In the US I would say more-ish. I support a guaranteed basic income, and any benefit to one person or group (benefitting the bottom without costing the top would decrease inequality but would still be good), but think there should be a smaller middle class.

I don't know enough about global issues to comment on them.

Assuming that cupcakes are tradable, that seems intuitively false to me. Is it just your intuition, or is there also reason? Not denying intuitions' values, they are just not as easy to explain to one who does not share them.

(The analogy to Friendly AI is worth considering, though.)

Ok, so start by examining the suspected sociopath's source code. Wait, we have a problem.

I'd rather avoid going too deeply into definitions here. Sometimes I feel that if a group of rationalists were in a house that is on fire, they would refuse to leave the house until someone gives them a very precise definition of what exactly does "fire" mean, and how does it differ on quantum level from the usual everyday interaction of molecules. Just because I cannot give you a bulletproof definition in a LW comment, it does not mean the topic is completely meaningless.

Specifically I am concerned about the type of people who are very low on empathy and their utility function does not include other people. (So I am not speaking about e.g. people with alexithymia or similar.) Think: professor Quirrell, in real life. Such people do exist.

(I once had a boss like this for a short time, and... well, it's like an experience from a different planet. If I tried to describe it using words, you would probably just round it to the nearest neurotypical behavior, which would completely miss the point. Imagine a superintelligent paperclip maximizer in a human body, and you will probably have a better approximation. Yeah, I can imagine how untrustworthy this sounds. Unfortunately, that also is a part of a typical experience with a sociopath: first, you start doubting even your own senses, because nothing seems to make sense anymore, and you usually need a lot of time afterwards to sort it out, and then it is already too late to do something about it; second, you realize that if you try to describe it to someone else, there is no chance they would believe you unless they already had this type of experience.)

I think this community should be open for non-neurotypical people with low empathy scores provided those people are willing to act decently.

I'd like to agree with the spirit of this. But there is the problem that the sociopath would optimize their "indecent" behavior to make it difficult to prove.

The best ruler for a community is an uncorruptible, bias-free, dictator. All you need to do to implement this is to find an uncorruptible, bias-free dictator. Then you don't need a watertight justification because those are used to avoid corruption and bias and you know you don't have any of that anyway.

All cheap detection methods could be fooled easily. It's like with that old meme "if someone is lying to you, they will subconsciously avoid looking into your eyes", which everyone has already heard, so of course today every liar would look into your eyes.

I see two possible angles of attack:

a) Make a correct model of sociopathy. Don't imagine sociopaths to be "like everyone else, only much smarter". They probably have some specific weakness. Design a test they cannot pass, just like a colorblind person cannot pass a color blindness test even if they know exactly how the test works. Require passing the test for all positions of power in your organization.

b) If there is a typical way sociopaths work, design an environment so that this becomes impossible. For example, if it is critical for manipulating people to prevent their communication among each other, create an environment that somehow encourages communication between people who would normally avoid each other. (Yeah, this sounds like reversing stupidity. Needs to be tested.)

My goal is to create a rationalist community. A place to meet other people with similar values and "win" together. I want to optimize my life (not just my online quantum physics debating experience). I am thinking strategically about an offline experience here.

Eliezer wrote about how a rationalist community might need to defend itself from an attack of barbarians. In my opinion, sociopaths are even greater danger, because they are more difficult to detect, and nerds have a lot of blind spots here. We focus on dealing with forces of nature. But in the social world, we must also deal with people, and this is our archetypal weakness.

The typical nerd strategy for solving conflicts is to run away and hide, and create a community of social outcasts where everything is tolerated, and the whole group is safe more or less because it has so low status that typical bullies rather avoid it. But at the moment we start "winning", this protective shield is over, and we do not have any other coping strategy. Just like being rich makes you an attractive target for thieves, being successful (and I hope rationalist groups will become successful in near future) makes your community a target for people who love to exploit people and get power. And all they need to get inside is to be intelligent and memorize a few LW keywords. Once your group becomes successful, I believe it's just a question of time. (Even a partial success, which for you is merely a first step along a very long way, can already do this.) That will happen much sooner than any "barbarians" would consider you a serious danger.

(I don't want to speak about politics here, but I believe that many political conflicts are so bad because most of the sides have sociopaths as their leaders. It's not just the "affective death spirals", although they also play a large role. But there are people in important positions who don't think about "how to make the world a better place for humans", but rather "how could I most benefit from this conflict". And the conflict often continues and grows because that happens to be the way for those people to profit most. And this seems to happen on all sides, in all movements, as soon as there is some power to be gained. Including movements that ostensibly are against the concept of power. So the other way to ask my question would be: How can a rationalist community get more power, without becoming dominated by people who are willing to sacrifice anything for power? How to have a self-improving Friendly human community? If we manage to have a community that doesn't immediately fall apart, or doesn't become merely a debate club, this seems to me like the next obvious risk.)

Well, I suspect Eugine Nier may have been one, to show the most obvious example. (Of course there is no way to prove it, there are always alternative explanations, et cetera, et cetera, I know.)

Now that was an online behavior. Imagine the same kind of person in real life. I believe it's just a question of time. Using the limited experience to make predictions, such person would be rather popular, at least at the beginning, because they would keep using the right words that are tested to evoke a positive response from many lesswrongers.

The most contra-LW belief I have, if you can call it that, is my not being convinced on the pattern theory of identity - EY's arguments about there being no "same" or "different" atoms not effecting me because my intuitions already say that being obliterated and rebuilt from the same atoms would be fatal. I think I need the physical continuity of the object my consciousness runs on. But I realise I haven't got much support besides my intuitions for believing that that would end my experience and going to sleep tonight won't, and by now I've become almost agnostic on the issue.

• Technological progress and social/political progress are loosely correlated at best

• Compared to technological progress, there has been little or no social/political progress since the mid-18th century - if anything, there has been a regression

• There is no such thing as moral progress, only people in charge of enforcing present moral norms selectively evaluating past moral norms as wrong because they disagree with present moral norms

It's related. Goodhart's Law says that using a measure for policy will decouple it from any pre-existing relationship with economic activity, but doesn't predict how that decoupling will occur. The common story of Goodhart's law tells us how the Soviet Union measured factory output in pounds of machinery, and got heavier but less efficient machinery. Formalizing the patterns tells us more about how this would change if, say, there had not been very strict and severe punishments for falsifying machinery weight production reports.

Sometimes this is a good thing : it's why, for one example, companies don't instantly implode into profit-maximizers just because we look at stock values (or at least take years to do so). But it does mean that following a good statistic well tends to cause worse outcomes that following a poor statistic weakly.

That said, while I'm convinced that's the pattern, it's not the only one or even the most obvious one, and most people seem to have different formalizations, and I can't find the evidence to demonstrate it.

over six-to-nine months to get the Sequences eBook proofread

This is one of the things that keep me puzzled. How can proofreading a book by a group of volunteers take more time than translating the whole book by a single person?

Is it because people don't volunteer enough for the work because proofreading seems low status? Is it a bystander effect, where everyone assumes that someone else is already working on it? Are all people just reading LW for fun, but unwilling to do any real work to help? Is it a communication problem, where MIRI has a lack of volunteers, but the potential volunteers are not aware of it?

Just print the whole fucking thing on paper, each chapter separately. Bring the papers to a LW meetup, and ask people to spend 30 minutes proofreading some chapter. Assuming many of them haven't read the whole Sequences, they can just pick a chapter they haven't read yet, and just read it, while marking the found errors on the paper. Put a signature at the end of the chapter, so it is known how many people have seen it.

What's stopping you from doing this? If you know someone else was actively doing the same, and could keep you committed to the goal in some way, would that help? If that didn't work, then, what would be stopping us?

In organized form, I've joining the Youtopia page, and the current efforts appear to be either busywork or best completed by a native speaker of a different language, there's no obvious organization regarding generalized goals, and no news updates at all. I'm not sure if this is because MIRI is using a different format to organize volunteers, because MIRI doesn't promote the Youtopia group that seriously, because MIRI doesn't have any current long-term projects that can be easily presented to volunteers, or for some other reason.

For individual-oriented work, I'm not sure what to do, and I'm not confident the best person to do it. There are also three separate issues, of which there's not obvious interrelation. Improving the Sequences and accessibility of the Sequences is the most immediate and obvious thing, and I can think of a couple different ways to go about this :

• The obvious first step is to make /any/ eBook, which is why a number of people have done just that. This isn't much more comprehensible than just linking to the Sequences page on the Wiki, and in some cases may be less useful, and most of the other projects seem better-designed than I can offer.

• Improve indexing of the Sequences for online access. This does seem like low-hanging fruit, possibly because people are waiting for a canonical order, and the current ordering is terrible. However, I don't think it's a good idea to just randomly edit the Sequences Wiki page, and Discussion and Main aren't really well-formatted for a long-term version-heavy discussion. (And it seems not Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be "shake up the local textbook!") I have started working on a dependency web, but this effort doesn't seem produce marginal benefits until large sections are completed.

• The Sequences themselves are written as short bite-sized pieces for a generalized audience in a specific context, which may not be optimal for long-form reading in a general context. In some cases, components that were good-enough to start with now have clearer explanations... that have circular redundancies. Writing bridge pieces to cover these attributes, or writing alternative descriptions for the more insider-centric Sequences, works within existing structures, and providing benefit at fairly small intervals. This requires fairly deep understanding of the Sequences, and does not appear to be a low-hanging fruit. (And again, not necessarily Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be "shake up the local textbook!")

But this is separate from MIRI's ability to work with insiders and only marginally associated with its ability to work with outsiders. There are folk with very significant comparative advantages (ie, anyone inside MIRI, anyone in California, most people who accept their axioms) on these matters, and while outsiders have managed to have major impact despite that, they were LukeProg with a low-hanging fruit of basic nonprofit organization, which is a pretty high bar to match.

There are some possibilities -- translating prominent posts to remove excessive jargon or wordiness (or even Upgoer Fiving them), working on some reputation problems -- but none of these seem to have obvious solutions, and wrong efforts could even have negative impact. See, for example, a lot of coverage in more mainstream web media. I've also got a significant anti-academic streak, so it's a little hard for me to understand the specific concern that Scott Alexander/su3su2u1 were raising, which may complicate matters further.

"believing X" and "knowing X is not true" cannot happen in the same head

This is known as doublethink. Its connotations are mostly negative, but Scott Fitzgerald did say that "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" -- a bon mot I find insightful.

Words are just labels for empirical clusters. I'm not going to scare-quote people when it has the usual referent used in normal conversation.

Summary of my understanding of it: P-zombies require that there be no causal connection between consciousness and, well, anything, including things p-zombie philosophers say about consciousness. If this is the case, then a non-p-zombie philosopher talking about consciousness also isn't doing so for reasons causally connected to the fact that they are conscious. To effectively say "I am conscious, but this is not the cause of my saying so, and I would still say so if I wasn't conscious" is absurd.

I often wonder if my subconsciousness is actually conscious, it's just a different consciousnesses than me.

If anyone cares, the effective altruism community has started pondering this question as a group. This might work out for those doing direct work, such as research or advocacy: if they're doing it mostly virtually, what they need the most is Internet access. If a lot of the people they'd be (net)working with as part of their work were also at the same place, it would be even less of a problem. It doesn't seem like this plan would work for those earning to give, as the best ways of earning to give often depend on geography-specific constraints, i.e., working in developed countries.

Note that if you perceive this as a bad idea, please share your thoughts, as I'm only aware of its proponents claiming it might be a good idea. It hasn't been criticized, so it's an idea worthy of detractors if criticism is indeed to be had.

would suggest ANZAC, Germany, Japan, or Singapore. ... Scandinavia is also good.

That's a very curious list, notable for absences as well as for inclusions. I am a bit stumped, for I cannot figure out by which criteria was it constructed. Would you care to elaborate why do these countries look to you as the most ethical on the planet?

For reference, ANZAC stands for the "Australia and New Zealand Army Corps" that fought in WWI. If you mean "Australia and New Zealand", then I don't think there's a shorter way of saying that than just listing the two countries.

what's morally problematic about wanting to be a more successful writer or researcher or therapist?

The issue is blanket moral condemnation of the whole society. Would you want to become a "more successful writer" in Nazi Germany?

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie." -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Thanks for asking, here's an attempt at an answer. I'm going to compare the US (tax rate 40%) to Singapore (tax rate 18%). Since SG has better health care, education, and infrastructure than the US, and also doesn't invade other countries or spy massively on its own citizens, I think it's fair to say that 22% extra of GDP that the US taxes its citizens is simply squandered.

Let I be income, D be charitable donations, R be tax rate (0.4 vs 0.18), U be money usage in support of lifestyle, and T be taxes paid. Roughly U=I-T-D, and T=R(I-D). A bit of algrebra produces the equation D=I-U/(1-R).

Consider a good programmer-altruist making I=150K. In the first model, the programmer decides she needs U=70K to support her lifestyle; the rest she will donate. Then in the US, she will donate D=33K, and pay T=47K in taxes. In SG, she will donate D=64K and pay T=16K in taxes to achieve the same U.

In the second model, the altruist targets a donation level of D=60, and adjusts U so she can meet the target. In the US, she payes T=36K in taxes and has a lifestyle of U=54K. In SG, she pays T=16K of taxes and lives on U=74K.

So, to answer your question, the programmer living in the US would have to reduce her lifestyle by about $20K/year to achieve the same level of contribution as the programmer in SG.

Most other developed countries have tax rates comparable or higher than the US, but it's more plausible that in other countries the money goes to things that actually help people.

Just to make sure, could this be because you [sic] assume that "intelligent life" will automatically be similar to humans in some other aspects?

It could be because they assume that. More likely, I'd guess, they think that some forms of human-displacing intelligence (like your spacefaring smart torturers) would indeed be ghastly and/or utterly unrecognizable to humans — but others need not be.

I hadn't thought of CBT, it does work in a very loose sense of the term although I wouldn't call weight loss of 4 kg that plateaus after a few months much of a success. I maintain that no non-surigcal intervention (that I know of) results in significant long term weight loss. I would be very excited to hear about one that does.