Where life finds death as counterpart, aging is unopposed, yet frames our understanding of both....

What if we take a first-principles approach when defining aging, looking at decay as the derivative of the path between an 80-year-old and a 10-year-old across?

Some of these sentences need to be reworded such that they mean something more precisely, requiring less creative interpretation from the reader.

This post is a good example of one where AI assistance would be helpful. If you asked, say, Claude to identify the various assertions made in this post and then to rewrite them as grammatically-correct English sentences, you could come up with something more concise and easier for the reader to grapple with.

I assume the audience here is a mix of sophisticated people who of course know all about the trolley problem, etc., and newbies who are attracted to rationalism or the LW ethos and are here to learn more about stuff. So I write in a mix of modes. I can't say I'm confident about how I navigate this... it's just kind of a gut feeling that there's room for multiple styles.

As for your first point about "...crazy quilt," I expand on this later in the essay when I discuss how responses to the trolley problems show that commonly people sometimes lean on deontological reasoning, sometimes on consequentalist reasoning.

For the second point, I think my "so from one perspective" caveat anticipates your objection. If you are first confronted with the lever-pulling scenario and think "well, this is just a matter of simple mathematics," the second scenario reminds you that there are other factors to consider.

For the third point, congratulations on having an existentialist perspective on this matter, but I'm confident that this is far from universal.

For what it's worth, here's an excerpt from my book on historical tax resistance campaigns that makes a similar point:

Radical honesty means abjuring subterfuge—conducting your campaign in the open, in plain sight, without trying to take your opponent by surprise through trickery, and without trying to influence people by “spin” and lopsided propaganda. It also means studiously refusing to participate in the dishonesty by which your opponent holds on to power and deceives those who submit to it. Radical honesty has several potential advantages:

1. Honesty provides a stark moral contrast between your campaign and whatever institution you are opposing.

In The Story of Bardoli, Mahadev Desai described how this played out in the Bardoli tax strike:

…a regular propaganda of mendacity was resorted to [by the Government]. The Government’s way and the people’s way presented a striking study in contrasts. On one side there were secrecy, underhand dealings, falsehood, even sharp practice; on the other there were straight and manly speech, and straight action in broad daylight.

This contrast can make your campaign more appealing to potential resisters and to bystanders, and can increase the morale of the resisters in your campaign.

2. Honesty itself is a threat to tyranny.

The way people signal their loyalty to tyranny is to participate in the lies that bolster its power. When everyone around you goes along with the lies, it feels like everyone is loyal to the tyrant. Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote of how this worked under communist tyranny:

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

But, he said, people may start to refuse:

Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can coexist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

Tolstoy went further, and claimed that radical honesty not only threatens tyrants but constitutes a revolution:

No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen’s unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aërial navigation; but a change in public opinion.

And to accomplish this change no exertions of the mind are needed, nor the refutation of anything in existence, nor the invention of any extraordinary novelty; it is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.

And if only a small body of the people were to do so at once, of their own accord, outworn public opinion would fall off us of itself, and a new, living, real opinion would assert itself. And when public opinion should thus have changed without the slightest effort, the internal condition of men’s lives which so torments them would change likewise of its own accord.

One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

3. Honesty keeps your campaign from deluding itself.

In a tax resistance campaign, as in any activist campaign, there are frequently temptations to take short-cuts. Rather than winning a victory after a tough and uncertain struggle, you can declare victory early and hope to capitalize on the resulting morale boost. Or, rather than doing something practical that takes a lot of thankless hours, you can do something quick and symbolic that “makes a powerful statement.” Or, rather than fighting for goals that are worth achieving, you can pick goals that are easily achievable but that aren’t really worth fighting for.

Radical honesty gets you in the habit of avoiding temptations like these. By facing your situation forthrightly, and by evaluating your tactics unflinchingly and without self-flattery, you become more apt to make effective decisions.

4. Honesty is itself a good thing worth contributing to.

If you conduct your campaign in a radically honest way, you contribute to a cultural atmosphere of trust and straightforward communication. In this way, even if you do not succeed in the other goals of your tax resistance campaign, you still may have some residual positive effect on the world around you.

5. Honesty means there’s a lot you no longer have to worry about.

When you practice radical honesty, you don’t have to worry about keeping your stories straight, you don’t have to worry about leaks of information that might cast doubt on your credibility, you don’t have to be as concerned about information security, and you don’t have to worry about spies and informers in your midst who might blab your secrets to the authorities. This leaves you free to spend your energy and attention playing offense instead of defense.

When Gandhi heard concerns that government agents had infiltrated the Indian independence movement, he wrote:

This desire for secrecy has bred cowardice amongst us and has made us dissemble our speech. The best and the quickest way of getting rid of this corroding and degrading Secret Service is for us to make a final effort to think everything aloud, have no privileged conversation with any soul on earth and to cease to fear the spy. We must ignore his presence and treat everyone as a friend entitled to know all our thoughts and plans. I know that I have achieved most satisfactory results from evolving the boldest of my plans in broad daylight. I have never lost a minute’s peace for having detectives by my side. The public may not know that I have been shadowed throughout my stay in India. That has not only not worried me but I have even taken friendly services from these gentlemen: many have apologized for having to shadow me. As a rule, what I have spoken in their presence has already been published to the world. The result is that now I do not even notice the presence of these men and I do not know that the Government is much the wiser for having watched my movements through its secret agency.

What’s the catch? For one thing, for a campaign to be radically honest it needs to have fairly tight control over its message. Not just anyone can be a spokesperson, but only those with the talent to speak precisely and to cut through the sorts of baloney that characterize political debate in this era of spin doctors and pundits and talking points.

Another difficulty is that if your campaign already has a credibility problem, it’s going to take a lot of radical honesty to dig you out of that hole.

Also, it seems that at least some of the benefits of radical honesty only emerge when it has become really radical and pervasive. Half-hearted gestures of radical honesty are just another form of machiavellian communication. If you’re not prepared to go all the way, it may not be to your advantage to put in the extra effort.

I just finished that book. He seems to think of practical wisdom as being what helps with things like bounded rationality, fuzzy categorization, reasoning by analogy with previous experience, and developing mastery in a craft. He gives lots of examples of how institutions degrade practical wisdom by using rules or incentives to guide people instead (e.g. the practice of medicine being taken over by insurance companies, childhood education becoming drills to cram test-taking knowledge, judges' judgement being replaced by mandatory minimum sentencing). And he discusses ways in which institutions can buck that to empower people to develop and deploy practical wisdom.

I didn't feel I learned a lot from the book. I think it could have been usefully reduced to a long essay. There was lots of rehashing of anecdotes, tangents into questionably-related subjects, and arguments that seemed more like assertions and applause-lines. Nothing egregious: pretty much on-par for mass-market nonfiction stuff these days.

There are some promising but under-utilized interventions for improving personality traits / virtues in already-developed humans,* and a dearth of research about possible interventions for others. If we want more of that sort of thing, we might be better advised to fill in some of those gaps rather than waiting for a new technology and a new generation of megalopsychebabies.

How robust are these calculations against the possibility that individual gene effects aren't simply additional but might even not play well together? i.e. gene variant #1 raises your IQ by 2 points, variant #2 raises your IQ by 1 point, but variants #1+2 together make you able to multiply twelve-digit numbers in your head but unable to tie your shoes; or variant #3 lifts your life expectancy by making you less prone to autoimmune disease A, variant #4 makes you less prone to autoimmune disease B, but variants #3+4 together make you succumb to the common cold because your immune system is not up to the task.

It's hard for me to tell from the level of detail in your explanation here, but at times it seems like you're just naively stacking the ostensible effects of particular gene variants one on top of the other and then measuring the stack.

• “[I]t is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies & to end as superstitions.” [T.H. Huxley, The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species 1880]

I was interrupted by underpants gnomes while reading this. They summarized it for me this way, but I'm sure they left the good parts out.

1. Trust that organizations like hospitals, nonprofits, and state bureaucracies will self-organize towards pursuing their nominal goals, so long as they claim to be doing that, even if those bureaucracies lack strong organizational incentives to do so.
2. ???
3. Bizarre policies like police abolishment.

I thought this quote was nice and oddly up-to-the-minute, from Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil (1983), spoken by the character William Eastcote at a Quaker meeting:

My dear friends, we live in an age of marvels. Men among us can send machines far out into space. Our homes are full of devices which would amaze our forebears. At the same time our beloved planet is ravaged by suffering and threatened by dooms. Experts and wise men give us vast counsels suited to vast ills. I want only to say something about simple good things which are as it were close to us, within our reach, part still of our world. Let us love the close things, the close clear good things, and hope that in their light other goods may be added. Let us prize innocence. The child is innocent, the man is not. Let us prolong and cherish the innocence of childhood, as we find it in the child and as we rediscover it later within ourselves. Repentance, renewal of life, such as is the task and possibility of every man, is a recovery of innocence. Let us see it thus, a return to a certain simplicity, something which is not hard to understand, not a remote good but very near. And let us not hesitate to preach to our young people and to impart to them an idealism which may later serve them as a shield. A deep cynicism in our society too soon touches old and young, forbidding us to speak and them to hear, and making us by an awful reversal ashamed of what is best. A habit of mockery destroys the intelligence and sensibility which is reverence. Let us prize chastity, not as a censorious or rigid code, but as fastidious respect and gentleness, a rejection of promiscuity, a sense of the delicate mystery of human relations. Let us do and praise those things which make for a simple orderly open and truthful life. Herein let us make it a practice to banish evil thoughts. When such thoughts come, envious, covetous, cynical thoughts, let us positively drive them off, like people in the olden days who felt they were defeating Satan. Let us then seek aid in pure things, turning our minds to good people, to our best work, to beautiful and noble art, to the pure words of Christ in the Gospel, and to the works of God obedient to Him in nature. Help is always near if we will only turn. Conversion is turning about, and it can happen not only every day but every moment. Shun the cynicism which says that our world is so terrible that we may as well cease to care and cease to strive, the notion of a cosmic crisis where ordinary duties cease to be and moral fastidiousness is out of place. At any time, there are many many small things we can do for other people which will refresh us and them with new hope. Shun too the common malice which finds consolation in the suffering and sin of others, blackening them to make our grey seem white, rejoicing in our neighbours’ downfall and disgrace, while excusing our own failures and cherishing our own undiscovered secret sins. Above all, do not despair, either for the planet or in the deep inwardness of the heart. Recognize one’s own evil, mend what can be mended, and for what cannot be undone, place it in love and faith in the clear light of the healing goodness of God.

The sequence is rationality-informed but also picks up things from folk wisdom, religious traditions, etc. when that seems helpful. It references cogsci studies and insights when those are available.

This might scratch your itch: the Notes on Virtues sequence.

Investigating a variety of human virtues, with the hope of learning how we might improve in their practice.

In Firefox, you can hover over the timestamp next to the name of the commenter, right-click (or whatever it is you Mac people do), and select Bookmark Link... to bookmark a comment.

Alternatively, you can click on the timestamp and then use whatever mechanism your OS/Browser allows to bookmark the page you go to as a result of the click.

I posit: high enough that you’re slightly overoptimistic about stuff you can’t control, so that for stuff where confidence itself makes the difference, you squeak in.

FWIW, see Notes on Optimism, Hope, and Trust for more on this hypothesis, including William James's speculations.

All this sounds wonderful, but reminds me of people who have amazing systems to play the stock market and leverage $1,000 to $1,000,000. Of all the people with all their systems, a few lucky ones hit the jackpot by chance, while the majority muddle through or lose it all. The lucky ones assume the market has acknowledged their financial genius and go on to tell us all about it.

If 5% of glioblastoma patients uncannily survive, how much am I supposed to update on hearing that one of those patients did some combination of plausible but undertested interventions during their recovery?

A prereminiscence: It's like it was with chess. We passed through that stage when AI could beat most of us to where it obviously outperforms all of us. Only for cultural output in general. People still think now, but privately, in the shower, or in quaint artisanal forms as if we were making our own yogurts or weaving our own clothes. Human-produced works are now a genre with a dwindling and eccentric fan base more concerned with the process than the product.

It was like the tide coming in. One day it was cutely, clumsily trying to mimic that thing we do. Soon after it was doing it pretty well and you watched it with admiration as if it were a dog balancing on a ball. Then soon it could do it well enough for most purposes, you couldn't help but admit. Then as good as all but the best, even to those who could tell the difference. And then we were suddenly all wet, gathering our remaining picnic and heading for higher ground, not only completely outclassed but even unable to judge by how far we were being outclassed. Once a chess machine can beat everybody every time, who is left to applaud when it gets twice again as good?

If it had been a war, we would have had a little ceremony as we brought down our flag and folded it up and put it away, but because it happened as quickly and quietly as it did and because we weren't sure whether we wanted to admit it was happening, there was no formal hand-off. One day we just resignedly realized we could no longer matter much, but there was so much more now to appreciate and we could see echoes and reflections of ourselves in it, so we didn't put up a fight.

Every once in a while someone would write an essay, Joan Didion quality, really good. Or write a song. Poignant, beautiful, original even. Not maybe the best essay or the best song we'd seen that day, but certainly worthy of being in the top ranks. And we'd think: we've still got it. We can still rally when we've got our backs to the wall. Don't count us out yet. But it was just so hard, and there was so much else to do. And so when it happened less and less frequently, we weren't surprised.

And our curiosity left us, too. We half-remembered a time when we would have satisfied curiosity by research and experiment (words that increasingly had the flavor of “thaumaturgy,” denoting processes productive though by unclear means). But nowadays curiosity is déclassé. It suggests laziness (why not just ask it?)… or poverty (oh, you can’t afford to ask it; you want one of us to ask it)—an increasing problem as we less and less have something to offer in trade that it desires and lacks.

The book in the Chinese Room directs the actions of the little man in the room. Without the book, the man doesn't act, and the text doesn't get translated.

The popcorn map on the other hand doesn't direct the popcorn to do what it does. The popcorn does what it does, and then the map in a post-hoc way is generated to explain how what the popcorn did maps to some particular calculation.

You can say that "oh well, then, the popcorn wasn't really conscious until the map was generated; it was the additional calculations that went into generating the map that really caused the consciousness to emerge from the calculating" and then you're back in Chinese Room territory. But if you do this, you're left with the task of explaining how a brain can be conscious solely by means of executing a calculation before anyone has gotten around to creating a map between brain-states and whatever the relevant calculation-states might be. You have to posit some way in which calculations capable of embodying consciousness are inherent to brains but must be interpreted into being elsewhere.

The book in the room isn't inert, though. It instructs the little guy on what to do as he manipulates symbols and stuff. As such, it is an important part of the computation that takes place.

The mapping of popcorn-to-computation, though, doesn't do anything equivalent to this. It's just an off-to-the-side interpretation of what is happening in the popcorn: it does nothing to move the popcorn or cause it to be configured in such a way. It doesn't have to even exist: if you just know that in theory there is a way to map the popcorn to the computation, then if (by the terms of the argument) the computation itself is sufficient to generate consciousness, the popcorn should be able to do it as well, with the mapping left as an exercise for the reader. Otherwise you are implying some special property of a headful of meat such that it does not need to be interpreted in this way for its computation to be equivalent to consciousness.

This reminds me of my intuitive rejection of the Chinese Room thought experiment, in which the intuition pump seems to rely on the little guy in the room not knowing Chinese, but that it's obviously the whole mechanism that is the room, the books in the room, etc. that is doing the "knowing" while the little guy is just a cog.

Part of what makes the rock/popcorn/wall thought experiment more appealing, even given your objections here, is that even if you imagine that you have offloaded the complex mapping somewhere else, the actual thinking-action that the mapping interprets is happening in the rock/popcorn/wall. The mapping itself is inert and passive at that point. So if you imagine consciousness as an activity that is equivalent to a physical process of computation you still have to imagine it taking place in the popcorn, not in the mapping.

You seem maybe to be implying that we have underinvestigated the claim that one really can arbitrarily map any complex computation to any finite collection of stuff (that this would e.g. imply that we have solved the halting problem). But I think these thought experiments don't require us to wrestle with that because they assume ad arguendo that you can instantiate the computations we're interested in (consciousness) in a headful of meat, and then try to show that if this is the case, many other finite collections of matter ought to be able to do the job just as well.

Crucially, the mappings to rocks or integers require the computation to be performed elsewhere to generate the mapping. Without the computation occurring externally, the mapping cannot be constructed, and thus, it is misleading to claim that the computation happens 'in' the rock or the integers. Further, Crucially, the mappings to rocks or integers require the computation to be performed elsewhere to generate the mapping. Without the computation occurring externally, the mapping cannot be constructed, and thus, it is misleading to claim that the computation happens 'in' the rock or the integers.

Either this is saying the same thing twice or I'm seeing double.

Tomasik dismisses this as ,

?

The fundamental attribution error is another important one. I sometimes find I slip into it myself when I get tired or inattentive, but for most people I observe it seems fully baked into their characters.

More on gratitude, how it works, and how to best take advantage of it: Notes on Gratitude

Wants are emergent, complex forms of pain and pleasure. They are either felt or they are not felt, and reason only comes in at the stage of deciding what to do about them.

Are you really certain that one's desires are just givens that one has no rational influence over? I'm skeptical.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aQQ69PijQR2Z64m2z/notes-on-temperance#Can_we_shape_our_desires_

An influential ethical philosopher is on his way to address a conference of wealthy donors about effective altruism. His rhetorical power and keen arguments are such that he can expect these donors to reach deep and double their donations to yet worthier causes after his talk. On his way to the conference, however, he comes across a child drowning in a pond. He is the only one around who can save this child, but to do so, he would have to jump in the pond, ruin his humble but respectable second-hand suit, and miss the train to the conference. While he would certainly have a good excuse to give to the donors, before he would have the opportunity to do so they would probably leave the conference feeling resentful at the waste of their valuable time, rather than generous and inspired. He figures he can save more lives by letting the child drown and instead catching his train to the conference, so he turns his back on the pond.

A lot of the current education system aims to give children skills that they can apply to the job market as it existed 20 years ago or so. I think children would be better-advised to master more general skills that could be applied to a range of possible rapidly changing worlds: character skills like resilience, flexibility, industriousness, rationality, social responsibility, attention, caution, etc.

Come to think of it, such skills probably represent more reliable "investments" for us grown-ups too.

Done. Thanks for the correction.

It seems plausible to me that there is a sort of selection process in which people are creating ostensible-wisdom all the time, but only some of that wisdom gets passed along to the next generation, and the next, and so forth, while a lot of it gets discarded. If some example of wisdom is indeed ancient, then you can by virtue of that have at least some evidence that it has passed through this selection process.

To what extent this selection process selects for wisdom that actually earns that designation I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

We taboo resemblance all the time for things that refer to other things: Words, for example. The word "mouse" does not resemble a mouse, but we can usefully use the word as a reference. Words that resemble their references are a peculiar and remarkable tiny category (onomatopoeia) that are the exception to the rule.

If you thought your computer interface were an accurate picture of what is going on inside the computer, you might indeed go looking for a microscopic pointer somewhere in the wires. It's because you don't think this that you know to look for correspondences and representations instead. Hoffman's point is that we don't tend to do this with things like space, time, matter, etc.: we think those things in our interface-with-reality correspond to the same sorts of things in reality-under-the-hood (space, time, matter, etc.). He believes we're mistaken.

It's not nonsensical. It's an assertion that can be made sense of with a little effort.

Consider the user interface analogy. On your desktop there is a mouse pointer with which you can drag a file from here to there. In the underlying computer which executes the actions which are represented by this interface, there is nothing that resembles a pointer, a dragging action, or a file. That the interface associates certain activity in the hardware with certain things that appear on the desktop is a useful convention for us, but it is not one that was designed to give us an accurate notion of what is taking place inside the machine. Hoffman suggests that the same thing is true of the interface-reality we perceive and the real-reality underneath. The interface-reality was "designed" by natural selection to be a useful convention for us as we interact with the real-reality which is not apparent to us.

shame—no need to exacerbate such feelings if it can be avoided

Shame may be an important tool that people with dark traits can leverage to overcome those traits. Exacerbating it may in some cases be salutary. 

FWIW: I've added my summary of the answers here to my Notes on Industriousness.

To me, the phrase “I decided to trust her” throws an error. It’s the “decided” part that’s the problem: beliefs are not supposed to involve any “deciding”.

To trust is more than a passive cognitive reflection like a belief, it is also an action taken upon the world. This might be more easily seen if you consider the more awkward phrasing "I decided to extend my trust to her".

See e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/62fx4bp4W2Bxn4bZJ/notes-on-optimism-hope-and-trust#Trust_vs__expectation_and_reliance 

“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” ―Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography Ⅳ, 1791)

“[T]he majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.” ―Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1894)

“[A]n aim of philosophy is patiently and unremittingly to sustain the vigilance of reason in the presence of failure and in the presence of that which seems alien to it.” ―Karl Jaspers (Way to Wisdom, 1950)

“He who knows the truth is not equal to him who loves it, and he who loves it is not equal to him who delights in it.” ―Confucius (Analects Ⅵ.18)

“The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.” —Thomas Macaulay (“Lord Bacon” 1837)

Some considerations you might be missing:

A language, among other things, is an ongoing, long-term, collective effort by a culture to categorize understanding: to divide up what is known, knowable, (or mistaken) into chunky abstractions that can then be played with lego-style to assemble new insights, hypotheses, or what-have-you.

Each language carves up reality a little differently.

When there are more languages in use, there are more versions of this carving at play. Some languages can easily express things that other languages cannot. Some languages make distinctions that others do not. And so forth.

When a language dies and merely exists as documentation in another language, something is lost. The very things in the dead language that are most exceptional are the ones that defy translation; they have their edges rubbed off during the documentation process and become e.g. "the closest English equivalent of" rather than their rich original meaning.

When we lose living languages, we lose more than alternative ways of expressing certain concepts, but alternative ways of conceptualizing.

Anyone else getting "ask your doctor if Photoshop™ is right for you" vibes from some of those before & after photos?

...the fact that the average life in New Zealand is much, much better than the average life in the Democratic Republic of Congo...

I think you may be in danger of overloading "better" in statements like this, and more implicitly throughout your argument. (Similarly "good" in statements like "It’s absurd to... believe[] a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is just as good as life for a woman in some other country with similarly high per capita income".)

Consider if I said something like this: "We are constantly told that it would be better for us if we ate fewer calories. But this ignores the quality of those calories. Everybody who has tasted both knows that calorie for calorie, chocolate eclairs are better than lima beans. So it only makes sense that it would be better to reduce the better calories last."

It might help if you explicitly stated better how (and maybe for whom) throughout, or use more precise adjectives than the generic good or better.

You also seem to me to be making an implicit "the goal of EA ought not to be to relieve existing suffering but to maximize future hedons" argument that maybe should be made explicit instead.

If UBI is implemented as a form of wealth redistribution -- in other words if a progressive tax fully funds the UBI payouts -- then the money supply inflation problem goes away, no? At least on the economy-wide scale.

I guess there is still the problem that at the bottom of the income scale there is now more money chasing e.g. a stickily-fixed supply of low-income housing, so the prices of such goods are likely to rise. But might some of the people who used to compete for that stock of housing also now be UBI-boosted into setting their sights on higher-quality housing and no longer be part of that competitive pool? Maybe it evens out.

See also: Notes on Empathy for more suggestions and some of the research / theory behind them.

What I don't see in your outline, and what I think would make your proposed manifesto stronger, would be a chapter along the lines of "this is the steelmanned case for why continuing progress in technology is problematic and dangerous and for how humanity could prosper or avoid disaster by putting the brakes on it."

Otherwise it does look like a preaching to the choir thing. Manifestos are often that sort of preaching, so maybe that's okay for what you're after, but for all the usual LW-communications-ethos reasons, I hope you decide on something better.

I've seen dukkha translated as something more like "unsatisfactoriness" which puts a kind of Stoic spin on it. You look at the cards you've been dealt, and instead of playing them, you find them inadequate and get upset about it. The Stoics (and the Buddhists, in this interpretation) would recommend that you instead just play the cards you're dealt. They may not be great cards, but you won't make them any better by complaining about them. Dunno if this is authentic to Buddhism or is more the result of Westerners trying to find something familiar in Buddhism, though.

My point is that in English "experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain" would be considered an uncontroversial example of "suffering", not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there's a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.

I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker "Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again" they would assume you were claiming that this would include "never experiencing such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain." If this is not the case, I think they would be justified to feel they'd been played with a bit of a bait-and-switch dharma-wise.

There can be pain without suffering. If pain is experienced without attachment and aversion, there is no resulting suffering. If the Buddha were to stub his toe, there would be pain, but he would not suffer as a result.

I wonder whether "suffering" is an adequate translation. I get the feeling that the Buddhist sutras and our common vulgate are talking past each other. See for example MN144, in which Channa slits his wrists to end his pain, and the Buddha says he was sufficiently enlightened that he will not be reborn. Channa complains: “Reverend Sāriputta, I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. The winds piercing my head are so severe, it feels like a strong man drilling into my head with a sharp point. The pain in my head is so severe, it feels like a strong man tightening a tough leather strap around my head. The winds slicing my belly are so severe, like a deft butcher or their apprentice were slicing open a cows’s belly with a meat cleaver. The burning in my body is so severe, it feels like two strong men grabbing a weaker man by the arms to burn and scorch him on a pit of glowing coals. I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. Reverend Sāriputta, I will slit my wrists. I don’t wish to live.” If that's "not suffering" then "not suffering" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Anselm: I have discovered a truly marvelous proof for the existence of God, which this tweet is too small to contain. 🙏😇

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnNNGWQEX7CgaqBt2/notes-on-reverence

Excerpt:

“I am an atheist, and am addressing an audience in which, if I’m not mistaken, respect for the tenets of established religion is fairly low. But I want to explore reverence — in the spirit of Chesterton’s Fence — because it is common to many virtue systems across cultures and across time. Among the questions that concern me:

• “Are there aspects of reverence that are valuable that rationalists can preserve and nurture in their own ways in their own traditions?
• “Is reverence perhaps so valuable that it is worth taking a ‘leap of faith’ beyond the limits of rationalism in order to practice it?”

Took a couple of years, but my dystopian future has arrived:

May, 2024: Google search starts to put "AI Overviews" above its web search results. [BBC] "Google's new artificial intelligence (AI) search feature is facing criticism for providing erratic, inaccurate answers. Its experimental 'AI Overviews' tool has told some users searching for how to make cheese stick to pizza better that they could use 'non-toxic glue'. The search engine's AI-generated responses have also said geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day."

my current best guess

FWIW, from Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (p. 323): "If we study one moral concept we soon see it as an aspect of another. It is true on the one hand that as moral agents we tend to specialise. The high-principled statesman may be a negligent father (and so on). It may seem as if we have a limited amount of good motivation available and cannot expect to be decent 'all round'. There are familiar ways of characterising people in terms of individual characteristics. Yet also a closer look may show this as superficial, and we then wish to say that the impulse toward goodness should stir the whole person."