Questions and comments about Eliezer's Dec. 2 2013 Oxford speech

What honest arguments could the blind person use?

This sounds like motivated cognition. "How can I use EA to justify what I already want to do?"

Suppose that a blind person in a first world country wants help paying for a guide dog and/or wants guide dogs for other blind people in first world countries, but has heard of effective altruism. What honest arguments could the blind person use?

Effective altruism doesn't necessarily imply selflessness in all your actions, but effectiveness in actions that are intended to be altruistic.

If the human race is down to 1000 people, what are the odds that it will continue and do well? I realize this is a nitpick-- the argument would be the same if the human race were reduced to a million or ten million.

The argument remains the same even if the odds are very low, because of the high stakes involved.

Comparisons of brain size tells you less than people assume.

Only laypeople make such assumptions, see my other comment.

What's wrong with the TED talk? Like most, it can be summarized in 5 sentences, but I think it is worth summarizing, which makes it one of the best ever:

When people talk about brain size, they mainly talk about brain mass, because that's easy to measure. Wouldn't neuron count be better? Primate neuron count is proportional to brain mass, but rodent neuron count is sublinear. Energy expenditure is proportional to neuron count. Humans can only afford to spend so much energy on their brains because of cooking.

The talk fails to address why rodents have bigger neurons, rather than small neurons in small brains. And whether rodents are typical in this pattern. The well-known pattern is that brain mass grows like a power (2/3 or 3/4) of body mass, and that the ratio is a good measure of intelligence. I think the implication is that neurons counts grow at a lower power, but still grow. I think that there is data at the web site of the speaker, Suzana Herculano-Houzel.

Suppose that a blind person in a first world country wants help paying for a guide dog and/or wants guide dogs for other blind people in first world countries, but has heard of effective altruism. What honest arguments could the blind person use?

I'm thinking "Increasing independence for blind people in first world countries increases their economic impact, potentially from a net negative to a net positive. It can be expected that some of those blind people will contribute to charities. Information to the blind is often sent through extremely narrow channels controlled by a few organizations, so it would be somewhat trivial to promote EA while paying for guidedogs and associated training, increasing the potential pool of EA donors."

It has flaws (probably more efficient to uplift the Occupy types by paying off their college debt and simultaneously evangelizing EA; the returns would almost definitely be higher), but that's the first response that comes to mind.

Perhaps a one-line, how-to-read-this-post would be helpful at the top? Btw, good questions!

If I were designing an intelligence, I'm not sure how much control I would give it over its own brain.

This sounds like it has the same failure modes as boxing. E.g. an AI doesn't need direct Write access to its source code if it can manipulate its caretakers into altering it. Like boxing, it slows things down and raises the threshold of intelligence required for world domination, but doesn't actually solve the problem.

If the human race is down to 1000 people, what are the odds that it will continue and do well? I realize this is a nitpick-- the argument would be the same if the human race were reduced to a million or ten million.

The argument remains the same even if the odds are very low, because of the high stakes involved.

Suppose that a blind person in a first world country wants help paying for a guide dog and/or wants guide dogs for other blind people in first world countries, but has heard of effective altruism. What honest arguments could the blind person use?

The question is only nontrivial if you presuppose that to hear of effective altruism is to agree with its tenets. Without such a presupposition honestly has nothing to do with it.

I didn't buy the alleged advantage of a noise free environment. We've known since von-Neumann's paper titled:

PROBABILISTIC LOGICS AND THE SYNTHESIS OF RELIABLE ORGANISMS FROM UNRELIABLE COMPONENTS

...that you can use unreliable computing components to perform reliable computation - with whatever level of precision and reliability that you like.

Plus the costs of attaining global synchrony and determinism are large and massively limit the performance of modern CPU cores. Parallel systems are the only way to attain large computing capacities - and you can't guarantee every component in a large parallel system will behave deterministically. So: most of the future is likely to lie with asynchronous systems and hardware indeterminism, rather contrary to Yudkowsky's claims.