My Childhood Death Spiral

"Surely, then, superintelligence would necessarily imply supermorality" Thought the cow, as a bolt plunged into its brain.

Excellent analogy TGGP. (and I say that as a meat eater)

Now see, that's exactly the sort of comment that led the young Eliezer to associate criticism of the intelligence-morality link with bad surface analogies. An easy enough monster-argument to slay, but I didn't do quite as well on reconstructing the corpse into something scarier.

Then why don't you go ahead and slay it? I share your dislike for surface analogies, but it seems like this one runs deeper.

Although the cow doesn't have the intelligence to form that thought, the point is that the hypothetical cow thinks "It takes intelligence to increase my utility function, therefore intelligence much greater than mine must lead to greater increases in my utility". It turns out that the cow is wrong, and a counterexample is us. There are supercow intelligences running around, but they kill and eat cows which is presumably not something the cow wants.

If you get the exact same argument out of a human brain, it's just as invalid, though (thankfully) there isn't any real life example to point to.

The deep connection is the same; there is more than one possible utility function.

I like "we are the cards we are dealt", which expresses nicely a problem with common ideas of blame and credit. I disagree that intelligence is the unfairest card of all - I think that a relatively dim person born into affluence in the USA has a much better time of it than a smart person born into poverty in the Congo.

It would be interesting to read a post that describes how a future society would look like if everyone was given the ability of todays top 2% regarding IQ. What would happen, implications, economic output, happiness and so on.

a relatively dim person born into affluence in the USA has a much better time of it than a smart person born into poverty in the Congo.

Taboo 'better'. I wouldn't swap one IQ point for all the silver spoons in the world.

Don't think "silver spoons", think "clean drinking water".

In general, cows seem to do pretty well out of being eaten - there are now hundreds of millions of them on the planet. If only they could find a way of making themselves more tasty.

Paul, fair point. I'd better say instead that granted a chance to grow up healthy and given a solid (!) education, I'd spend all my other pre-natal person-points on a nice high g. Or at least, I'd say that would make me about the most effective optimiser I could be.

Tim, I think you mean cow genes, rather than cows. Growing large slabs of meat in factories will be great for cow genes, but pretty disastrous for cows. Good for me though, as that's when I plan to jump right off the wagon and into a nice synthetic steak. Eliezer's right though; this has little bearing on what he's talking about.

I'd counter "Parents do all the things they tell their children not to do, which is how they know not to do them" with "Adolescents are inherently unlikely to take their parents' explicit advice, particularly when they think they can see a bigger picture." This would seem to fit with your story, Eliezer, and it certainly does with mine.

The things I really learnt from my parents' experience were the things they never made explicit by giving advice. They were rather the mistakes that I saw (and see) in them that they hadn't/haven't recognised or come to terms with. I largely ignored their advice, and wouldn't really change that if I could. Mistakes are far more informative than advice.

Can't wait for the sequel.

Ori, in the meantime you might try the old Poul Anderson novel, "Brain Wave".

Warren Buffet uses the 'birth points' idea ("Ovarian Lottery" in his terminology) in a great thought experiment for developing his morality and ethics.

http://rationalangle.blogspot.com/2007/12/warren-buffett-and-hillary-clinton-at.html

At the end he puts a political slant on it, but I've read other instances where he puts it into larger terms.

... if everyone was given the ability of todays top 2% regarding IQ. What would happen, implications, economic output, happiness and so on.

This doesn't seem outlandish. In my former field, advances in gene therapy have been able (in animal models) to improve the function of tissues. Observations such as: the association of autosomal recessive and low-penetrance dominant mutations in Ashkenazim with high intelligence. Without at least heterozygosity for the health disorders associated with the mutations, Ashkenazim are no more intelligent, in the aggregate, than non-Ashkenazy Jews. See here and here. It seems reasonable that the genetic pattern of this disease/intelligence relationship will be known, the ethical concerns addressed, and a method for cognitive enhancement available to all, perhaps sooner rather than later. So much the better if it were to be effective in adults! Please correct me if I have misunderstood this concept.

"Without at least heterozygosity for the health disorders associated with the mutations, Ashkenazim are no more intelligent, in the aggregate, than non-Ashkenazy Jews."

Retired, you're wrong. The largest hypothesized effects of the disease alleles would be only a small fraction of the Ashkenazim advantage: they just aren't frequent enough. If you had a selective pressure for IQ, then it would affect all IQ-influencing alleles, reducing the frequency of rare variants with negative effects (Ashkenazi have lower rates of IQ-reducing PKU alleles), changing the distribution of allleles responsible for normal variation, etc. The Ashkenazi genetic diseases just happen to be visible because of their medical consequences. For instance, there may also be alleles that cause miscarriage (reducing parental fertility) or disrupt implantation in homozygotes but boost cognition, and we wouldn't know.

Ori: It seems to me that what you're describing has already been approximated, due to the filtering effects of certain job markets and employers. Look to Seattle's Eastside, or Silicon Valley. I've never been to the latter, but the former is a lot like heaven, except that the streets aren't slated to be paved with gold until 2014. (Planning takes time.)

I'm uncertain whether Eliezer-1995 was equating intelligence with the ability to self-optimize for utility (ie intelligence = optimization power) or if he was equating intelligence with utility (intelligence is great in and of itself). I would agree with Crowly that intelligence is just one of many factors influencing the utility an individual gets from his/her existence. There are also multiple kinds of intelligence. Someone with very high interpersonal intelligence and many deep relationships but abyssmal math skills may not want to trade places with the 200 IQ point math wiz who's never had a girlfriend and is still trying to compute the ultimate 'girlfriend maximizing utility equation". Just saying...

Anyone want to provide links to studies correlating IQ, ability, and intelligences in various areas with life-satisfaction? I'd hypothesize that people with slightly above average math/verbal IQs and very above average interpersonal skills probably rank highest on life-satisfaction scales.

Unless, of coures, Eliezer-1995 didn't think utility could really be measured by life satisfaction, and by his methods of utility calculation, Intelligence beats out all else. I'd be interested in knowing what utility meant to him under this circumstance.

Thank you, Carl Shulman, for correcting my misinformation. It's difficult for one to know which references are reliable, when one is not in the field.

@Carl Shulman: The largest hypothesized effects of the disease alleles would be only a small fraction of the Ashkenazim advantage: they just aren't frequent enough.

Dr. Bostrom cites this paper (so I considered it might be reliable) in his treatise on cognitive enhancement: "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending. Speaking of the incidence of of the Ashkenazim mutations, they state: "the probability of having at least one allele from these disorders is 59%.". As I understand it, these disorders are exceedingly rare in non-Ashkenazim. Are these authors simply incorrect, or did you mean that a 59% incidence just isn't frequent enough? That incidence is very close to the intelligence distribution I read between mutated and non-mutated Ashkenazim. Coincidence? Or already discredited?

We are the cards we are dealt, and intelligence is the unfairest of all those cards.

I completely agree with that statement, though my interpretation of it might be the opposite of Eliezer's. From The Simpsons:

Lisa: Dad, as intelligence goes up, happiness often goes down. In fact, I made a graph! [She holds up a decreasing, concave upward graph on axes marked "intelligence" and "happiness"] Lisa: [sadly] I make a lot of graphs.

Dear Scott Aaronson:

Pffft.

Let me know if you do not find this argument convincing, and I will expand on it somewhat.

Lara, Eliezer-1995 is pre-Bayesian-enlightenment so he wouldn't have spent a lot of time talking about "utility". But yes, intelligence was a terminal value to him.

As long as you are sharing your development with us, I'd be curious to know why the young Eliezer valued intelligence so highly as to make it a terminal value. He must have enjoyed what he thought was 'intelligence' tremendously, and seen that people who did not share in this intelligence, did not share in his enjoyment and felt sorry for them. Moreover, he must not have been jealous of any enjoyments his less intelligent brethren seemed to partake in that he did not. He probably also did some sort of correlative analysis observing people he considered having more and less intelligence and determined the mores were betteroff than the morons. What traits would he have used to establish this correlation?

Heck- not having experienced qualitatively what young Eliezer did, I can't be certain he's not right about how great it is to be that smart. But that argument can go in any direction. I was quite a busy teen myself, and I'm not so sure I'd trade my ups for a few more IQ points.

Eliezer, I don't think there's a necessary tradeoff between intelligence (the academic rather than interpersonal kind) and happiness at the far nerd end of the spectrum---just that the way society is currently organized, it seems to be both true and common knowledge that there is (cf. Lara Foster's comment). Though despite the temptation, I can't justify dwelling on this phenomenon for too long---any more than on physical appearance, parental wealth, or any other aspect of our lives that we might love to "choose wisely" but can't. Unlike many other accidents of birth, one could even regard this one as "cosmically justified" if one saw intelligence as having a value of its own, independent from happiness. If you disagree, then yes, I might need a better argument than Pfffft.

Retired: 59% of the population having alleles that boost IQ by <10 pts only accounts for part of the gap, and most of the alleles probably have effects substantially <10pts (ITD, at about 10pts, is probably the largest effect). Also, what sort of selective pressures would produce only costly alleles of large effect without boosting the frequencies of cheap alleles of small effect? Actually, that's my main problem with the Cochran Harpending hypothesis. The impact from the large alleles seems too large compared to the total advantage. Pressure sufficient to boost their concentrations to the observed levels should have boosted average IQ further. Something seems to be going on, but its not clear what. My best guess is some mix of a genetic bottleneck and noise boosting their starting population and the selection being from some trait other than 'g' which is much more enhanced by the alleles in question than 'g' is and which correlates with 'g'. The personality trait Openness would be a good candidate for such a trait. Personality trait measures are by self-report, so their real impact and variance are much larger than tests indicate. I wonder if some objective measure of Openness would show huge Ashkenazi differences and huge effects for the alleles in question. Does anyone know of any proposed method for measuring this? You could regress Openness from a function of grades (which it doesn't boost) and years of schooling (which it does, but which normally correlates with grades).

Lara, Scott: Surely interpersonal utility calculations are always dubious but become much more so when comparing people of greatly differing intelligence. If no altruistic considerations applied, how much money (or other utility-bearing fruit) would you demand (or pay Scott) to take a drug which lowered your IQ by x pts? How relevant is the endowment effect to this decision, e.g. how much would you pay to correct existing brain damage which depresses your IQ by x pts? Actually, lets replace IQ with hypothetical cognitive dimension with the sort of associated correlations that accompany IQ differences near the average, or near the lowest level that you can relate to if average is too low.

As an altruistic GURPS character, I'd probably dump a point of intelligence into single minded and some reaction modifiers, especially reputation. As a selfish GURPS character I definitely wouldn't be tempted by any other "realistic" point sink (gadgeteer isn't realistic).

Retired,

59% frequency isn't enough to explain the size of measured IQ differences between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi populations. This is off-topic, so let's take it to email.

@Carl Shulman:

Thanks Carl. Now I understand. See Teacher's Password.

Taboo 'better'. I wouldn't swap one IQ point for all the silver spoons in the world.

Even valuing one's self-function highly, I'd say that turning down all of the world's silver spoons for a single IQ point is a poor decision.

If we don't take your statement literally, then you're even wronger than before. By the world's standards, there are countless 'silver spoons' that have a profound effect on neurological development and achievement in learning -- giving up the things that are luxuries by the world's standards would cost you far more than a single point of IQ. Quality nutrition alone, regardless of other factors, is responsible for far more than that.

Michael, Your question is very ill-defined. I regularly partake in a drug that lowers my IQ in exchange for other utility... It's called alcohol. If you are talking about permanent IQ reductions, I would need to have some sense of what losing one IQ point felt like before I could evaluate a trade. Is it like taking one shot? Would I even notice it missing?

Many psychotropic drugs, especially antipsychotics, 'slow' down the people that take them and thus could be associated with lowering IQ, yet many people choose to take them and lower their IQ for the utility gained by not hearing demonic voices or being allowed to leave a mental institution.

how much money (or other utility-bearing fruit) would you demand (or pay Scott) to take a drug which lowered your IQ by x pts?

Here's the funny thing: given who I am now, I would not pay to have my IQ lowered, and indeed would pay good money to avoid having it lowered, or even to have it raised. But I would also pay to have been, since early childhood, the sort of person who didn't have such an intelligence-centric set of priorities. I'm not transitive in my preferences; I don't want to want what I want.

Interesting, Scott. What priorities do the intelligence-centric type have that make you unhappy? Though I might not necessarily fit into this group, I am confident that I am of above-average intelligence, and I do not believe my litany of worldly woes are attributable to that, so much as to specific personality traits independent of intelligence.

In his comment to Scott Aaronson, Eliezer seems skeptical of extreme intelligence being detrimental to happiness. It is however my understanding that statistics favor Scott's view.

Such statistical data are discussed in this article:

http://www.prometheussociety.org/articles/Outsiders.html

Lara: I regularly partake in a drug that lowers my IQ in exchange for other utility... It's called alcohol.

You've just summarized my complete refusal of all alcoholic beverages better than I ever could. I try not to be too annoying about it, but I really do find the stuff quite horrifying.

Scott: Here's the funny thing: given who I am now, I would not pay to have my IQ lowered, and indeed would pay good money to avoid having it lowered, or even to have it raised. But I would also pay to have been, since early childhood, the sort of person who didn't have such an intelligence-centric set of priorities. I'm not transitive in my preferences; I don't want to want what I want.

How much would you pay to retain your present intelligence, but be born into a world where that intelligence was average? I've never regretted being smart, but I sometimes wish I wasn't smarter. I think that's at least 50% of what people who complain about being smart are really complaining about.

But I try not to complain about that either - it seems like whining, considering all the people who would commit murder to swap places with me. We all have our own troubles and they aren't any less troubling just because other people have troubles too. But I wouldn't want to swap places with those people who want to swap places with me. The grass is greener on this side of the fence.

I don't have a problem, my environment has a problem.

Lara: As far as I can tell, there are four basic problems.

First, if adults constantly praise and reward you for solving math problems, writing stories, and so on, then you aren't forced to develop interpersonal skills to the same extent most kids are. You have a separate source of self-worth, and it may be too late that you realize that source isn't enough. (Incidentally, the sort of interpersonal skills I'm talking about often get conflated with caring for others' welfare, which then leads to moral condemnation of nerds as egotistical and aloof. But the two qualities seem completely unrelated to me. As often as not, those who are most skilled at convincing others to go along with them also care about others the least.) Of course, the same might in principle be true for any unusual talent, including musical or athletic talent---except that the latter are understood and rewarded by one's peer group in a way that intellectual skills aren't.

Second, math, physics, and so on can simply be fun, independently of whatever self-worth one derives from them. In this they're no different from tennis or basket weaving or any other activity that some people enjoy. The trouble, again, is that while math and physics are reasonably well-rewarded economically, they're not rewarded socially. And therefore, deriving pleasure from them can have the same sorts of social implications as deriving pleasure from heroin.

Third, even if you manage to overcome these handicaps, other people won't know you have, and will be guided by the reigning stereotypes. They might decide before talking to you that you couldn't possibly have anything in common with them. Naturally, this sort of thing can be overcome given enough social skill, but it's another obstacle.

The fourth problem is specific to technical fields (rather than literary ones), and is just the well-known gender imbalance in those fields.

Given all of this, what's surprising is not that so many "intelligence-centric types" are unhappy, but rather that in spite of it many manage to live reasonably happy lives. That's the interesting part! :-)

Scott, all your problems are problems of being smarter, not problems of being smart.

I don't have a problem, my environment has a problem.

Eliezer, I'm in complete sympathy with that attitude. I've had only limited success so far at nerdifying the rest of the world, but I'll keep at it!

"Here's the funny thing: given who I am now, I would not pay to have my IQ lowered, and indeed would pay good money to avoid having it lowered, or even to have it raised. But I would also pay to have been, since early childhood, the sort of person who didn't have such an intelligence-centric set of priorities. I'm not transitive in my preferences; I don't want to want what I want."

Scott,

Does this mean that you would take a pill that transferred your neurotransmitter reward responses and so forth to less brainy activities? Assume that it would also transfer your relative skill levels to the new activities, that your friends (old and new) would be compatible with the activities, etc.

Carl: I'm not sure, but I'd certainly try such a pill were the effects reversible.

There are certain diseases which cause 'brain fog' that could give insight into trade offs of gaining/losing intelligence. I'm cold (literally, often less than 96 degrees) and it effects my cognition at times. The drop in IQ is probably much greater than 1 point. Personally I would do anything short of violence to prevent it.

Interestingly certain quantities of alcohol seem to increase my intelligence, mostly in areas I normally suffer in (like word recall, especially in a foreign language).

Scott: "You have a separate source of self-worth, and it may be too late that you realize that source isn't enough."

Interesting theory of why intelligence might have a negative correlation with interpersonal skills, though it seems like a 'just so story' to me, and I would want more evidence. Here are some alternatives: 'Intelligent children find the games and small-talk of others their own age boring and thus do not engage with them.' 'Stupid children do not understand what intelligent children are trying to tell them or play with them, and thus ignore or shun them.' In both of these circumstances, the solution is to socialize intelligent children with each other or with an older group in general. I had a horrible time in grade school, but I socialized with older children and adults and I turned out alright (well, I think so). I suppose without any socialization, a child will not learn how to interpret facial expressions, intonations, and general emotional posturing of others. I'm not certain that this can't be learned with some effort later in life, though it might not come as naturally. Still, it would seem worth the effort.

Regarding alcohol and lowering of IQ, am I correct in assuming that we are talking here about the temporary negative effects on cognitive ability of occasionally imbibing alcohol in moderation? Or are there studies I'm unaware of that show that occasional alcohol use has an adverse and permanent effect on cognitive ability?

If we're talking about the former, I'd be curious if those who are so vehemently anti-alcohol under all circumstances and with no exceptions are consistent in their application of the rule that anything that temporarily decreases cognitive ability should be avoided in all cases. I'd be willing to bet that there is something of a cognitive refractory period after having sex, so these people would presumably avoid sex entirely (if they can do so without other negative effects), they would be obsessive about never eating so much food that it might leave them momentarily feeling bloated and less intellectally capable as a result, they would avoid concert music of every form if like me they sometimes hear the music internally for days afterward with such vividity that it can be very distracting (and thus equivalent to a small cognitive impairment), etc.

Ori: "It would be interesting to read a post"

It's only a story (intended to illustrate a completely unrelated point), but do see "That Alien Message."

"that describes how a future society would look like if everyone was given the ability of todays top 2% regarding IQ. What would happen, implications, economic output, happiness and so on."

If you mean shifting the entire bell curve two sigmas to the right, I'll say we can't know in detail because the Singularity would happen soon afterwards. If you mean repealing the central limit theorem and pegging everyone at IQ 131--well, that's a much harder question, because you're changing the mean and eliminating the variance: to the extent that progress depends on rare genius, we could end up worse off in some ways.

My best guess is . . . the selection [pressure on 'g' in Ashkenazim] being from some trait other than 'g' which is much more enhanced by the alleles in question than 'g' is and which correlates with 'g'. The personality trait Openness would be a good candidate for such a trait.

Interesting conjecture, Michael Vassar. A very salient characteristic of younger Eliezer's writings is great openness -- about things like his history and his internal thought processes. I have been trying to be more open, except when I talk to Muggles, in which case I have been trying to be more circumspect in my speech and not to volunteer negative information about myself.

Rather strangely, all the intelligent people here seem to be talking about "intelligence" as if it could be measured by points on some linear scale. It probably varies with age, time, mood, etc. even for a single person. And there is hardly any good definition of what it is to begin with.

Richard, Openness means with respect to things (ideas/experiences) going in, not things going out.

Ah, now I see. Thanks for speaking up, steven.

epwripi: This might sound cockier than I mean it to, but really, I tire of such assertions. I know what intelligence is, and I suspect many here do as well. Plenty of good definitions have been put forth, but somebody is always going to have a nitpick because it doesn't include their favorite metaphor, and there are always going to be people who don't want it to be defined. It can certainly be quantified roughly and relatively, at the least (though "points on a linear scale" may be tending towards a strawman extreme), and when people speak of an individual's intelligence, it's implied that they're talking about a certain time, or an average over time. It's trivial to point out that individuals can be consistent and inconsistent. It's the same with athletic ability.

Sorry, this I realize is entirely off topic. Where should I move the discussion to? Ppl can take it to email with me if they like (cingulate2000@gmail.com).

Hmm... musing again on the psycho-social development of children and the role of adult approval. Scott suggested that being rewarded by adults for academic development may have impeded his social development.

I wonder if there are any social psychology studies in which a child is chosen at random to be favored by an adult authority figure, an what happens to that child's interactions with peers, and self perception. I wonder if gender has been used as a variable. Anyone have any references?

Personally, I have long asserted that the main reason I put any effort into school was to gain the approval and attention of my male teachers. My mother pointed out that I loved all my male teachers and usually despised the female ones, and thus did much better under male tutelage, even switching me into a male teacher's classroom in 4th grade after a 'personality conflict' with a female one. Now, for a woman, learning how to gain the approval of male authority figures is a transitive skill from childhood to adulthood... The girls at the lab I worked at in Germany joked that I was 'Herr Doctors kleine Freundin,' because he showed a disproportionately great interest in my relatively unremarkable project and would always pop into my room to chat (an apparently aberrant behavior for this very serious man).

Now, for boys, learning how best to get the approval of female authority figures doesn't seem to translate into adulthood. Maybe there is a subtle sexual tension between young female students and their male teachers (hence crushes and the like) but not for boys and their female teachers, who they might view more like mommies than girlfriends. Thus, at some point boys are going to need to break away from the adult-approval schematic if they are to be romantically successful and not turn into man-children. The psycho-social-sexual development of children seems very interesting to me, and I would be very grateful to be directed to some thoughtful literature and/or studies on the topic.

andy, I understand what you say, but I was not referring to the entire discussion in my comment. I posted it impulsively after reading some specific comments that seemed to rather seriously discuss the hypothetical merits of one point of IQ and such. I only meant that it is pointless to discuss it as if everything is so precise and quantifiable, forgetting the fact that the concept itself is hazy (even though, as everyone knows, you can roughly categorize people as being more intelligent/less intelligent when the differences are very clear)

If there is that 'g'/unhappiness correlation, maybe the causality is: unhappiness->'g'. The overly happy, seeing less problems, get less problem solving practice, whereas a tendency to be analytical could boost 'g' over a lifetime, though perhaps not effective intelligence.

I wouldn't expect this to apply to most readers, who get particular pleasure from solving intelligent problems. Think general population.

Difference between "expirience" and "intelligence" is the difference between aproahes of Google and SIAI.

First gives instant results and grow lineary. Second will give no result until some treshold will be passed.

Expirience could gave better prediction in complex situation then pure inteligence without knowleghe

My own intelligence had affected every aspect of my life and mind and personality; that was massively obvious, seen at a backward glance.

Obviously you are a great deal smarter than I was as a child...and maybe more of a contrarian. I have a tendency to smooth conflicts over rather than attack them head-on, which probably makes it harder for me to be a rationalist, and most of what I experience is bumping up against the limits of my native intelligence: concepts I kind of understand, but which are too complex to hold in my working memory all at once so I can really look at them, or music that sounds amazing, but which is too complex for me to break it down and figure out how to replicate the effect, or my struggles with learning computer programming. (I didn't struggle relative to other people, but subjectively I felt like it was difficult and frustrating.) If I could take a pill to increase my working memory (which is below average), ability to consolidate to long-term (probably above average but always room for improvement) or spatial skills and ability to grasp concepts at a glance, I would likely choose that over any kind of physical enhancement. It's really annoying to be more curious than intelligent...I'm acutely aware that I don't understand most of quantum mechanics (or a dozen other fascinating fields) and probably never will, because understanding would require years of dedicated studying.

"We are the cards we are dealt, and intelligence is the unfairest of all those cards. More unfair than wealth or health or home country, unfairer than your happiness set-point. "

I hope you were just exaggerating to make a point ^^; Otherwise this comes off as a fairly privileged comment that assumes a lot about how fair the world is when it comes to wealth, health, and country...

I suppose we could taboo "intelligence" and see if we really disagree, but you've already excluded health and wealth so I suspect we really do have approximately similar ideas in mind. Certainly, it seems a not uncommon tendency to put raw intelligence on a shrine in rationalist communities, but I'm still surprised to see it here, and especially from you.

Whether you were exaggerating or not, though, thank you for saying it, because I'm finally, finally free of that meme myself now :)

When I think of poor hands dealt to humans, these days, I think first of death and old age. Everyone's got to have some intelligence level or other, and the important thing from a fun-theoretical perspective is that it should ought to increase over time, not decrease like now.

This is a really important point, and I want to make certain that I get it right - especially to you personally, Mr. Yudkowsky, since you seem like someone with a higher-than-epsilon chance of actually doing something about all of this.

Solve people's lack of motivation and expertise for self-improvement before you handle our old age and death, please. Please.

Because, speaking as someone caught deep in the throes of a flawed optimization loop, the prospect of being caught in such a loop for centuries is terrifying.

Just as initial conditions are hideously unfair, life-paths are also hideously unfair, and the universe does not owe anyone the capacity, let alone the opportunity, to achieve meaning and purpose and happiness in their life.

And I don't know about others, but being condemned to an eternity as myself, damned to struggle futilely to achieve some understanding or purpose that will always be one level higher than I can reach, seems far, far worse than simply recycling my constituent hardware, freeing up my clock cycles, and letting something else take my place. Given the utterly unfair, stochastic nature of the universe, maybe it will be something better. But if it isn't, at least it won't have to suffer with its inadequacy forever, either.

Don't get my doom-and-gloom wrong, though - I would love to be immortal, and free, and capable of pursuing happiness. But I am terrified that, in my current mental configuration, immortality would simply mean an eternity of self-inflicted suffering. And I am most certainly not alone in this fear.

Keep working on your Series here - they're insightful and important, and they're the first thing I've heard in almost 20 years that doesn't sound like utter bullshit - and keep your fire to save the world, because that fire is the one thing in the universe worth protecting - but remember that some parts of the world may not be better off saved, if you can't heal them first.