On October 29th, I asked Eliezer and the LW community if they were interested in doing a video Q&A. Eliezer agreed and a majority of commenters were in favor of the idea, so on November 11th, I created a thread where LWers could submit questions. Dozens of questions were asked, generating a total of over 650 comments. The questions were then ranked using the LW voting system.
On December 11th, Eliezer filmed his replies to the top questions (skipping some), and sent me the videos on December 22nd. Because voting continued after that date, the order of the top questions in the original thread has changed a bit, but you can find the original question for each video (and the discussion it generated, if any) by following the links below.
Thanks to Eliezer and everybody who participated.
Update: If you prefer to download the videos, they are available here (800 MB, .wmw format, sort the files by 'date created').
Eliezer Yudkowsky - Less Wrong Q&A (5/30) from MikeGR on Vimeo.
(Video #5 is on Vimeo because Youtube doesn't accept videos longer than 10 minutes and I only found out after uploading about a dozen. I would gladly have put them all on Vimeo, but there's a 500 MB/week upload limit and these videos add up to over 800 MB.)
If anything is wrong with the videos or links, let me know in the comments or via private message.
Society is supported by "hydraulic pressure", a myriad flows of wealth/matter/energy/information and human effort each holding the others up. It's a layered, cyclic graph - technology depends on the surplus food of agriculture, agriculture depends on the efficiencies of technology. It's a massively connected graph. It has non-obvious dependencies even at short range - think what computer gamers have done for Moore's law, or music pirates for broadband. It has dependencies across time. It has a lot of dependencies in which the supporter does not know and probably wouldn't much care about the supported - consider the existence of Freemind software, which was not written for SIAI.
This whole structure expends most of its effort supporting itself, most of the rest on motivator rewards, and SIAI gets the crumbs. You could realistically get lots more crumbs.
What is the information dynamics of spreading understanding of FAI as a problem? What technologies support communication, and what are their limitations? (Especially limitations in the ability to arrange huge data for optimally for narrow human input.) How to explore the space of information-connecting technologies? Given that most people have satisficed on a learning strategy that leaves you out entirely, how can you communicate urgency to them?
What economic flows support you in the above? Who supports them?
I think your answer in #5 trivializes the question.