They can't just be things you think you 'should' do to meet some vague abstract goal that isn't immediately salient.
I really don't want to do those things because I think I 'should' do them but because I'd love to do them. If I would be living in Bank's Culture or under Yudkowsky's FAI oversight I would want to do exactly those things. That I ask about them at all is because I fear I should be doing other things. If I would just accept the line of reasoning that there is nothing more important than donating to the SIAI then I would choose to become a street builder and work long hours. You can earn good money doing that here in Germany while you don't need to have particular skills. I don't expect the time I would need to acquire advanced knowledge to pay off either by enabling me to get a better job or by being able to work towards FAI directly.
I suppose all my questions and submissions here tend towards the goal of allowing me to conclude that I can ignore all this. My nightmare is that reality is fucked up enough that trying to do the 'right' thing makes you eventually end up seriously considering three spins of a roulette wheel or tossing a quantum coin to gamble at a 10,000:1 ratio.
Does my desire to learn not eventually result in knowing what is right and wrong? Yeah, but making decisions under uncertainty would currently force me to take the risk of not pursuing any terminal goals directly but rather to try to mitigate risks from AI. That sucks and I try to ignore it but haven't been able to do so yet.
I'm just looking for some justification to do what I want and ignore what I don't want.
"Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. At the moment one is enlightened, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers. After enlightenment, mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers."
When you learn about relativity, do you throw away your watch because time is relative anyway? No, because relativity must give the same results as Newtonian physics in the conditions where (and to the precision that) Newtonian mechanics has already been verified. If you have a theory that says stran...
Given that
1. Deciding to read and actually reading the sequences is 'work'
2. Reading the latest frontpaged article on LessWrong is 'fun'
3. We frequently have gaps in the posting rate of articles that make it to the front page
4. There are many people who joined this community after the sequences were written and haven't gone through all of them
...would it make sense to start bringing articles from the sequences to the front page, either at a set pace or whenever there is a gap in posting?
I have actually read most of the sequences, but wouldn't mind going through them once again. However, taking it up as a project seems like too much work. By bringing an article to the front page, either with the old comment thread or with a fresh one (plus a reference to the old one), it becomes something that the community is doing. Following things that a group you belong to is doing is fun. But for that to happen, we need to share a common pointer to which article is 'the one we are reading now'. Hence, the front page.
In short, I think if people in this community reading (and re-reading) more of the sequences is something we want, then recycling them through the front page is also a good idea.
If the barrier is implementation modifications needed, I may be able to assist.