Hi Utilitarian!

um... are you the same guy who wrote those essays at utilitarian-essays.com? If you are, we have already talked about these topics before. I'm the same Peer Infinity who wrote that "interesting contribution" on Singularitarianism in that essay about Pascal's Wager, the one that tried to compare the different religions to examine which of them would be the best to Wager on.

And, um... I used to have some really nasty nightmares about going to the christian hell. But then, surprisingly, these nightmares somehow got replaced with nightmares of a hell caused by an Evil AI. And then these nightmares somehow got replaced with nightmares about the other hells that modal realism says must already exist in other universes.

I totally agree with you that the suffering of humans is massively outweighed by the suffering of other animals, and possibly insects, by a few orders of magnitude, I forget how many exactly, but I think it was less than 10 orders of magnitude. But I also believe that the amount of positive utility that could be achieved through a positive Singularity is... I think it was about 35 orders of magnitude more than all of the positive or negative utility that has been experienced so far in the entire history of Earth. But I don't remember the details of the math. For a few years now I was planning to write about that, but somehow never got around to it. Well, actually, I did make one feeble attempt to do the math, but that post didn't actually make any attempt to estimate how many orders of magnitude were involved

Oh, and I totally share your concerns about the possible implications of CEV. Specifically, that it might end up generating so much negative utility that it outweighs the positive utility, which would mean that a universe completely empty of life would be preferable.

Oh, and I know one other person who shares your belief that promoting good memes like concern about wild animals would be more cost effective than donating to Friendly AI research. He goes by the name MetaFire Horsley in Second Life, and by the name MetaHorse in Google Wave. I have spent lots of time discussing this exact topic with him. I agree that spreading good memes is totally a good idea, but I remain skeptical about how much leverage we could get out of this plan, and I suspect that donating to Friendly AI research would be a lot more leveraged. But it's still totally a good idea to spread positive memes in your spare time, whenever you're in a situation that gives you an opportunity to do some positive meme spreading. MetaHorse is currently working on some sci-fi stories that he hopes will be useful for spreading these positive memes. He writes these stories in Google Wave, which means that you can see him writing the stories in real-time, and give instant feedback. I really think it would be a good idea for you to get in contact with him. If you don't already have a Google Wave account, please send me your gmail address in a private email, and I'll send you a Wave invite.

Oh, and I'm still really confused about how CEV is supposed to work. It seems like it's supposed to take into our account our beliefs that the suffering of animals, or any sentient creatures, is unacceptable, and consider that as a source of decoherence if someone else advocates an action that would result in suffering. And apparently it's not supposed to just average out everyone's preferences, it's supposed to... I don't know what, exactly, but it's supposed to have the same or better results than if we spent lots and lots of time talking with the people who would advocate suffering, and we all learned more, were smarter, and "grew up further together", whatever that means, and other stuff. And that sounds nice in theory, but I'm still waiting for a more detailed specification. It's been a few years since the original CEV document was published, and there haven't been any updates at all. Well, other than Eliezer's posts to LW.

Oh, and I read all of your essays (yes, all of them, though I only skimmed that really huge one that listed lots of numbers for the amount of suffering of animals) a few months ago, and we chatted about them briefly. Though that was long enough ago that it would probably be a good idea for me to review them.

Anyway, um... keep up the good work, I guess, and thanks for the feedback. :)