding truly enormous strings, you could use a length-prefixed string in which the length is a big integer. This is much more efficient and the natural distribution here is also much more heavy-tailed: it is something like a smoothed-out version of 2^(32 Geometric(1/2)). We have come closer to encoding a length of x in log(x) bits, but it's more like C log(x) for some constant C. (The constant is actually 32/31, since for every 31 bits of length, we have 1 bit of "length of length".)

If we iterate this, we can produce even more efficient schemes, but log(x)+1 is unreachable.

(What I have been calling the natural distribution to use for each of these schemes is something like a max-entropy distribution. The way I am defining it is to assume an infinite sequence of random bits, let the scheme read this infinite sequence until it decides that it's reached the end of the string, and take that string's length.)

Here is a different answer to your question, hopefully a better one.

It is no coincidence that the prior that requires log(x)+1 bits of evidence for length x does not converge. The reason for this is that you cannot specify using only log(x)+1 bits that a string has length x. Standard methods of specifying string length have various drawbacks, and correspond to different prior distributions in a natural way. (I will assume 32-bit words, and measure length in words, but you can measure length in bits if you like.)

Suppose you have a length-prefixed string. Then you pay 32 bits to encode the length; but the length can be at most 2^32-1. This corresponds to the uniform distribution that assigns all lengths between 0 and 2^32-1 equal probability. (We derive this distribution by supposing that every bit doing length-encoding duty is random and equally likely.)

Suppose you have a null-terminated string. Then you are paying a hidden linear cost: the 0 word is reserved for the terminator, so you have only 2^32-1 words to use in your message, which means you only convey log(2^32-1) bits of information per 32 bits of message. The natural distribution here is one in which every bit conveys maximal information, so each word has a 1 in 2^32 chance of being the terminator, and so the length of your string is Geometric with parameter 1/2^32.

A common scheme for big-integer types is to have a flag bit in every word that is 1 if another word follows, and 0 otherwise. This is very similar to the null-terminator scheme, and in fact the natural distribution here is also Geometric, but with parameter 1/2 because each flag bit has a probability of 1/2 of being set to 0, if chosen randomly.

If you are encoding truly enormous strings, you could use a length-prefixed string in which the length is a big integer. This is much more efficient and the natural distribution here is also much more heavy-tailed: it is something like a smoothed-out version of 2^(32 Geometric(1/2)). We have come closer to encoding a length of x in log(x) bits, but it's more like C log(x) for some constant C. (The constant is actually 32/31, since for every 31 bits of length, we have 1 bit of "length of length".)

If we iterate this, we can produce even more efficient schemes, but log(x)+1 is unreachable.

(What I have been calling the natural distribution to use for each of these schemes is something like a max-entropy distribution. The way I am defining it is to assume an infinite sequence of random bits, let the scheme read this infinite sequence until it decides that it's reached the end of the string, and take that string's length.)

What sort of evidence about x do you expect to update on?

Relevant thread

I wrote a check for this property for all the words in my system's inbuilt vim dictionary and got the following list:

Rubbish Words:

er, Livy, Lyly, na, ob, re, uh

Interesting Words:

an, fans, fobs, gnat, ravine, robe, serf, tang, thug

A simple google search brings up this page, but it doesn't have anything new.

Well, of course, the hot pole will heat the air around it and warm air rises. Same thing for the cold pole and cold air sinks. The specifics depend on how the poles are oriented with respect to gravity.

For calculations of conditional probabilities I've found an initial sample size of 10,000 is more manageable. But that's just me.

For numerical calculations, your method doesn't ever really break down and, moreover, Brennan is essentially doing the same thing you are, but with a sample of 16 people instead of 100 to make the math simple enough to do mentally.

A more Bayes-theorem styled calculation tells us that we have 1:3 odds initially (as there are 1/4 men and 3/4 women) and the Virtuist evidence updates it by a factor of 2:3 (as Virtuists are 2/4 of men and 3/4 of women), so we end with 2:9 odds. I think this is easier than what either you or Brennan are doing, but it's a matter of taste and of what's more intuitive. (Which certainly varies from person to person; I find two-elevenths easier to grasp than 22.2%)

Doing Bayesian calculations formally is more important where you are doing symbolic calculations, especially with continuous probability distributions.

Edit: Also, 22.2% is wrong, which I didn't realize at first; it's 2/9, not 2/11. You want to compute 12.5/(12.5+56.25) instead.

Why can't we just make a CPU as large as a dump truck [...?]

Lots of reasons, some of which Vaniver and ShardPhoenix have already given, but one of the big ones is that CPUs dissipate a truly enormous amount of heat for their size. Your average laptop I7 consumes about thirty watts, essentially all of which goes to heat one way or another, and it's about a centimeter square (the chip you see on the motherboard is bigger, but a lot of that is connections and housing). Let's call that about the size of a penny. That's an overestimate, but as we'll see, it won't matter much.

Now, a quick Google tells me that a dump truck can hold about 20 cubic meters (=20000 liters), and that a liter holds about 2000 closely packed pennies. So if we assume something with around the same packing and thermal efficiency, our dump truck-sized CPU will be putting out about 30 2000 20000 = 1.2 gigawatts of heat, or a bit more than the combined peak output of the two nuclear reactors powering a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

This poses certain design issues.

1. There's a limit to how large we can scale computers at any given tech level. What you're talking about is basically what a supercomputer is (they have many CPUs rather than one huge one), but there's still a limit to what's practical with them.

2. What do you mean by "evolve intelligence"? Run evolutionary algorithms on random bits of code? How do you evaluate the results? Before you can use search algorithms you have to be able to define the target, which is most of the problem in this case, plus search is likely to be impractically slow in something as big as "the space of all programs".

If you, personally, were given a zillion dollars and told to implement this plan yourself, how would you do it?

A thousand petabytes is probably enough to run one human-equivalent brain. In order to evolve intelligence, I'm guessing you would need to run thousands of brains for millions of generations.

This is a real problem, but I don't think it is propaganda. Rather these ideas are so ingrained as tropes that writers don't even think about it when they use them.

On the other hand, Chappie (despite what other flaws it might have) has a surprisingly sane take on death.

Based on some experiences that transgender people I know have had, it seems like a change in sex hormones can change their d/s orientation. Also, age seems to push people more towards sexual dominance.

Unknown. It is probably not purely genetic, because the heredity is less than for a lot of personality stuff. People do change, but trying to change or push somebody to change tends to fail.

I think that if the future people are still baseline, someone from our time might be able to adapt. If they have changed, though (more rational, more intelligent, better memory, better bodies) then a version 1.0 person might never be able to live independently.

I think your last comment seemed to most readers like just a reminder of your idea that the future will be neoreactionary and then the cryopreserved from our time will see, which is something they really don't like for various reasons.

I don't think there's any reason the story wouldn't work, in fact I think most stories that feature cryonics send the protagonist into a future they find horrifying and dystopian, except it's often they heroically overthrow it instead of just adapting and surviving.

I think the thought-process of AI is expected to be alien by anyone who take AGI seriously. It's just not all that relevant to discussions about the threats and possibilities about it.

Related article.

This seems to confuse inefficient allocation of humans with making all humans go extinct, which from our perspective is close to about as maximally inefficient an allocation one can get (barring highly implausible scenarios of genuinely malevolent AI).

...okay, so change it. Make a Main post with polls on some relevant questions (like, what is your estimate of S&P500 return to be in the next {time period}), and let people vote - 10%, 20%...90% probability for a given outcome. People like voting. I would also copy-paste it in a comment after a while, so that those who had voted would be able to vote for posterior probabilities (maybe it's possible to lock the second vote for specific users?..) Don't just send people onto predictionsbooks, give them some definitions in the beginning of your post, frame it as an exercize, because YES, it's hard to give a damn about abstract things you don't work with daily.

And after there have been several - preferably no less than five - failures of predictions based on 'the market', then people will start listening.

"The historical S&P500 returns were X% so by golly that's what we should expect decades into the future!" /facepalm

Do you think it's going to be higher or lower than the historical average? Why?