"Yuck factor" has nothing to do with it. The "duty of the rigorously disciplined rationalist" does not include ignoring others' reactions to your statements.

From the topic, in this case "selection effects in estimates of global catastrophic risk". If you casually mention you don't particularly care about humans or that personally killing a bunch of them may be an effective strategy the discussion is effectively hijacked. So it doesn't matter that you don't wish to do anybody harm.

Most of us frown on irresponsible encouragements to criminal acts.

As well you should. Of course, this carries a number of interesting assumptions:

• The assumption of irresponsibility.

• The assumption of encouragement.

• The assumption of the 'wrongness' of criminal acts.

Let me rephrase this: If you believed -- very strongly (say confidence over 90%) -- there was a strong chance that a specific person was going to destroy the world, and you also knew that only you were willing to acknowledge the material evidence which lead you to this conclusion...

Would you find sitting still and letting the world end merely because ensuring the survival of the human race was criminal an acceptable thing to do?

In that counterfactual, I do not. I find it reprehensibly irresponsible, in fact.

In that case, allow me to add that I believe the current likelihood of UFAI to be well below any other known species-level existential risk, and that I also believe that the current crop of AGI researchers are sufficiently fit to address this problem.

Anyone interested in "reporting" me to local law enforcement need only message me privately and I will provide them with my full name, address, and contact information for my local law enforcement.

I am that confident that this is a non-issue.

Send to: logos01@TempEmail.net (Address will expire on Nov. 23, 2011)

In this case? The demonstrated inability to parse counterfactuals from postulates, in emotionally charged contexts.

Me going to prison for murder is about as bad as my own death, so its more like .01-.1x end of humanity. Can you imagine that?

I'm curious, now, as to what nation or state you live in.

Thinking about it harder I feel like "death of all the people I care about" is more like 10-100X worse than my own death.

Well -- in this scenario you are "going to die" regardless of the outcome. The only question is whether the people you care about will. Would you kill others (who were themselves also going to die if you did nothing) and allow yourself to die, if it would save people you cared about?

(Also, while it can lead to absurd consequences -- Eliezer's response to the Sims games for example -- might I suggest a re-examination of your internal moral consistency? As it stands it seems like you're allowing many of your moral intuitions to fall in line with evolutionary backgrounds. Nothing inherently wrong with that -- our evolutionary history has granted us a decent 'innate' morality. But we who 'reason' can do better.)

I was considering writing a long thing about your overconfidence in thinking you could carry out such a plan without any (I am presuming) experience doing that kind of thing.

I didn't list any plan. This was intentional. I'm not going to give pointers to others who might be seeking them out for reasons I personally haven't vetted on how to do exactly what this topic entails. That, unlike what some others have criticized about this conversation, actually would be irresponsible.

That being said, the fact that you're addressing this to the element you are is really demonstrating a further non-sequitor. It doesn't matter whether or not you believe the scenario plausible: what would your judgment of the rightfulness of carrying out the action yourself int he absence of democratic systems be?

that everyone else on LW seems to hate so y bother?

1. Why allow your opinions to be swayed by the emotional responses of others?

2. In my case, I'm currently sitting at -27 on my 30-day karma score. That's not even the lowest I've been in the last thirty days. I'm not really worried about my popularity here. :)