Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014

Here's GiveWell's detailed announcement post. I've posted a summary of the new (and old) charities to LW Discussion.

Also note that there is information on tax-deductibility of donations outside of the U.S. on that site. If you are paying a lot of income tax you might be able to get some money back, donate even more or some combination of those two.

Depends on what kind of NRx. There isn't a single value system shared among them.

The popular trichotomy is "Techno-commercialist / Theonomist / Ethno-nationalist" - I don't know about the first two, but the ethnonationalists would probably disagree with a lot of Givewell's suggestions.

The most coherent proposal I've heard so far is applying being TRS at the polling place to charity: The principle of optimising your donations for cultural-marxist outrage.

Sarah Hoyt isn't quite NRx, but her recent (re)post here seems relevant.

In particular, the old distinction between deserving and undeserving poor.

The Austrian "Iron Ring" party. Restore the Hapsburg Empire!

Yes, I am aware that there are things to understand about the crazy straw design world. :)

NRx's are generally not utilitarians.

Ha. Good question.

Subverting the Cathedral, maybe?

SSC would get a lot more traffic

SSC getting a lot more traffic might change it and not necessarily for the better.

My suspicion is that SSC would get a lot more traffic if its lousy WP comment system was better, but then Scott is apparently not motivated by traffic, so there is no incentive for him to improve it.

Why do you think that's the case? Are there any cases of blogger getting much more popular after switching to a different comment system?

And what comment system would you advocate?

The amount of comments can be rather overwhelming as it is. Do you want a larger SSC community, for the ideas to get a wider audience, or what?

The reason why the belief in afterlife is not just neutral but harmful for modern people is that it demotivates them from doing immortality research.

While mainstream belief in an afterlife is probably a contributing factor in why we aren't doing enough longevity/immortality research, I doubt it's a primary cause.

Firstly, because very few people alieve in an afterlife, i.e. actually anticipate waking up in an afterlife when they die. (Nor, for that matter, do most people who believe in a Heaven/Hell sort of afterlife, actually behave in a way consistent with their belief that they may be eternally rewarded or punished for their behavior.)

Secondly, because the people who are in a position to do such research are less likely than the general population to believe in an afterlife.

And finally, because even without belief in an afterlife, people would still probably have a strong sense of learned helplessness around fighting death, so instead of a "Dying is sure scary, we won't truly die, so problem solved, let's do something else." attitude, we'd have a "Dying is sure scary, but we can't really do anything about it, let's do something else." attitude (I have a hunch the former is really the latter dressed up a bit.).

About half of your list is actually an OR statement (timeless identity AND brain scanning AND simulation) OR (nanites through ice), and that doesn't even exhaustively cover the possibilities since at least it needs a term for unknown unknowns we haven't hypothesized yet. It's probably easiest to cover all of them with something like "it's actually possible to turn what we're storing when we vitrify a cryonics patient back into that person, in some form or another".

And the vast majority of cryonicists, or at least, those in Less Wrong circles who your post are likely to reach, already accept that the probability of cryonics working is low, but exactly how low they think the probability is after considering the four assumptions your list reduces to is something they've definitely already considered and probably would disagree with you on, if you actually gave a number for what "very low" means to see whether we even disagree (note: if it's above around 1%, consider how many assumptions there are in trying to achieve "longevity escape velocity", and maybe spread your bets).

And, as others have already pointed out, belief in cryonics doesn't really funge against longevity research. If anything, I expect the two are very strongly correlated together. At least as far as belief in them being desirable or possible goes, it's quite apparent that they're both ideas that are shared by a few communities such as our own and rejected by other communities including "society at large". How much we spend on each is probably affected by e.g. cryonics being a thing you can buy for yourself right now but longevity being a public project suffering from commons problems, so the correlation might be less strong and even inverse if you check it (I would be very surprised if it actually turned out to be inverse), but if so that wouldn't necessarily be because of the reasons you suggest.

All that combined, the probability of working out is really darn low.

How about putting numbers on it? Without doing so, your argument is quite vague.

Some amount of resources are devoted to the conventional longevity research, but as far as I understand, we're not hoping to achieve the longevity escape velocity for currently living people, especially adults.

Have you actually looked at the relevant LW census numbers for what "we are hoping"?

The true point of no return has to be indeed much later than we believe it to be now.

Who is "we", and what do "we" believe about the point of no return? Surely you're not talking about ordinary doctors pronouncing medical death, because that's just irrelevant (pronouncements of medical death are assertions about what current medicine can repair, not about information-theoretic death). But I don't know what other consensus you could be referring to.

You missed a few:

• you will die in a way that leaves your brain intact
• people will care enough in the future to revive frozen people
• the companies that provide these services will stick around for a long time

I think trying to stop death is a rather pointless endeavour from the start but I agree the fact that most everyone has accepted it and we have some noble myths to paper it over certainly keep resources from being devoted to living forever. But then, why should we live forever?

Say you're undergoing surgery, and as part of this they use a kind of sedation where your mind completely stops. Not just stops getting input from the outside world, no brain activity whatsoever. Once you're sedated, is there any moral reason to finish the surgery?

Say we can run people on computers, we can start and stop them at any moment, but available power fluctuates. So we come up with a system where when power drops we pause some of the people, and restore them once there's power again. Once we've stopped someone, is there a moral reason to start them again?

My resolution to both of these cases is that I apparently care about people getting the experience of living. People dying matters in that they lose the potential for future enjoyment of living, their friends lose the enjoyment of their company, and expectation of death makes people enjoy life less. This makes death different from brain-stopping surgery, emulation pausing, and also cryonics.

(But I'm not signed up for cryonics because I don't think the information would be preserved.)

Short version: I adjusted my sense of "self" until it included all my potential future selves. At that point, it becomes literally a matter of saving my life, rather than of being re-awakened one day.

It didn't actually take much for me to take that leap when it came to cryonics. The trigger for me was "you don't die and then get cryopreserved, you get cryopreserved as the last-ditch effort before you die". I'm not suicidal; if you ask any hypothetical instance of me if they want to live, the answer is yes. By extending my sense of continuity into the not-quite-really-dead-yet instance of me, I can answer questions for that cryopreserved self: "Yes, of course I want you to perform the last-ditch operation to save my life!"

If you're curious: My default self-view for a long time was basically "the continuity that led to me is me, and any forks or future copies/simulations aren't me", which tended toward a somewhat selfish view where I always viewed the hypothetical most in-control version (call it "CBH Alpha") as myself. If a copy of me was created; "I" was simply whichever one I wanted to be (generally, the one responsible for choosing to create the new instance or doing the thing that the pre-fork copy wanted to be doing). It took me a while to realize how much sense that didn't make; I always am the continuity that led to me, and am therefore whatever instance of CBH that you can hypothesize, and therefore I can't pick and choose for myself. If anything that identifies itself as CBH can exist after any discontinuity from CBH Alpha, I am (and need to optimize for) all those selves.

This doesn't mean I'm not OK with the idea of something like a transporter that causes me to cease to exist at one point and begin again at another point; the new instance still identifies as me, and therefore is me and I need to optimize for him. The old instance no longer exists and doesn't need to be optimized for. On the other hand, this does mean I'm not OK with the idea of a machine that duplicates myself for the purpose of the duplicate dying, unless it's literally a matter of saving any instance of myself; I would optimize for the benefit of all of me, not just for the one who pushed the button.

I'm not yet sure how I'd feel about a "transporter" which offered the option of destroying the original, but didn't have to. The utility of such a thing is obviously so high I would use it, and I'd probably default to destroying the original just because I don't feel like I'm such a wonderful benefit to the world that there needs to be more of me (so long as there's at least one), but when I reframe the question from "why would I want to not be transported (i.e. to go on experiencing life here instead of wherever I was being sent)" to "why would I want to have fewer experiences than I could (i.e. only experience the destination of the transporter, instead of simultaneously experiencing both), I feel like I'd want to keep the original. If we alter the scenario just slightly, such that the duplicate is created as a fork and the fork is then optionally destroyed, I don't think I would ever choose destruction except if it was a scenario along the lines of "painless disintegration or death by torture" and the torture wasn't going to last long (no rescue opportunity) but I'd still experience a lot of pain.

These ideas largely came about from various fiction I've read in the last few years. Some examples that come to mind:

• "Explorers" by Alicorn (http://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/explorers.shtml ; her fiction first led me to discover LW, though this story is more recent than that)
• Cory Doctorow's short story To Go Boldly (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061562351/downandoutint-20)
• The "Gavs" of Schlock Mercenary (big spoilers for a major plot arc if I talk about it in a lot of detail; just go read http://www.schlockmercenary.com/)

Obviously, when I'm awake, I enjoy life, and want to keep enjoying life.

Perhaps that is not so obvious. While you are awake, do you actually have that want while it is not in your attention? Which is surely most of the time.

If you are puzzled about where the want goes while you are asleep, should you also be puzzled about where it is while you are awake and oblivious to it? Or looking at it the other way, if the latter does not puzzle you, should the former? And if the former does not, should the Long Sleep of cryonics?

Perhaps this is a tree-falls-in-forest-does-it-make-a-sound question. There is (1) your experience of a want while you are contemplating it, and (2) the thing that you are contemplating at such moments. Both are blurred together by the word "want". (1) is something that comes and goes even during wakefulness; (2) would seem to be a more enduring sort of thing that still exists while your attention is not on it, including during sleep, temporarily "dying" on an operating table, or, if cryonics works, being frozen.

I have trouble understanding why people think that something spooky happens if you could cryopreserve and revive a human brain in good shape that apparently doesn't happen when you do that to other human organs.

No research, just my personal opinion: borderline personality disorder.

alternating between high positive regard and great disappointment

First the stalker is obsessed by the person because the target is the most awesome person in the universe. Imagine a person who could give you infinitely many utilons, if they wanted to. Learning all about them and trying to befriend them would be the most important thing in the world. But at some moment, there is an inevitable disappointment.

Scenario A: The target decides to avoid the stalker. At the beginning the stalker believes it is merely a misunderstanding that can be explained, that perhaps they can prove their loyalty by persistence or something. But later they give up hope, or receive a sufficiently harsh refusal.

Scenario B: The stalker succeeds to befriend the the target. But they are still not getting the infinite utilons, which they believe they should be getting. So they try to increase the intensity of the relationship to impossible levels, as if trying to become literally one person. At some moment the target refuses to cooperate, or is simply unable to cooperate in the way the stalker wants them to, but to the stalker even this seems like a spiteful refusal.

In both scenarios, now the stalker feels hurt and cheated, and wants revenge. Projecting their false beliefs on the target, they believe the target has lied to them about the inifinite utilons; they blame the target for starting this whole process, and for destroying the stalker's life. (In the next mood swing, the stalker may offer forgiveness to the target, if the target agrees to give them the inifinite utilons now. Then they become angry again, etc.)

But maybe there are more possible mechanisms than this one. Also, my model does not explain why the stalker is targetting one specific person instead of multiple people, or everyone.

To what extend is getting a stalker a risk worth thinking about before it's too late?

I think it is worth thinking about, but I am not sure what specific advice to offer except for (a) avoiding everyone "weird", which seems like an overkill, and (b) using a pseudonym and other methods of protecting your privacy if you want to become even a bit famous.

I would certainly recommend to everyone who wants to become famous (as a bloger, singer, actor, etc.) to choose a pseudonym, stick to it, and never reveal anything personal. (Probably not even the city you live in; I would imagine that the idea that you are geographically distant would discourage most possible stalkers.)

PubMed and Wikipedia give this:

The three predominant stalker typologies currently in use include Zona’s stalker–victim types, Mullen’s stalker typology, and the RECON stalker typology.

Most stalkers are lonely and socially incompetent, but all have the capacity to frighten and distress their victims.

While all subjects exhibited some similarities in stalking behaviors and demographic variables, including childhood attachment disruptions, no single profile of a "stalker" emerged.

... in less forensically focused samples of stalkers, rates of borderline personality are likely to be substantially higher, but confirmatory data is lacking

... celebrity worshippers may exhibit narcissistic features, dissociation, addictive tendencies, stalking behavior, and compulsive buying.

The basic idea is that one can reduce the marginal cost by preserving a huge number of people in one vat.

Currently the main cost in cryonics is getting you frozen, not keeping you frozen. For example, Alcor gives these costs for neuropreservation:

• $25k -- Comprehensive Member Standby (CMS) Fund
• $30k -- Cryopreservation
• $25k -- Patient Care Trust (PCT)
• $80k -- Total

The CMS fund is what covers the Alcor team being ready to stabilize you as soon as you die, and transporting you to their facility. Then your cryopreservation fee covers filling you with cryoprotectants and slowly cooling you. Then the PCT covers your long term care. So 69% of your money goes to getting you frozen, and 31% goes to keeping you like that.

(Additionally I don't think it's likely that current freezing procedures are sufficient to preserve what makes you be you, and that better procedures would be more expensive, once we knew what they were.)

EDIT: To be fair, CMS would be much cheaper if it were something every hospital offered, because you're not paying for people to be on deathbed standby.

I've seen extremely low plastination estimates due to the lack of maintenance costs. Very speculative obviously,, and the main component of cost is still the procedure itself (though there are apparently some savings here as well.)

Sabotage of a big company's IT systems, or of an IT company that maintains those systems, to force people to use paperclip-needing physical documents while the systems are down. Can have the paperclips be made mention of, but as what seems to the players like just fluff describing how this (rival company/terrorist/whatever) attack has disrupted things.

It depends on how familiar your friends are with uFAI tropes, so you may want to tone these up or down to keep foreshadowing at the right level. If they're highly familiar, you may want to switch paperclips with staples.

• Monsters attack a factory, which happens to manufacture binder clips.
• An infectious disease spreads across [home city], causing photosensitive epilepsy. Careful observers will note that seizures occur most often when lights strobe at computer monitor refresh rates.
• Corporate executives experience wave of meningitis (nanotechnology-induced). When they return to work, they cancel all paperless-office initiatives.
• Population of [distant area] missing. Buried underground: lots of paperclips. (If needed, have the paperclips test positive for some hallucinogen as a red herring).
• Iron mines report massive thefts, magnetism-related supervillain denies all responsibility and is actually innocent. Alternatively, if any heroes have metal-related powers, frame one of them and present false evidence to the players that a supervillain did it.
• Biotechnology companies seem to be colluding about something. The secret: somebody or something has been producing genetic material with their equipment, and they need to find out who, ideally without causing a panic. Maybe some superheroes could investigate for them?

If you do run this, please share your notes with us.

Edit: Now I want to run this sort of campaign. Thanks!

Why would an effective altruist (or anyone wanting their donations to have a genuine beneficial effect) consider donating to animal charities? Isn't the whole premise of EA that everyone should donate to the highest utilon/$ charities, all of which happen to be directed at helping humans?

Just curiosity from someone uninterested in altruism. Why even bring this up here?

The first question is what goals should undergraduate education have.

There is a wide spectrum of possible answers ranging from "make someone employable" to "create a smart, well-rounded, decent human being".

There is also the "provide four years of cruise-ship fun experience" version, too...

Nerds tend to undervalue anything that is not math-heavy or easily quantifiable.

Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex has the idea that if the humanities are going to be taught as part of a core curriculum, it might be better to teach the history of them backwards.

If I were designing a core curriculum off the top of my head, it might look something like this:

First year: Statistics, pure math if necessary, foundational biology, literature and history of a time and place far removed from your native culture. Classics is the traditional solution to the latter and I think it's still a pretty good one, but now that we can't assume knowledge of Greek or Latin, any other culture at a comparable remove would probably work as well. The point of this year is to lay foundations, to expose students to some things they probably haven't seen before, and to put some cognitive distance between the student and their K-12 education. Skill at reading and writing should be built through the history curriculum.

Second year: Data science, more math if necessary, evolutionary biology (perhaps with an emphasis on hominid evolution), basic philosophy (focusing on general theory rather than specific viewpoints), more literature and history. We're building on the subjects introduced in the first year, but still staying mostly theoretical.

Third year: Economics, cognitive science, philosophy (at this level, students start reading primary sources), more literature and history. At this point you'd start learning the literature and history of your native language. You're starting to specialize, and to lay the groundwork for engaging with contemporary culture on an educated level.

Fourth year: More economics, political science, recent history, cultural studies (e.g. film, contemporary literature, religion).

I've been thinking a lot about undergraduate core curriculum lately. What should it include?

I just want to point out for the record that if we're discussing a core curriculum for undergraduate education, I figure it would be even better to get such a core curriculum into the regular, secondary schooling system that almost everyone goes through. Of course, in practice, implementing such would require an overhaul of the secondary schooling system, which seems much more difficult than changing post-secondary education. The reason for this would probably because changing the curriculum for post-secondary education, or at least one post-secondary institution, is easier, because there is less bureaucratic deadweight, a greater variety of choice, and a nimbler mechanisms in place for instigating change. So, I understand where you're coming from in your original comment above.

tl;dr: having a set of courses for everyone to take is probably a bad idea. People are different and any given course is going to, at best, waste the time of some class of people.

A while ago, I decided that it would be a good thing for gender equality to have everyone take a class on bondage that consisted of opposite-gender pairs tying each other up. Done right, it would train students "it's okay for the opposite gender to have power, nothing bad will happen!" and "don't abuse the power you have over people." In my social circle, which is disproportionately interested in BDSM, this kinda makes sense. It may even help (although my experience is that by the time anyone's ready to do BDSM maturely, they've pretty much mastered not treating people poorly based on gender.) It would also be a miraculously bad idea to implement.

In general, I think it's a mistake to have a "core curriculum" for everyone. Within 5 people I know, I could go through the course catalog of, say, MIT, and find one person for whom nobody would benefit from them taking the course. (This is easier than it seems at first; me taking social science or literature courses makes nobody better off (the last social science course I took made me start questioning whether freedom of religion was a good thing. I still think it's a very good thing, but presenting me with a highly-compressed history of every inconvenience it's produced in America's history doesn't convince my system 1). Similarly, there exist a bunch of math/science courses that I would benefit greatly from taking, but would just make the social science or literature people sad. Also, I know a lot of musicians, for whom there's no benefit from academic classes; they just need to practice a lot.)

Having a typical LWer take a token literature class generally means they're going to spend ~200 hours learning stuff they'll forget exponentially. (This could be remedied by Anki, but there's a better-than-even chance the deck gets deleted the moment the final's over.) Going the other way, forcing writers to take calculus probably won't produce any tangible benefits, but it will make them pissed off and write things with science is bad plotlines. (Yes, most of us probably wish writers would get scientifically literate, but until we can figure out a way to make that happen, forcing them to take math and science courses is just going to have predictable effects on what they write and do you really think it helps to have a group of people who substantially influence culture to hate math and science?)

For the typical LWer, I'd go heavy on the math and CS with enough science (physics through psych) to counteract Dunning-Kruger, and some specialization, the idea being that math and CS are tools that let you take something you already know and find out something you didn't know for free, the sciences are there to reduce inferential gaps and eliminate illusory competence, and the specialization gets you a job. This would be very good for people-who-are-central-examples-of-LWers (although I'm sure there many are people here who this would be very bad for), but I have trouble imagining that this would work for more than a few percent of the population. In fact, for everyone going into a field that doesn't need a lot of technical knowledge, I'd look for the most efficient way to measure intelligence and conscientiousness (preferably separately), which looks very little like an undergraduate curriculum.

• History illuminates the present. A lot of people care about it, a lot of feuds stem from it, and a lot of situations echo it. You can't understand the Ukrainian adventures Putin is going on without a) knowing about the collapse of the Soviet Union to understand why the Russians want it, b) knowing about the Holodomor to understand why the Ukrainians aren't such big fans of Russian domination, and arguably c) knowing about the mistakes the west made with Hitler, to get a sense of what we should do about it.

• History gives you a chance to learn from mistakes without needing to make them yourself.

• History is basically a collection of the coolest stories in human history. How can you not love that?

Undergraduate core curriculum where, for whom, and for what purposes?

I think history and the softer social sciences / humanities can, if taught well, definitely improve your ability to understand and analyze present-day media and politics. This can improve your qualitative appreciation of works of art, understand journalistic works on their own terms and context instead of taking them at face value, and read and write better.

They can also provide specific cultural literacy, which is useful for your own qualitative appreciation as well as some status things.

I had a pretty shallow understanding of a lot of political ideas until I took a hybrid history/philosophy course that was really excellently taught. It allowed me to read a lot of poltical articles more deeply and understand their motivations and context and the core academic ideas they built around.

That last part, seeing theses implicitly referenced in popular works, is pretty neat.

Here is Eliezer's post on the subject.

History seems to me a subject in its teachings that aims to produce critical thinking in a sense different than what LessWrong typically tries to optimize for. I figure LessWrong optimizes for the critical thinking of the individual, which benefits from an education in logic, computer science, and mathematics, among a general knowledge of the natural sciences. I'm not sure how much history would contribute to that sort of skill, but others in this thread seem skeptical of its value.

However, learning history seems like it improves how critically groups and societies can think together, across a few domains key to society. A general education in history as part of the core curriculum could be a heuristic for circumventing group irrationality, and mob rule, in a way that critical thinking skills designed for only the individual might not. Understanding the history of one's own nation in a democracy give the electorate knowledge of what's worked in the past, what's different in the nation in the present compared to the past, and the context in which policy platforms and cultural and political divides were forged. This extends to the less grand history of the geographical location in which ones resides, or was raised in, within one's own nation. An understanding of a history of other nations, and the world, gives one the context in which international relations have formed over centuries.

Here's an example of how knowledge of world history and international relations might be useful. If the executive branch of the United States federal government wants to declare war on the country, to intervene against a predator country on the behalf of one victimized, it makes sense to understand the context of that conflict. If the history of those faraway regions is known, than the electorate can check the narrative the government puts forward against what they learned in schooling. Even very recent history could be useful knowledge in this regard. If the electorate of the United States was aware of the hundreds of years of colonial or ideological conflict, and how intractably stupid the whole thing is and has been, they might have been warier of condoning invasions of Iraq, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, etc. Knowing the background of such regions in the future, by having better access to options in learning of these regions in undergraduate education, might make whole generations less likely to vote for parties or presidents who will sink the United States into costly and drawn-out wars that are negative-sum games for all sides.

Groupthink and other pitfalls of group psychology that aren't circumvented by merely knowing science might be debunked by everyone knowing more history. In writing this, I'm realizing that the value of history would be in having enough information as a baseline to not make mistakes of ignorance, the same way that knowing of biology or psychology might. This decreases the chances that a society at large will make mistakes, like supporting a stupid war, or rallying behind an anti-vaccination movement. However, it doesn't seem to fall into the more valuable category of subjects which (presumably) directly improve reasoning ability for individuals, such as maths, and computer science.

My above illustration is a hypothesis or thought experiment for how an education in history might be valuable for critical thinking skills. If it's mostly valuable for having a better democracy with better politics, then perhaps the question can't be divorced from what other education makes for a better democratic polity. That leads us to opening the Pandora's Box of producing better thinking on politics, which is its own behemoth of a problem.

I think the idea of a core curriculum that contains things such as history is awful. Diversity is pretty useful.

Business in general is useful, but little of the relevant skills are well learned via lectures. Being able to negotiate is a useful business skill.

Some salient questions:

1) What's your motivation for wanting to do this?

2) What's your current background/skill set?

3) Where in the world are you?

quite a few straight young men miss this window and become the targets of social derision and contempt.

I'd say it's more of a pity than derision and contempt, but then it probably depends on one's social circles.

I think parents want their children to be successful with their peers, particularly if they are. I helped raise my cousins and the youngest one was the last to really attract men and we felt really sorry for her because she was missing out and she was depressed because her sisters were always attached and she was not. Its a social thing, but it doesn't really hurt you as a person. I do think however, that your attractiveness level when you're young does have affect on your perception of your attractiveness into the rest of your life. Evolutionarily, when we only live to 40, it was important to keep the species going. Now, I think it is a matter of fitting in and finding one's place in society. Knowing, at a young time that you are attractive helps keep you going as life goes along. Whereas, if you don't feel attractive then you get that idea and it can be very hard to break.

This relates to my puzzlement about the idea that the "sexual debut" happens as an organic developmental stage with a median age of 17, compared with the fact that quite a few straight young men miss this window and become the targets of social derision and contempt.

Now I'm puzzled by this too. Does the median age for young males making their "sexaul debut" vary by culture?

For example, if you tend to your sick friend, but explain to them that you are (really only) doing so on utilitarian ground, or on egoistic grounds, or because you are obligated to do so, etc, well...doesn't that seem off?

... no? I mean, maybe it will sound weird if you actually say it, because that's not a norm in our culture, but apart from that, it doesn't seem morally bad or off to me.

ETA: well, I suppose only helping someone on egoistic grounds sounds off, but the utilitarian/moral obligation motivations still seem fine to me.

If I tell my friend that I am visiting him on egoistic grounds, it suggests that being around him and/or promoting his well-being gives me pleasure or something like that, which doesn't sound off - it sounds correct. I should hope that my friends enjoy spending time around me and take pleasure in my well-being.

However, if we are willing to call one simulation real, then we get into the slippery slope problem which I have no idea how to avoid whereby any physical phenomena implementing any program from the perspective of any universal Turing machine must really exist.

Can you expand on this a bit?

My approach is that everything is equally real, just not everything is equally useful. In a meta level, talking about what's more real is not useful outside a specific setting. Unicorns are real in MLP, cars are real in the world we perceive, electrons are real in Quantum Electrodynamics, virtual particles are real in Feynman diagrams, agents are real in decision theories, etc.

I would expect social arrangements to appear that we aren't even beginning to imagine much more than anything especially neo-reactionary.

About that quote: If life is not worth living for 1000 years, then why is it worth living for 80? And if it's worth living for 80, why not 1000? If you don't want to live 1000 years, why not kill yourself now?

Is there some utility function that is positive up to 80 years but starts to become negative after that? (independent of level of health, since we're implicitly assuming that if you lived for 1000 years you'd be reasonably healthy during most of that time). If so, what is it?

Have you read R. Scott Bakker's fiction? You might enjoy it, he deals with some issues that arise with living forever. I am surprised more LW folks aren't into Bakker. It's sort of Tolkien by way of Herbert with heavy rationalist overtones, e.g.:

"This trilogy details the emergence of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, a brilliant monastic warrior, as he takes control of a holy war and the hearts and minds of its leaders. Kellhus exhibits incredible powers of prediction and persuasion, which are derived from deep knowledge of rationality, cognitive biases, and causality, as discovered by the Dûnyain, a secret monastic sect. "

So what do you think about the conditions of human life over, say, the next 300 years?

Global warming; Islam; a cure for ageing; practical use of space; AI; something else. To know anything about the next 300 years one would have to know how all of these pan out.

Why exactly Neoreactionary? Why don't you talk about the chance of fundamental Muslims dominating?

I've started to question the assumption that the social ideology we've inherited from the Enlightenment

Our social ideology changed a lot in the 300 years. The fact that it hasn't is one of the more central misconceptions of Neoreactionary thought.

Even in 200 years we went from homosexuality being legal, to it being illegal because of puritans, then being legal again and now gay marriage.

It's just ridiculous to say that the puritians that got homosexuality banned have roughly the same ideology as today's diversity advocates.

You see all this here; them boats, this street, that ocean, that sun in that sky? You’re gonna lose ‘em all! The more you go on, the more you’ll leave behind, so I’m telling you here and now, you’d best be damn certain about this living forever thing, because it’s gonna be every bit as much Hell as it Heaven.”

Sounds good to me.

(Disclaimer, or something: I am not signed up for cryonics.)

if knowledge of christianity still exists then, only a few academic specialists would know anything about it from fragmentary evidence.

In Asia, there are ideologies, philosophies, and/or religions two- or threefold older than Christianity, and they still have hundreds of millions of followers, or, at least, more than 'only a few academic specialists' who know about them. In particular, thought from ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations still have great impact on the modern incarnations of those civilizations. Also, how evidence is gathered and stored is so much better than it was two thousand years ago. If ever a point comes that future civilizations look at ours as ancient, they will have information on our histories and cultures much better (in quality and quantity) than we have of, e.g., the origins of Hinduism, Judaism, or Mesopotamia.

I like this Curtis Henderson guy. My great-grandmother lived to be 96 and one of her complaints was that everyone she knew, loved, and cared about had died and she hardly had anyone left.

what that could mean in terms of overturning our current assumptions and background conditions

"Our"? From other comments of yours I gather that you expect your own assumptions to be upheld, it was only everyone else's (outside the NRsphere) who were due for a come-uppance.

Christians believe that a god exists and was interventionist enough to start a religion that taught the truth about him, so why wouldn't they expect him to at least also be interventionist enough to prevent that same religion from disappearing? And I'm not sure how, given someone already believes in an omnipotent interventionist god who's revealed his will to mankind, also believing that he'll perform a particular intervention in the future is "ridiculous" - do you have a theological argument or one based on the bible for why only an idiot would think God plans to make the rapture happen?

So what do you think about the conditions of human life over, say, the next 300 years?

By modern standarts it will be worse than present. This is how social change works.

It may be worth mentioning that the article appears to be from 14 years ago. (Or it may not; for all I know the same policy is still in place.)

I went into the article thinking the guy would have a freakishly high IQ (160+) where I could maybe see the point, but instead was 125. The judges most likely scored higher than that - aren't they feeling even slightly belittled at the suggestion that they'd be ineligible for law enforcement work because they'd find it too boring?

The weird part is that after being rejected as a police officer he goes off to work as a prison guard. The latter is way more boring. If he's able to put up with that, he should be able to cope with the boredom of law enforcement.

Their explanation is that he would get bored and leave. I'm not surprised - I've been rejected for jobs more than once due to being too smart. (I'm not just boasting, it does seem relevant)

Why would it be a pollutant in the LW ecosystem? This sounds pretty central in the space of things LW people are interested in; what am I missing? (Are you concerned that it would be too elementary for LW? that it might be full of mistakes and annoy or mislead people? that its topic isn't of interest to LW readers? ...)

What's the intended audience? What's it for? (Introducing ideas to people who don't know them? Cutting-edge research? Thinking aloud to get your ideas in order? ...)

Manfred, I think your posts on Sleeping Beauty, etc. are fine, people just may not be able to follow you or have anything to contribute.

TL;DR because this turned into a lot of looking back on my relationship with my parents: I'd make sure they knew I had the capability, and then, if I saw a need to use it, I would. I wouldn't give an expectation of privacy and then violate it.

First, let me state that I'm in my late 20s, and have no children.

Secretly? No. Or rather, I would never hide that I have the capability, though I wouldn't necessarily tell them when I was using it. If I had reason to suspect them hiding things from me, I might even hide the mechanism, but I'd let them know that I could check. The goal would be to indicate that whatever it is I'm concerned about is REALLY IMPORTANT (i.e. more important than privacy), and that I expect that to act as a deterrence.

On the other hand, I can't think of many scenarios that would call for such action. I would make it clear, for example, that a diary is private unless I expect the kid to be in danger, but the scenarios that actually come to mind for when I would go through it all involve things like "E left without telling anybody where e'd be, can't be reached by any way, and has been gone since yesterday" or similar; if it was a suspicion of something like drug abuse, my inclination is simply to talk about it, not even necessarily asking anything specifically. If you can show your kid(s) the utility of giving a positive weight to your views on a subject, then you can often avoid needing to do anything so drastic as violating their privacy (in any scenario where they reasonably expect to have it).

With all that said, I don't really have a good view of how adversarial parent/child relationships function (or rather, dysfunction); I certainly didn't always get along with my parents, and didn't even always respect them very much (and oh damn but did my dad blow up when I told him that, circa age 12) but they never violated my trust on big things. It was never a case of me-vs.-him (most of my problems were with my father), but rather of my utility functions vs. his appreciation for my utility functions. He could make me incredibly angry by promising some treat and then simply failing to follow through (for what never seemed, to me, to be a valid reason to break your word) but that was because I valued a verbal promise of something trivial far more strongly than it warranted, not because he was inherently untrustworthy; to me, the breaking of a promise was a much greater betrayal than the loss of the treat. Once I learned to understand him better, I simply discounted any promise he according to how (un)important he thought it was (not how important I thought it was; I didn't get so far back then as to think about "how important he thinks it is to me"). The only times he came close to breaking the big ones I could usually argue him around.

Took me a long while to work out the details there, though. Might be good to help the kid(s) in question understand where you're coming from, and how much you value something like your implicit (or explicit) promise of their privacy. Of course, if you already have given an expectation of the child's privacy being sacrosanct, I don't know what I'd do in your place. If you've already been caught violating such expectations, my only recommendation would be to immediately explain why you fucked up because, if the kid's worldview is anything like mine at that age (which it totally may not be, and I'm no psychologist) you sure as hell have. Not by the snooping itself, but by simultaneously creating a scenario where the kid had reason to believe emselves private and yet one where you felt it was justified to violate that.

I don't have children. But my answer is that, potentially, I would, but it would depend on the situation.

Firstly, I think the level of privacy that a child can reasonably expect to have from his parents is age and context-dependent. A thirty-year-old who has left the home has a far greater legitimate expectation of privacy than a fifteen-year-old living at home, who in turn can legitimately expect far more than a 5-year-old. I don't think most people have any problem with, say, using a baby-monitor on a young child, even though this could be viewed as a gross invasion of privacy if done on someone older.

Secondly, it is better to be honest and open where possible, as otherwise when your actions are discovered (and they likely will be), it could be seen as a breach of trust. However, if your child is lying to you, then it could be appropriate. For example, suppose my teenage child kept receiving suspicious parcels through the mail, and gave implausible accounts for the contents. I would then try to sit the child down and say right, we're going to open this together, and see what's inside. But if that wasn't possible, then yes, I might secretly open one of the parcels, to ascertain whether the child is doing something illegal, dangerous, or otherwise inappropriate.

Corollary - would you secretly invade an adult's privacy for their own protection?

I have more trouble answering that one. The answer to the "children" question begins somewhere on "estimate what they might think about the situation as adults"...now if I only knew where the line could be drawn for an adult, this would be simple...

No.

Aside from the don't do things to other people without other their consent angle (which is hard with a child), my two year old is ascribing motives to my actions, and when privacy comes into being I doubt I'll be able to use any information that I do acquire without them noticing.

Yes, I would.

(Have two small children, haven't needed to).

Depends on age. If they were teenagers, not secretly. For the simple reason that it could backfire (they find out their privacy has been invaded, then in the future hide things even more strongly). I would, however, expect them to tell me whatever information about their lives I wanted to know.

For full disclosure: I'm in my late 20's and have no children.

For a young child, of course it's not even close since the kid probably doesn't even value privacy.

Is there a way to sign up for cryonics and sign up to be an organ donor?

No, because the folks responsible for each process need custody of the body in the same time frame after legal death.

I'm considered pretty good in this respect. I think the #1 thing that helps is just paying attention to things a lot and having a high degree of situational awareness, which causes you to observe more interesting things and thus have more good stories to share. Reading quickly also helps.

When it comes to actually telling the stories, the most important thing is probably to pay attention to people's faces and see what sorts of reactions they're having. If people seem bored, pick up the pace (or simply withdraw). If they seem overexcited, calm it down.

One good environment to practice the skill of telling stories is tabletop role-playing games, especially as the DM/storyteller/whatever. In general, I think standards in this field are usually fairly low and you get a good amount of time to practice telling (very unusual) stories in any given session.

Although I consider myself average in good storytelling abilities, I'd like to be better. Additionally, it's always been curious to me how one can improve this skill, rather than just leaving one's talent in it to the whims of social fortune, or whatever. As such, I've outsourced this question to my social media networks. If I haven't returned with some sort of response within a few days, feel free to remind me in a few days with either a reply to this comment, or a private message.

Learn storyteller, read a writing book. A good story has to have setting, a character, situations that are ironic, funny or heartfelt, and then a transformation. Sometimes it can be short and other times it can be longer and more like an epic. If you have all the elements, then learn how to keep an audience's attention with good language.

Unplug the desktop monitor and plug it in the laptop. Open some docs on the tablet. Keep your todo list on the phone.

Or just get another monitor or two and use that. In my experience, you never need more than 3 monitors at once (for one computer, of course).

The biggest hangup I've found in using multiple computers simultaneously is copy pasting long strings. I can chat them to myself, but it's still slightly awkwarder than I'd like.

Otherwise, Sherincall is pretty on point.

I have a spreadsheet in which I record every financial transaction, and enter all future transactions, estimated as necessary, out to a year ahead. Whenever I get a bank statement, credit card statement, or the like, I compare everything in it with the spreadsheet and correct things as necessary. I don't try to keep track of cash spent out of my pocket. I tried that once, but found it wasn't practical. The numbers would never add up and there would be no independent record to check them against.

One row of the spreadsheet computes my total financial assets, which I observe ticking upwards month by month.

I don't record in detail what I buy, only the money spent and where (which is a partial clue to what I bought). I'm sufficiently well off that I don't need to plan any of my expenditure in detail, only consider from time to time whether I want to direct X amount of my resources in the way I observe myself doing.

I spend less than I earn, because it seems to me that that is simply what one does, if one can, in a sensibly ordered life.

MoneyDashboard.com - links directly to my credit cards and bank accounts. I hear that the US equivalent is mint.com

My income is variable and hasn't been great lately. As a result, several months ago I flipped the "I'm poor!" switch that's been lingering in my brain since I was a student, and so I avoid almost all unnecessary spending(a small recreation budget is allowed, for sanity, but otherwise it's necessities and business expenses only). Every few months I review spending to see if there's any excessive categories, but my intuition has been pretty good.

And yeah, everything on plastic. Not even because of tracking, mostly because Visa gives me 1% cash back, which is a better bribe than anyone else offers.

I did a rough estimation of my normal monthly costs of living and then added a small amount for fun. The rest of my monthly paycheck gets semi-automatically invested in ETFs and can't be used without transaction costs. I have a small buffer account that I can use for unexpected expenses and if this happens I'll be aware of it the next month and try to spend less and grow the buffer account.

Once you have a few thousand socked away, remember to start investing and picking up your free money.

This is a filter rather than a recommendation, but read the reviews to find out whether people used the book rather than just finding it a pleasant read.

What are you hoping to improve about your life?

When reason fails, boobs have a chance.

...Ok, Obviously enough that's an affective plan, (even if it is dark arts-ish) but are you posting this as news or a recruitment attempt?