Me too. smk, your wish has been granted.

So basically you redefine "harm" to mean "whatever impedes reproduction" -- something which grossly does NOT coincide with common human understanding of the word harm.

Take typical examples of harm. Getting cut. Breaking a bone. Losing an eye. What these all have in common is that they adversely impact one or another function.

But our body functions only because it is a product of natural selection, and natural selection occurs on the basis of reproduction. Our skin is closed to protect against infection, and if it is cut we are exposed to infection, which reduces our probability of survival, which reduces our expected number of offspring. If we lose an eye or break a bone, same thing. Break an animal's bone, and you'll reduce the probability that it reproduces. Poke out its eye, and you'll do the same thing. Harms reduce your ability to reproduce.

Do you really not realize that every part of you that has evolved, every tiny little part, every little mechanism of your body which has a function and which has the potential to be harmed, evolved because it helped your ancestors to survive and reproduce and ultimately to produce you? Every little evolved part of you is part of a reproduction machine, whether you acknowledge it or not. And it follows from this as night follows on day, that if you harm any one of those little bits of you that have a function, then you are harming a mechanism whose function is to help you to reproduce, and so you are harming your own ability to reproduce (to the extent that those mechanisms still function in your generation and are not mere functionless leftovers of an earlier generation).

I bet that if someone tortured you to death but at the same time collected your semen to impregnate a dozen women, I bet you'd still consider this a "harmful" thing.

But in that case I am being harmed and helped. The fact that my murderer is simultaneously also helping me to reproduce (in his own way) does not mean that he has not also harmed me. Taken in itself, the murder reduces my own evolved ability to reproduce, and therefore the murder is a harm. That the murderer also committed this other act which helped me through the introduction of a novel method of reproduction (collecting my semen) does not change this.

So what the hell is this whole comment of yours about? Downvoted for sheer nonsense.

I am surprised that it is controversial that harms adversely impact reproduction. Of course they do. Sure, as someone pointed out, if you have already lost your ability to reproduce, then obviously a harm won't impact your ability to reproduce - because it was already impacted. But the harm still would have impacted your ability to reproduce had you not already lost it.

Let's think about it. Imagine some typical harm happening to you, say, somebody throws a stone at you and it hits you in the head. But roll back time. Now roll forward and suppose you duck, avoiding the stone. Why do you duck? You duck because you have evolved to duck. Why have you evolved to duck? Why do we have this duck-when-something-is-flying-at-me instinct cooked into us as firmly as it is? And I do think it's cooked in (I don't think it's learned, though I might be wrong). It's cooked in by natural selection. But natural selection only cares about reproduction. What, did you think natural selection cared about your happiness? No, it cares about whether you reproduce. Your instincts are what they are because they help you reproduce. Therefore you fear the things you do, you object to the things you do, you consider "harms" the things you do, because they adversely affect your ability to reproduce. Whether you think so or not! Because natural selection doesn't care what you think, and natural selection made you.

Imagine some harm done to the elderly woman. That elderly woman has, let us say, eyes, and can see. So if her eyes are harmed, then this typically means her sight is reduced or lost. Sight has a biological function. We have evolved eyes because it enhances our biological fitness. Biological fitness is our ability to survive and reproduce. Therefore if this elderly woman's eyes are harmed, then something has happened to her which, had it happened to someone still fertile, would have adversely affected her ability to reproduce. And similarly for other harms done to her.

Harms done to a person are things which would have reduced that person's ability to reproduce, had that person not already lost that ability due, e.g., to other harms, or to age. Harms done to a young fertile person are things which actually do reduce that person's ability to reproduce.

What we want for ourselves and our descendants is obviously no (or at least no longer) the same a reproductive fitness.

I don't think any non-human animal ever (consciously) wanted reproductive fitness as such, this being a long-term, multi-generational desire that humans may be the only animal capable of caring about, and I don't think all that many humans do. On second thought, maybe they do, in the sense that many humans want children and grandchildren. But the things we typically do want by and large enhance our reproductive fitness, so reproductive fitness is, in practice, a good proxy for what we want (though it might be more accurate to say that what we want is a good proxy for reproductive fitness). Good music, for example, comes from good musicians, and a high musical ability is thought to be closely related with sexual selection. Same with athletic ability, intelligence, empathy reliability, trustworthiness, good parenting, and so on and so forth. Pretty much everything we rejoice in about ourselves, Is closely tied one way or another with reproductive fitness.

no reason to rejoice about a future in which humanity is made up of crack-heads.

When I survey the traits that have been and currently still are correlated in the human species with greater reproductive success, I find admirable traits such as those I've listed above. You are speculating that at some future date, all these other traits will be swamped by a tendency of welfare crack-heads not to use contraceptives. I don't have any proof that your scenario is improbable, but still I think it is.

I read it the day he posted it, and it made a nice review of a point that I had known for decades.

CEV takes more of an economic perspective where agent-extrapolations make deals with each other. The "good" agent-extrapolations might win out in the end (due to having a more-timeless discount rate, say), but there might be a lot of suffering along the way. CFAI on the other hand takes a less deal-centric perspective where the AI's more directly supposed to reason everything through from first principles, which can avoid predictably-stupid-in-retrospect agents getting much of the future's pie, so to speak. So I'm more afraid of CEV-like thinking than CFAI-like thinking, even though both are scary, because I am more afraid of humans being evil than I'm afraid of me not getting what I want. This may or may not overlap at all with your concerns.

(The difference isn't necessarily whether or not they converge on the same policy, it might also be how quickly they converge on that policy. CFAI seems like it'd converge on justifiedness more quickly, but maybe not.)

(although to be clear Askenazim do not genetically look very European compared to most Europeans)

Really depends on who you compare them to.

Naturally American Whites with their predominantly Northern European (German, English, Irish, Scottish) origins aren't really that close to unmixed Askeanazi. But on nearly every study I've run into they are for example closer to Greeks and Italians than the Souther Europeans are to Austrians, British or Russians.

Askenazi Jews seem to be about ~40 to 50% Southern European, the second largest component is basically classical Near Eastern (think Druze or Syrians) and they (according to the current interpretation of genetic data) seem to have been this way for centuries.

Its rather surprising that they seem to have Southern European admixture while there is only a few extra % of Eastern and Northern Admixture, they are among European peoples closest to Italians. Perhaps the mixture stabilised in the Late Roman Empire after Europe became less cosmopolitan? Perhaps both Italians and Jews had much in common to start with due to ancient Greek admixture (they are remarkably close to modern Greeks as well)? Also Germanic migrations in the 5th century where there are already some indications of Jews settling in what is now Germany might be another common imprint.

Recent admixture that occurred after Jewish and Christians started integrating seems to have gone mostly into the gentile population, though naturally in places like America with its massive out marriage rate and considering the large population of marginally Jewish Soviet immigrants in Israel this has probably changed recently.

As to the Shepardim, depends on how the word is used. In the narrow sense of "Spanish Jews" I don't think the differences are that pronounced (though I must admit I don't recall much of the data regarding them). But if one under the term includes Mizrahi Jews as often it is, then the differences are rather significant and yes they do seem to have non-negligible Arab admixture or rather a greater similarity to them (someone really needs to recover some Jewish DNA from the Roman and Hellenic period, lots of interesting stuff might be found).

No love on LW for Yiddish?

I find the same thing as Kaj. I've started literally percieving myself as having that set of "needs" bars in the Sims. Bladder bar gets empty, and I need to use the toilet or I'll be uncomfortable. Sleep bar gets low, and I'll be tired until I get enough. Social bar (face to face time) gets low, and I'll feel bleah until I get some face to face time.

The good news is that I've noticed this, become able to distinguish between "not enough facetime Bleah" and other types of Bleah, and then make sure to get face-to-face time when I need it.

Very much the same way. The internet has been a mixed blessing -- it allowed me to have the life I have at all, way back when, but now it's also a massive hook for akrasia and encourages sub-optimal use of free time. I'm still trying to get that under control.

No, I'm not talking about the basis to criticize technology, but more about of actual target of criticism. Disclaimer: there sure are technologies that can do more harm than good. Here I will concentrate on communications, as you picked it as being one of the top problematic technologies.

For me, it all boils down to constructive side of criticism: should we change the technologies of the way we use them? Because I think in first case, new technologies will be used with the same drawbacks for humans as old ones. In the second case, successful usage patterns can be applied to new technologies as well.

For example, rather than limit the usage of communication technologies or change the comm technology itself, maybe we should focus on how the people use them. Make television more social. Or make going out with other people more easy and fun. Promote social interaction and activities using existing technologies, not relying on some magic future technology that will solve the existing problems. I think building the solution around existing technologies is a faster way than waiting for new ones.

Surely, there are technology side and social/culture side of the problem. But we cannot change any of these fast. We can only expand one to help the other. For example, on one programming site, around two years after its creation, people started to organize meetups in local places, much like LW meetups. Then, year later, other group on the site organized soccer games between different site users. The people liked it. And it doesn't take much time because they were building around existing stuff.

Also, sorry for my english. It's not my main language.