What do you think are the most interesting philosophical problems within our grasp to be solved?

I'm not sure there is any. A big part of it is that metaphilosophy is essentially a complete blank, so we have no way of saying what counts as a correct solution to a philosophical problem, and hence no way of achieving high confidence that any particular philosophical problem has been solved, except maybe simple (and hence not very interesting) problems, where the solution is just intuitively obvious to everyone or nearly everyone. It's also been my experience that any time we seem to make real progress on some interesting philosophical problem, additional complications are revealed that we didn't foresee, which makes the problem seem even harder to solve than before the progress was made. I think we have to expect this trend to continue for a while yet.

If you instead ask what are some interesting philosophical problems that we can expect visible progress on in the near future, I'd cite decision theory and logical uncertainty, just based on how much new effort people are putting into them, and results from the recent past.

Do you think that solving normative ethics won't happen unti

I think that the estimates cannot be undertaken independently. FAI and UFAI would each pre-empt the other. So I'll rephrase a little.

I estimate the chances that some AGI (in the sense of "roughly human-level AI") will be built within the next 100 years as 85%, which is shorthand for "very high, but I know that probability estimates near 100% are often overconfident; and something unexpected can come up."

And "100 years" here is shorthand for "as far off as we can make reasonable estimates/guesses about the future of humanity"; perhaps "50 years" should be used instead.

Conditional on some AGI being built, I estimate the chances that it will be unfriendly as 80%, which is shorthand for "by default it will be unfriendly, but people are working on avoiding that and they have some small chance of succeeding; or there might be some other unexpected reason that it will turn out friendly."

No. I ran as a Republican in one of the most Democratic districts in Massachusetts, my opponent was the second most powerful person in the Massachusetts State Senate, and even Republicans in my district had a high opinion of him.

I believe so for reasons you wouldn't find compelling, because the gods apparently do not want there to be common knowledge of their existence, and thus do not interact with humans in a manner that provides communicable evidence. (Yes, this is exactly what a world without gods would look like to an impartial observer without firsthand incommunicable evidence. This is obviously important but it is also completely obvious so I wish people didn't harp on it so much.) People without firsthand experience live in a world that is ambiguous as to the existence or lack thereof of god-like beings, and any social evidence given to them will neither confirm nor deny their picture of the world, unless they're falling prey to confirmation bias, which of course they often do, especially theists and atheists. I think people without firsthand incommunicable evidence should be duly skeptical but should keep the existence of the supernatural (in the everyday sense of that word, not the metaphysical sense) as a live hypothesis. Assigning less than 5% probability to it is, in my view, a common but serious failure of social epistemic rationality, most likely caused by arrogance. (I think LessWrong is es... (read more)