Academic Torrents site, for large scale database transfers

http://academictorrents.com/

Excellent. My personal theory is that the universe is fine-tuned for both life and for the Fermi paradox with a late great filter because across the multiverse most lifeforms such as us will exist in such universes in part because without a great filter intelligent life will quickly turn into something not in our reference class and then use all the resources of their universe and so make their universe inhospitable to life in our reference class.

Note that DeepMind's two big successes (Atari and Go) come from scenarios that are perfectly simulable in a computer. That means they can generate an arbitrarily large number of data points to train their massive neural networks. Real world ML problems almost all have strict limitations on the amount of training data that is available.

Are you signed for cryonics?

I don't think that gene drives are the best technology when you account for the politics and indeed the post by Luke that you link doesn't use the term. SIT seems to be effective enough from a cost-benefit analysis and can be used in a very controlled way.

I look a while ago into the issue and wrote an LW post about it. I think there's a fair chance that pushing for gene drives mosquitos to be released will mean that mosquito elemintion will happen later rather than sooner.

Oxitec has today the technology that produes "sterile mosquitio" sterile for them means that the mosquitos die when they are larves. That means they compete in the early larve stage against other mosquito larves. Oxitec also inserts color coding genes to be able to proof that all of the offspring of the mosquitos they produce really dies and the genes that they produce really die.

It would be worthwhile if people think of mosquito erradication as being about release sterile mosquitos and not about releasing mutant GMO mosquitos.

If you actively want to do something on the PR front I think it would be worthwhile to contact someone at Oxitec and ask them what they think would be helpful. Maybe invite someone from Oxitec for your podcast and have a discussion with them about the strategic implications?

It's worthwhile to remember that the Obama administration was very effective about reducing Mercury pollution but not very effective about reducing CO2 pollution. More publish attention isn't always worthwhile to getting policy passed. Especially the scenario where a Republican Trump advocates a gene drive might mean that you get opposition from liberals who are currently against GMO's on the topic that prevents real action from happening.

Make it obvious that we are targeting male mosquitoes, then the idea will also be acceptable for the other side.

Note there are two seemingly conflicting strategies here. One is to solve part of the problem, focusing on it for a given time, trying to jumpstart a success spiral. But how would you differentiate this from bikeshedding? How can you be sure you're not focusing on irrelevant things?

You can't. That's where iterating comes in. even if you do spend 20minutes solving the leaking tap in the bathroom, which is maybe the most irrelevant problem, you only killed 20 minutes.

I would suggest hamming style questions too - to ask "what is the biggest problem?" a few times. Not just listing out the things that are bugging me.

This strategy is not going to work the same if you have a sharp deadline - i.e. an assignment due tomorrow. In a problem-situation with no deadlines - try to work on any one problem for a period of time will work on that one problem.

Uncharitable paraphrase of previous post: "Here is someone who seems to have lots of problems. Please identify The Problem (tm)".

Uncharitable paraphrase of this post: "The Problem is that this person actually has not one problem but many problems."

So far as I can tell, introducing this business about "The Problem" adds nothing but obfuscation. You encountered someone who seemed to have lots of problems. You concluded that he has lots of problems. Amazing!

That doesn't mean that these posts are valueless! Even without the "TheProblem (tm)" framing, readers might be tempted to look for a single underlying problem, and being cautioned away from that is useful; and your proposed way of dealing with this sort of big-pile-of-mutually-reinforcing-problems situation may well be a good one. And it's interesting to read about how you approached the situation. So I'm glad I read these. I just don't see what the business about "The Problem" was for.

I considered downvoting. I opted instead to ignore after reading the preamble, which told me nothing but

I talked to a guy about solving his problem. I don't think it worked. Tell me if you have an interesting insight.

while taking 3 paragraphs to do it, with page after page after page of dialogue following,

I'm generally for letting anyone share what they have to share, but the tone of the preamble screams of low budget wannabe internet crank [TheProblem(tm), among other issues of tone] , and given that many have a greater signal to noise threshold than I do, I suspect the downvotes were responses to having their crank detector pinged.

I struggled with responding to this, as I don't want to discourage people generally from sending in even the half baked, but this kind of thing also makes people leave LessWrong.

X-risks prevention groups are disproportionally concentrated in San Francisco and around London. They are more concentrated than possible sources of risks. So in event of devastating EQ in SF our ability to prevent x-risks may be greatly reduced.

Rationalists often presume that it is possible to do much better than average by applying a small amount of optimization power. This is true in many domains, but can get you in trouble in certain places (see: the valley of bad rationality).

Rationalists often fail to compartmentalize, even when it would be highly useful.

Rationalists are often overconfident (see: SSC calibration questions) but believe they are well calibrated (bias blind spot, also just knowing about a bias is not enough to unbias you)

Rationalists don't even lift bro.

Rationalists often fail to take marginal utility arguments to their logical conclusion, which is why they spend their time on things they are already good at rather than power leveling their lagging skills (see above). (Actually, I think we might be wired for this in order to seek comparative advantage in tribal roles.)

Rationalists often presume that others are being stupidly irrational when really the other people just have significantly different values and/or operate largely in domains where there aren't strong reinforcement mechanisms for systematic thought or are stuck in a local maximum in an area where crossing a chasm is very costly.

Can you describe how you came to these ideas as TheProblem? Your thought process or your procedure for concluding these?

interesting idea; I'd like to see this guy going up and down the abstraction levels.

In the video he described one faith while talking about another. Obviously it's not easy to put both faiths on the line at the same time and compare them from the inside of one of them. I'd like to see this guy give away the tools to do that. Other than that - this was excellent.

Also worth noting, he could be more generous with giving the position he is reasoning around but not agreeing with a "true position" when describing it. He was very careful to not allow her position to be true when he was talking about it. things like, "you believe X", "your belief is X", unreasonably take perspective on an unsuspecting person that their belief isn't 100% THEtruth. But he was still very good at what he did.

Unfortunately I don't think he used a convincing argument because religion is not dis-proveable in the conventional scientific evidence sense.

Just commenting to point out that I'm having a fabulous day, and have a very painless, enjoyable life. I struggle to even understand what suffering is, to be honest, so make a note of that any negative utilitarians who may be listening!

Foundational Research Institute promotes compromise with other value systems. See their work here, here, here, and quoted section in the OP.

Rest easy, negative utilitarians aren't coming for you.

Sex and love addiction, sexual compulsions, insecure attachment, risky sexual behaviour, HOCD, HIVOCD

What if you lost the love of your life due to a sexual impulse? What if you recognised sexual impulsivity as a pattern of your behaviour, deeply deeply ingrained into your being, and that you want to overcome it? That’s me.

I chose the name clarity because when I started to post, I was dipping in and out of psychoses and other really mentally unhealthy states. I would have moments of clarity, inspired by stuff I read in the sequences and other LessWrong posts and they would be like gulps of air saving me from drowning in really turbulent water. Now that I’m on some kind of boat, I don’t have to actively think about how to breath.

Until now, again.

I haven’t posted a lot recently. Mainly because I have been doing really, really well. My epic failures I dare so have given me a reputation here, and I talk about them freely. But, again, I have been doing well lately.

With an exception. Let me explain:

Since I already have a soldiery mindset due to some abuse from my childhood I thought I could grow by joining the French Foreign Legion. I had decided not to in the past due to risk of permanent injury but considered it again. I decided not to this time because I figured I wouldn’t be able to meet, court and enjoy time with someone, fall in love etc. – it’s unsuitable for married life (which correlates strongly with happiness), according to this link: https://www.cervens.net/legionbbs123/archive/index.php/t-53.html

Lately I am infatuated with someone. She seems to have the potential to meet my criteria for a good potential wife: communication skills, personality, responsibility, emotional honesty, attractiveness, matching sex drives, and value alignment. I just wish I had some good comebacks for when a person is out and about with an Asian girl and people making comments that make me feel self-conscious. She gives me a different feeling than that bewilderment kind of pleasant feeling I would get when my ex housemate I fell for used open her small mouth really really wide in amazement at something, haha. I get more of the nice chill longing of when I think of that cute little housemate listening too hip-hop.

I’ve been thinking about her strong feelings for veganism so I looked up some stuff about the case for veganism.

I decided to go milk free after watching this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UcN7SGGoCNI Wool free after watching watching just 243 of this video. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=siTvjWE2aVw

So another recent experience really stood out to me as a bad choice, by a similar rationale. I consider myself heteroflexible, or perhaps hetero but rather sexually fluid. On Sunday night I went to a gay sauna, tossed up a bit between that and a brothel, but decided I prefer the idea of guys this time. I’m a bit anxious and unattached to guys physically, except if its porn (which I had watched before going). So I went into a dark room with two guys I later saw were ugly AF and of course, like previous times, they give me tonnes or props and validation as a good looking guy. One guy said he was a cleaner when I asked what he does. The other had scaly crusty balls. I didn’t stop, unfortunately. And now maybe that sore was Herpes or Genital Warts and now if I got herpes which is incurable, then it might ostracise me from 4/5 of the beautiful women in the world (maybe just not the slutty ones who have that too, and may just break my heart in time anyway).

Worst case scenario, I just HIV. I mean it’s a dark room, anything can happen, a grazing, a bite, etc., a pin prick from some vexed crazy guy. No accountability. In the heat of the moment something could slip off too. And, I’m not familiar with much more than the superficial statistics around HIV transition and lore, like that oral sex HIV could but they doubt it often happens – but as a medical researcher I know the quality of research must be judged in a case by case basis and never take the overviews credibility for granted.

I reflected in the moment and realised I wasn't enjoying myself in the slightest. I think it’s some need for validation, or loneliness or risk taking or a compulsion. Fuck me autocorrect almost corrected to compulsive homosexuality. Got to fix that too, or I will be outed.

I think I have HOCD, or something accounted for by these accounts:

I find each of them helpful and hope to revisit them.

http://blogs.psychcentral.com/sex-addiction/2013/03/when-straight-men-are-addicted-to-gay-sex/ http://www.sexaddictionscounseling.com/can-a-straight-man-be-addicted-to-gay-sex/ http://www.brainphysics.com/yourenotgay.php https://www.google.com.au/amp/m.wikihow.com/Overcome-Sexual-Addiction%3famp=1?client=ms-android-optus-au

If I don't do it (regardless of where unless I find myself in a stable relationship with that person before or within a week) again by 2020 I'll give one my close friends $141 as a prize to encourage me. 1/1/2020. If not I’ll donate the same amount to a sex, love and or romance focussed impulse control related group.

Masturbating alone is hedonically better and it’s safer anyway, what the fuck is wrong with me?

I have an addiction but I have some much will power and a track record of discipline. This is the last frontier. Never again.

In ten years what's the probability that a CRISPR-competent terrorist group could exterminate mankind? The optimal consequentialist anti-terrorist policies if this answer is >1% should horrify a deontologicalist.

Could chewing gum serve as a suitable replacement for you?

Nothing. I don't think facebook membership counts are a good measurement.

If we knew that AI will be created by Google, and that it will happen in next 5 years, what should we do?

I think we discussed this previously on LW. In general the argument isn't convincing in his case.

Gilead made 20$ billion with a drug that cures one virus. If a pharma company would think that his approach has a 10% of working to cure all viruses spending 100$ million or more would be very interesting for traditional pharma companies under the current incentive scheme.

Primates and eukaryotes would be good.

I think it's well within the realm of possibility it could happen a lot sooner than that. 20 years is a long time. 20 years ago the very first crude neural nets were just getting started. It was only the past 5 years that the research really took off. And the rate of progress is only going to increase with so much funding and interest.

I recall notable researchers like Hinton making predictions that "X will take 5 years" and it being accomplished within 5 months. Go is a good example. Even a year ago, I think many experts thought it would be beaten in 10 years, but not many thought it would be beaten by 2016. In 2010 machine vision was so primitive it was a joke at how far AI has to come:

In 2015 the best machine vision systems exceeded humans by a significant amount at object recognition.

Google recently announced a neural net chip that is 7 years ahead of Moore's law. Granted only in terms of power consumption, and it only runs already trained models. But nevertheless it is an example of the kind of sudden leap forward in ability. Before that Google started using farms of GPUs that are hundreds of times larger than what university researchers have access to.

That's just hardware though. I think the software is improving remarkably fast as well. We have tons of very smart people working on these algorithms. Tweaking them, improving them bit by bit, gaining intuition about how they work, and testing crazy ideas to make them better. If evolution can develop human brains by just some stupid random mutations, then surely this process can work much faster. It feels like every week there is some amazing new advancement made. Like recently, Google's synthetic gradient paper or hypernetworks.

I think one of the biggest things holding the field back is that it's all focused on squeezing small improvements out of well studied benchmarks like imagnet. Machine vision is very interesting of course. But at some point the improvements they are making don't generalize to other tasks. But that is starting to change, as I mentioned in my above comment. Deepmind is focusing on playing games like starcraft. This requires more focus on planning, recurrency, and reinforcement learning. There is more focus now on natural language processing, which also involves a lot of general intelligence features.

Lots of other problems with it too. Why is there any last-universal-common-ancestor in this scenario? You would want to drop a full ecosystem with millions of different organisms, each with different FEC shards of data. If you can deliver some bacteria to a virgin planet, you can deliver multiple kinds of bacteria, not just one. Yet, genetics finds that there's a LUCA (not that much of LUCA survives in current genomes).

What are the reasons?

For example, there were 4,636 murders committed by white people and 5,620 murders committed by black people in 2015 (source). On the per-capita basis this makes the by-white murder rate to be about 2.2 per 100,000 and the by-black murder rate to be about 16.2 per 100,000.

Boo politics discussion during the pre-election madness.

Depends on in what way you're having trouble with it. If you need to interact with lots of people in whatever context, I find that taking an initial tone of mildly self-deprecating humor helps smooth things out. If you're the first one to mock yourself, it releases any tension that might be in the air. But then, you should let go of the self-deprecation before it starts to suggest actual low self-confidence.

It can also be good to formulate a pithy explanation for why you don't have the skill, so that you can casually explain the situation without bogging people down. "There weren't any swimming pools near where I grew up." Something short and simple, even if it leaves out important biographical details.

In the vast majority of cases, people are too involved in their own business to even think about you. If I see an adult swimming really badly, I just assume that nobody ever taught them to swim, which is a completely value-neutral assessment, and then continue on with whatever I was thinking about. I recently took a handful of jiu-jitsu lessons and was obviously as useless as a newborn kitten, but I don't really need to offer any kind of expository explanation for this lack of skill, because "just started learning" is a fully self-contained explanation.

In the hypothetical scenario in which there was something to find in Antarctica in the first place, given the thorough scraping the continent has gotten for 20+ megayears by kilometers-deep glaciers you can't expect to find much at all. The areas not covered by glaciers are generally mountains which erode - their modern exposed surfaces would have been quite deep underground at the time.

The sorts of things you could actually expect to find would be more along the lines of missing coal seams, long rods of long-ago-oxidized steel poking vertically through multiple strata into areas that would have held petroleum deposits at the time, really deep coal seams turned to ash in situ by underground gasification, hydrothermal features that concentrate copper and silver ore capped by weird craters that obliterate where the highest concentrations would have been with a big pile of copper-depleted gravel nearby. Perhaps odd isotope ratios in a very narrow sediment band if nuclear reactions were ever explored. The ecological effects you would expect on the continent are kind of overshadowed in the ocean sediment record by the worldwide climate event that the PETM represents (6C temperature spike, deep ocean hypoxia, phytoplankton death and repopulation).

It's worth noting that there are probably particular clades that are predisposed to being smart. There's a fascinating book out by Dr. Herculano-Houzel ("The Human Advantage") detailing recent work over the last decade examining brain structure across the mammals. She and her group found something fascinating: neural scaling laws differ from clade to clade. Mammals in general have a neural scaling law that if you make a brain 10x as large, it only has 4x as many neurons as the neurons on average increase in volume (partially due to longer connecting fibers). Primates break this though - all primate neurons are about the same size, which is remarkably small, the same size as that of a mammal that's like 10 grams in mass. A large primate brain is MUCH more powerful than a generic mammal brain of the same mass. Their recent work since that book came out indicates that birds also break that scaling law and have marvelously efficient brains - all bird neurons are approximately the same size like the primates, but what's more that size is 6x as small as those of primates. It is an interesting question if this would also have applied to dinosaurs, their close relatives who nonetheless were not under crazy selective pressure for low weight.

The most striking problem with this paper is how easy all of the tests of viability they used are to game. There are a bunch of simple tests you can do to check for viability, and it's fairly common for non-viable tissue to produce decent-looking results on at least a couple, if you do enough. (A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a paper by Fahy which described the presence of this effect in tissue slices.)

It may be worth pointing out that they only cooled the hearts to -3 C, as well.

cat weight might be relevant, cat current age, cat body shape (fat/skinny), description of cat's response to catnip,

Thank you James Lamine, Vaniver, and Trike Apps.

I also wanted to quote something Vaniver has said, but that was unfortunately downvoted below the visibility threshold at the time:

I've pushed for doing things the right way, even if it takes longer, rather than quicker attempts that are less likely to work.

Lately it seems that at least 50% of the Slate Star Codex open threads are filled by Trump/Clinton discussions, so I'm willing to bet that the debate will be covered there as well.

"Base rate" is statistics jargon. I would ask something like "which disease is more common?" And then if they still don't understand, you can explain that its probably the disease that is most common, without explaining Bayes rule.

I have read Convict Conditioning. The programming in that book (that is, the way the overall workout is structured) is honestly pretty bad. I highly recommend doing the reddit /r/bodyweightfitness recommended routine.

1. It's free.

2. It has videos for every exercise.

3. It is a clear and complete program that actually allows for progression (the convict conditioning progression standards are at best a waste of time) and keeps you working out in the proper intensity range for strength.

4. If you are doing the recommended routine you can ask questions at /r/bodyweightfitness.

The main weakness of the recommended routine is the relative focus of upper body vs. lower body. Training your lower body effectively with only bodyweight exercises is difficult though. If you do want to use Convict Conditioning, /r/bodyweightfitness has some recommended changes which will make it more effective.

have updated the list of common human goals.
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mnz/list_of_common_human_goals/

social looked like:

Social - are you spending time socially? No man is an island, do you have regular social opportunities, do you have exploratory social opportunities to meet new people. Do you have an established social network? Do you have intimacy?

and now looks like:

Social - are you spending time socially? No man is an island, do you have regular social opportunities, do you have exploratory social opportunities to meet new people. Do you have an established social network? Do you have intimacy? Do you have seek opportunities to have soul to soul experiences with other people? Authentic connection?

From feedback from someone who felt it wasn't covered and had a strong goal of authentic connection.

http://bearlamp.com.au/list-of-common-human-goals/

There are other emotional reactions which should register as confusion but don't.

Imagine a smart person who sees asphalt being deposited to pave a road. "How disgusting," they think. "Surely our civilization can think of something better than this." They spend a few minutes ruminating on various solutions for road construction and maintenance that would obviously be better than asphalt and then get distracted and never think about it again.

They thus manage to never realize that asphalt is a fantastic solution to this problem, that stacks of PhDs have been written on asphalt chemistry and thermal processes, that it's a highly optimized, cheap, self-healing material, that it's the most economical solution by leaps and bounds. All they noticed was disgust based purely on error and ignorance.

Any thought of the form "That's stupid, I can easily see a better way" should qualify as confusion.

You did read the rest of the article right, perhaps looked at the bibliography with over a dozen references?

Checkmate atheists.

(More seriously, you should've posted that to the cognitive science stack where there might actually be someone who knows something about IQ or gifted & talented education.)

For a while now, I have been working on a potentially impactful project. The main limiting factor is my own personal productivity- a great deal of the risk is frontloaded in a lengthy development phase. Extrapolating the development duration based on progress so far does not yield wonderful results. It appears I should still be able to finish it in a not-absurd timespan, it will just be slower than ideal.

I've always tried to improve my productivity, and I've made great progress in that compared to ten or even five years ago, but at this point I've picked most of the standard low hanging fruit. I've already fiddled with some extremely easy and safe kinda-nootropics already- melatonin, occasional caffeine pills- but not things like modafinil or amphetamines, or some of the less studied options.

And while thinking about this today, I decided to just run some numbers on amphetamines. Based on my current best estimates of market realities and the potential success and failure cases of the project, assuming amphetamines could improve my productivity by 30% on average, the expected value of taking amphetamines for the duration of development comes out to...

...a few hundred human lives.

And, in the best-reasonable case scenario, a lot more than that. This wasn't really unexpected, but it's surprisingly the first time I actually did the math.

So I imagine the God of Dumb Trolley Problems sits me down for a thought experiment and explains: "In a few years, there will be a building full of 250 people. A bomb will go off and kill all of them. You have two choices." The god leans in for dramatic effect. "Either you can do nothing, and let all of them die... or..." It lowers its head just enough for shadows to cast over its features... "You take this low, safe dose of Adderall for a few years, and the bomb magically gets defused."

This is not a difficult ethical problem. Even taking into account potential side effects, even assuming the amphetamines were obtained illegally and so carried legal liability, this is not a difficult ethical problem. When I look at this, I feel like the answer of what I should do is blindingly obvious.

And yet I have a strong visceral response of "okay yeah sure but no." I assume part of this is fairly extreme risk aversion to the idea of getting anything like amphetamines outside of a prescription. Legal trouble would be pretty disastrous, even if unlikely. And part of me is spooked about doing something like this without expert oversight.

But why not just try to get an actual prescription? For this, or some other advantageous semi-nootropic, at least. Once again, I just get a gross feeling about the idea of trying to manipulate the system. How about if I just explain the situation in full, with zero manipulation, to a sympathetic doctor? The response from my gut feels like a blank "... no."

So basically, I feel stuck. Part of me wants to recognize the risk aversion as excessive, and suggests I should at least take whatever steps I can safely. The other part is saying "but that is doing something waaaay out of the ordinary and maybe there's a reason for that that you haven't properly considered."

I am not even sure what I want to ask with this post. I guess if you've got any ideas or insights, I'd like to hear them.

These two lines seem to me contradictory. It is not clear to me should I upload you or preserve your brain.

• I don't understand how the cells of the brain produce qualia and consciousness, and have a certain concern that an attempt at uploading my mind into digital form may lose important parts of my self. If you haven't solved those fundamental problems of how brains produce minds, I would prefer to be revived as a biological, living being, rather than have my mind uploaded into software form.

• I understand that all choices contain risk. However, I believe that the "information" theory of identity is a more useful guide than theories of identity which tie selfhood to a physical brain. I also suspect that there will be certain advantages to be one of the first minds turned into software, and certain disadvantages. In order to try to gain those advantages, and minimize those disadvantages, I am willing to volunteer to let my cryonically-preserved brain be used for experimental mind-uploading procedures, provided that certain preconditions are met, including:

One interpretation I've seen is that ~130 is about as high as a human brain can get while still using basically the same architecture as an IQ 100 brain. The further beyond that you get, the more you're using significantly different systems. These differences may tend to be autism-related, such that the higher IQ comes at the expense of impairments.

Eliezer has recommended that one read them twice. I found this helpful.

Adams has written a lot about his voice.

He has/had spasmodic dysphonia which means (rougly) his vocal chords would spasm and seize up during normal speech. It was a huge problem for him. One path he took to getting over it was lots of voice lessons to gain greater control over his speech. What ultimately cured him, though, was a surgery that rewired the nerves in his neck.

I think the basic income is an interesting proposal for a difficult problem, but I downvoted this post.

1. This is naked political advocacy. Moreover, the comment is hyperbole and speculation. A better way to address this subject would be to try and tackle it from an EA perspective - how efficient is giving cash compared to giving services? How close could we come if we wanted to try it as charity?

2. The article is garbage. Techcrunch is not a good source for anything, even entertainment in my opinion. The article is also hyperbolic and speculative, while being littered with Straw Man, Ad Hominem, and The Worst Argument In the World. If you are interested in the topic, a much better place to go look would be the sidebar of the subreddit dedicated to basic income.

Bad arguments for a bad purpose with no data doesn't make for quality discussion.

I think HBD is a fantastic test for true rationality. It's a rare case where a scientific fact conflicts with deeply ingrained political and cultural values.

Unfortunately it might also be an area where epistemic and instrumental rationality clash. In fact, most of the world does not have freedom of speech in the same way the US does - if one advocated HBD in, say, Germany, could one be thrown in prison in the same way people are imprisoned for saying 'seig heil'? On reflection, that might be a bad example, because there is a good reason why laws prohibiting Nazism exist in specifically Germany, but laws against racial hatred exist in many other countries too, and I wonder if "I am just pointing out a scientific fact, it doesn't mean I hate anyone" would be a successful legal defence when the judge and jury are not rationalists.

The people directly killed by bombs are only a tiny fraction of the casualties. Afterwards you have the possibility of nuclear winter, which could radically change the climate for the worse. You have contamination of vast amounts of farmland and food supplies, and the destruction of the global economy. Even countries that weren't hit directly would be have tons of issues and would probably collapse.

The study I am thinking of did account for this. It is thought that nuclear winter would last 6 months (based on global cooling from very large volcanic eruptions, 3 km^3 of ash cools the planet by 0.5 degrees for 6 months) and in the worst-case scenario this happens at the right time of the year to make the harvests fail. Africa starves and takes high casualties even without being nuked, while Japan raids nearby countries for food. I'm not sure why they singled out Japan for stealing food, maybe they were still angry over WWII or had some other reason to believe that Japan would behave like that.

There have been quite a few airburst nuclear tests, and the background radiation on earth has barely changed. While the half life of uranium is millions or billions of years (depending upon isotope) the products of a nuclear explosion have very short half-lives - the worst would be over within an hour. Not only do we not have enough bombs to contaminate the world, but ground zero would be habitable again after a few months. Hiroshima was rebuilt, not abandoned, after WWII.

Yes, I agree many countries would collaspe, and moreover that the primary combatants quite possibly would take over 90% casualties, the low global rate being largely because many countries emerge unscathed. If there were some reason for most countries to be nuked, and enough bombs to nuke them all, then 90% global casualties is a possiblity, and while I think a nuclear war between allmost all countries is unlikly, its still a lot more likly then 90% of humanity killed by environmental or political collapse.

Sudden changes to the climate are bad. In the past the climate changed very very slowly, so that life had a chance to adapt.

Life is pretty good at surviving. Humans can live in the arctic circle and in tropical rainforest. Hopefully, by this time we would also have better technology to help us.

CO2 is acidifying the oceans and could destroy most of the oceans ecosystems.

This is a little worrying. I thought it was mostly 'just' the corral reefs, which, while very pretty, are not vital to everything.

The case for being pro-choice is so strong even neoreactionaries and fascists are pro-choice. Interestingly, on this specific issue, conservatives are to the right of fascists!

Probably more a case of demographics than the ideology itself. Total speculation, but I imagine someone who identifies as fascist is in the "liberal" demographic but happens to be into weird political beliefs in general, while someone who identifies as conservative might have just inherited that view from their family and upbringing. In general, I think old "conservative social issues" are becoming less popular among the younger generation. As our culture changes and gays and abortion become normal, the objections to them will decrease.

On political opinions, HBD is about an objective, falsifiable, scientifically mesureable characteristic of the world, whereas the other opinions are opinions. Opinions on HBD also correlates strongly with other views, and so I am interested as to how poeple's opinions would change if it was proved to them that the truth about HBD is the opposite of what they currently believe it to be. Would their other views change?

I think HBD is a fantastic test for true rationality. It's a rare case where a scientific fact conflicts with deeply ingrained political and cultural values.

The worst case scenario for nuclear war at the hight of the cold war was about 40% of humanity dies. I suppose that its possible that vast numbers of new bombs could be built, without similar investment in bomb shelters, but this does seem a little implausible.

The people directly killed by bombs are only a tiny fraction of the casualties. Afterwards you have the possibility of nuclear winter, which could radically change the climate for the worse. You have contamination of vast amounts of farmland and food supplies, and the destruction of the global economy. Even countries that weren't hit directly would be have tons of issues and would probably collapse.

In the 'Cretaceous hothouse' period CO2 levels were 8x higher, and there was still enough vegetation to support giant dinosaurs far bigger than the largest animal today. The worst-case scenarios are a decrease in economic growth and a migrant crisis, not 90% of humanity dies.

Sudden changes to the climate are bad. In the past the climate changed very very slowly, so that life had a chance to adapt. CO2 is acidifying the oceans and could destroy most of the oceans ecosystems. I tend to agree that humanity would probably survive though.

Have you considered adding the geometric mean for certain questions? It should help a bit to deal with extreamly large answers.

Some things I found interesting:

1) The case for being pro-choice is so strong even neoreactionaries and fascists are pro-choice. Interestingly, on this specific issue, conservatives are to the right of fascists!

2) On political opinions, HBD is about an objective, falsifiable, scientifically mesureable characteristic of the world, whereas the other opinions are opinions. Opinions on HBD also correlates strongly with other views, and so I am interested as to how poeple's opinions would change if it was proved to them that the truth about HBD is the opposite of what they currently believe it to be. Would their other views change?

3) Some of the '90% of humanity die' risks seem extremely low probability to me, and I am perplexed by why so many people chose them:

Nuclear war: +4.800% 326 (20.6%)

The worst case scenario for nuclear war at the hight of the cold war was about 40% of humanity dies. I suppose that its possible that vast numbers of new bombs could be built, without similar investment in bomb shelters, but this does seem a little implausible.

Environmental collapse (including global warming): +1.500% 252 (16.0%)

In the 'Cretaceous hothouse' period CO2 levels were 8x higher, and there was still enough vegetation to support giant dinosaurs far bigger than the largest animal today. The worst-case scenarios are a decrease in economic growth and a migrant crisis, not 90% of humanity dies.

Economic / political collapse: -1.400% 136 (8.6%)

Its difficult enough to imagine political collapse killing 90% of the population in one country. The Syrian civil war has killed 3% of the population. The Japanese invasion of China killed 4%. I'm aware of some wars that killed 50% - parts of the thirty years war, the Mongol invasion of China - but I think these were combined with famines or disease outbreaks. In the 1870 Japanese civil war, the samurai combatants took over 99% casualties, but the non-combatants survived. 90% deaths of one country would be mind-boggling. But 90% deaths of the whole of humanity? A political collapse that affects the entire world, including countries of every culture? Including China and other countries that are not democracies?

Edit: I dug through OP's post history and found this thread. The thread gives better context to what /u/reguru is trying to say.

A tip: very little is gained by couching your ideas in this self-aggrandizing, condescending tone. Your over-reliance on second person is also an annoying tic, though some make it work. You don't, however.

You come off as very arrogant and immature, and very few people will bother wading through this. The few that will do it only in hopes of correcting you.

If you're at all interested in improving the quality of your writing, consider, at the very least, reading a few other top level, highly upvoted posts. They do not have these problems, and you'd be served by emulating them.

Reality is arational. Everything you do is arational.

"Reality is arational." is an easily defensible position, though it would take some work to make an idea worth entertaining out of it.

"Everything you do is arational." is flatly solipsistic and useless. You must agree that words have meaning, if only subjunctively, by your usage of them. 'Rational' means something, and it describes behavior. Behavior is goal-directed, and be judged by how well it achieves those goals. That is what bare rationalism is. If you disagree with this, you'll need better justifications.

You aren't aware of it because you lack awareness. By becoming aware that you are unaware, you have increased your awareness.

Contradiction can be used for effect, but always err on the side of 'don't do it'. You're work is better served rigorous than poetic.

Yet still, you will always lack awareness. ... My definition of awareness is the subjective experience of separating thoughts from awareness. You can become aware of thoughts, and if an "I" thought appears, that was not you, you simply became aware of it.

Y'know, despite myself, I found this passage genuinely pleasing on a aesthetic level. It's a mess of negation and recursion and strange loops that I can only compare to the bizarre logic of time travel, or perhaps the descriptive amalgams of cosmic horror. This is not a compliment.

You seem to be equating awareness with at least four different things, three if that was supposed to be a recursive definition.

1) awareness as total self-knowledge ("you will always lack awareness") Since this is pure armchair speculation anyway, I'm sure the mere existence of quines makes "You will never reach total awareness" false as a theorectical proposition.

2) awareness as consciousness/the self ("separating thoughts from awareness")

3) awareness as noticing something ("You can become aware of thoughts,")

4) your own definition

My point is that I think that you, confuse the map for the territory. Now I made the same mistake, because "map not being the territory" is a map. In all actuality, all types of communication are, and equally untrue.

Solipsistic and useless.

The way I see it is that reality is the way it is and it is arational. Gravity does not exist. We may create a layer on top of arational reality and call it reality, while in all actuality it is a virtual reality.

Useless and solipsistic.

It is simply a human projection on top of the arational reality. Arationality is completely independent of reasoning, everything rational and irrational exists within a matrix (virtual reality) of the arational.

Do I need to say it?

It's fine to do physics, math or other science but it is still a human projection.

I think this is false. Mathematics is interesting precisely because of its non-humanity. The joy of doing mathematics is incommensurate with an imagination of the joy of doing mathematics. The missing ingredient, of course, is the unknown, of discovering something outside yourself.

To call it a human projection is to miss the entire point of preforming these actions in the first place, which is curiosity, exploring the unknown.

You might think that there is no alternative to using maps (like I do here) but I am simply pointing out that you can discover arational reality without creating another map to point out its existence.

The "map/territory" dichotomy is just another map, as you yourself said. In reality, there is only atoms and the void. Self/other, subject/object are all a part of reality itself, and the delineation is only useful, never necessary.

If you want to find out for yourself, what happens when you become silent of all thoughts? Does reality disappear?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

The point is that you can sit down, become aware of all the maps

you cannot

Because it is an illusion. The illusion that some maps are better than others when they are all the same from the perspective of the arational.

The arational has no perspective, because it is not the type of thing to have perspectives. Reality has no mind, no agency.

Reality is, however, patterned and models exploit this patterning.

Suppose one person (call her Alice) choose to act as if there exists models better than other models, while another person (call him Bob) chooses to not do this. One may object to using words like 'true' or 'accurate' to describe their approaches, but there is a certain quality the former would have that the latter does not. The former may make a habit ingesting certain objects, or preforming pointless tasks for useless trinkets. The other would object that 'hunger' and 'money' are just models and no model is better than another.

These approaches lead to certain outcomes. Again, one might not like describing one as 'true' and the other as 'false', but there is a certain pattern there to be found there.

What's the point of this post? It's an invitation, you have to figure it out yourself.

While I'm sure there are many people here who enjoy puzzles, obscurantism is frowned upon.

The social contract of lesswrong is the opposite of your epigram: "What's the point of this post?" You have to figure that out on your own. It's not our job, but yours. I don't doubt you have some insight here. I'm sure it could even be couched into a post fit for this community. But you have to do the job of filtering your thoughts, crafting your posts and hoping against hope you didn't make an embarrassing mistake.

Finally, I apologize for combative tone of this post. This was written out of sympathy rather than disgust or disrespect. (at the very least, notice if being offensive was my aim, I could have done a better job of it)

sounds similar to my experience. You might want to set up a review process once a week (Sunday night is usually convenient) so that you can check if you are still on track with the goal.

Minor failures or small setbacks will happen, finding a way to ensure they don't become drawn out failures will likely keep you on track.

I have some in transit to me (in Australia) will report on the OT when they get here.

bring about the future we would rather live in

Attacking the ability of journalists to uncover misdeads of powerful individuals seems to be the opposite. Investigative journalism is under enough attacks as it is.

Shortly after the very early effects, it will have a net positive effect of creating news of positive value, protecting the media from escalating negativity, and bringing about the future we want to see in the world.

The future I want to live in isn't one where the 4th estage can't fights against misdeeds by powerful people.

Scott Bakker published the latest book in his 2nd Apocalypse series. The Great Ordeal. It's pretty awesome.

The series is 6 books in. The basic premise is that there is a secret monastery where people train to try and become fully aware of themselves, in the sense that they understand why/how they do everything. Mental martial artists, if that makes any sense, ultimate goal is to become "self moving souls", and escape the tyranny of cause and effect. Our protag has to leave the monastery and go out into the world, which is a typical fantasy bronze age hellhole.

Name and shame media entities that fail to comply with no negative press, or fail to consider a policy.

Ironically, this suggestion is precisely the kind of "negative press" you ostensibly want to eradicate.

You haven't nearly done enough to explain why so called negative press is bad, nor what exactly it is. Many good things have resulted from a negative exposé published by the media.

I'm certainly not an expert, but I'll try to give some advice.

For game theory proper there's Yvain's sequence (and Schelling's book, which it's based off of) and/or Tadelis's Game Theory.

A good way to get to mechanism design might be through introductory economics and auction theory. McAfee's Introduction to Economic Analysis is an open econ textbook, good for people with a solid understanding of basic calculus. It assumes this bit of math so that the presentation is a lot shorter and more elegant. (Apostol is my calculus textbook of choice. If you've never done math where you actually have to prove things, then Velleman's How to Prove It will get you started. If you can't prove then you're just memorizing passwords. It's easier than it seems at first.) After IEA, Krishna's Auction Theory will segue from basic auction theory to basic mechanism design. Haven't gotten much further than that.

There's also a mechanism design sequence on LW. I haven't looked at it too closely and it might move too quickly for someone without the right background.

Open Phil's write-up on the grant has more details about the project.

I happen to be working on that at the office. Here is a snapshot of the opinion landscape (all from PubMed):

Iwamoto J. Vitamin K₂ therapy for postmenopausal osteoporosis. Nutrients. 2014 May 16;6(5):1971-80.

DiNicolantonio JJ, Bhutani J, O'Keefe JH. The health benefits of vitamin K. Open Heart. 2015 Oct 6;2(1):e000300.

Huang ZB, Wan SL, Lu YJ, Ning L, Liu C, Fan SW. Does vitamin K2 play a role in the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis for postmenopausal women: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Osteoporos Int. 2015 Mar;26(3):1175-86.

Falcone TD, Kim SS, Cortazzo MH. Vitamin K: fracture prevention and beyond. PM R. 2011 Jun;3(6 Suppl 1):S82-7.

Maresz K. Proper Calcium Use: Vitamin K2 as a Promoter of Bone and Cardiovascular Health. Integr Med (Encinitas). 2015 Feb;14(1):34-9.

Hamidi MS, Cheung AM. Vitamin K and musculoskeletal health in postmenopausal women. Mol Nutr Food Res. 2014 Aug;58(8):1647-57.

Stevenson M, Lloyd-Jones M, Papaioannou D. Vitamin K to prevent fractures in older women: systematic review and economic evaluation. Health Technol Assess. 2009 Sep;13(45):iii-xi, 1-134.

Fang Y, Hu C, Tao X, Wan Y, Tao F. Effect of vitamin K on bone mineral density: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. J Bone Miner Metab. 2012 Jan;30(1):60-8.

Vermeer C, Theuwissen E. Vitamin K, osteoporosis and degenerative diseases of ageing. Menopause Int. 2011 Mar;17(1):19-23.

Azuma K, Ouchi Y, Inoue S. Vitamin K: novel molecular mechanisms of action and its roles in osteoporosis. Geriatr Gerontol Int. 2014 Jan;14(1):1-7.

Hamidi MS, Gajic-Veljanoski O, Cheung AM. Vitamin K and bone health. J Clin Densitom. 2013 Oct-Dec;16(4):409-13.

Shah K, Gleason L, Villareal DT. Vitamin K and bone health in older adults. J Nutr Gerontol Geriatr. 2014;33(1):10-22.

Iwamoto J, Takeda T, Sato Y. Menatetrenone (vitamin K2) and bone quality in the treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis. Nutr Rev. 2006 Dec;64(12):509-17.

Pearson DA. Bone health and osteoporosis: the role of vitamin K and potential antagonism by anticoagulants. Nutr Clin Pract. 2007 Oct;22(5):517-44.

Gundberg CM, Lian JB, Booth SL. Vitamin K-dependent carboxylation of osteocalcin: friend or foe? Adv Nutr. 2012 Mar 1;3(2):149-57.

Bügel S. Vitamin K and bone health in adult humans. Vitam Horm. 2008;78:393-416.

Booth SL. Vitamin K status in the elderly. Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care. 2007 Jan;10(1):20-3.

Shea MK, Booth SL. Update on the role of vitamin K in skeletal health. Nutr Rev. 2008 Oct;66(10):549-57.

Iwamoto J, Sato Y, Takeda T, Matsumoto H. High-dose vitamin K supplementation reduces fracture incidence in postmenopausal women: a review of the literature. Nutr Res. 2009 Apr;29(4):221-8.

Iwamoto J, Matsumoto H, Takeda T. Efficacy of menatetrenone (vitamin K2) against non-vertebral and hip fractures in patients with neurological diseases: meta-analysis of three randomized, controlled trials. Clin Drug Investig. 2009;29(7):471-9.

Iwamoto J, Sato Y. Menatetrenone for the treatment of osteoporosis. Expert Opin Pharmacother. 2013 Mar;14(4):449-58.

Cranenburg EC, Schurgers LJ, Vermeer C. Vitamin K: the coagulation vitamin that became omnipotent. Thromb Haemost. 2007 Jul;98(1):120-5.

Guralp O, Erel CT. Effects of vitamin K in postmenopausal women: mini review. Maturitas. 2014 Mar;77(3):294-9.

As a matter of writing style, excessive use of hedging makes your writing harder to read. It's better to hedge once at the beginning of a paragraph and then state the following claims directly, or to hedge explicitly at the top of your article. At SlateStarCodex Scott sometimes puts explicit "Epistemic Status" claims at the top of the article (I first saw this at another site in the LW sphere quite a few years ago, but I can't remember where, and I'm glad to have seen it spread).

I am definitely guilty of excessive hedging when I write comments or essays, and I always have to go back and edit out "I think" and "it seems" from half my sentences.

On Moldbug from 2012.

Saw the site mentioned on Breibart:

Link: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

Money Quote:

...Elsewhere on the internet, another fearsomely intelligent group of thinkers prepared to assault the secular religions of the establishment: the neoreactionaries, also known as #NRx.

Neoreactionaries appeared quite by accident, growing from debates on LessWrong.com, a community blog set up by Silicon Valley machine intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. The purpose of the blog was to explore ways to apply the latest research on cognitive science to overcome human bias, including bias in political thought and philosophy.

LessWrong urged its community members to think like machines rather than humans. Contributors were encouraged to strip away self-censorship, concern for one’s social standing, concern for other people’s feelings, and any other inhibitors to rational thought. It’s not hard to see how a group of heretical, piety-destroying thinkers emerged from this environment — nor how their rational approach might clash with the feelings-first mentality of much contemporary journalism and even academic writing.

Led by philosopher Nick Land and computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, this group began a ..."

I wasn't around back in the day, but this is nonsense, right? Nrx didn't start on lesswrong, yeah?

Have you considered posting these things to your blog instead?

Agreed! What would be the best approach (I'm a PhD student and vector-borne disease epidemiologist)?

• Writing one or more popular/lay articles
• Writing one or more technical/scholarly articles
• Writing a popular/lay book
• Writing a technical/scholarly book
• Starting an advocacy non-profit
• Performing an explicit cost-benefit analysis
• Modelling to determine the necessary conditions for eradication
• Something else... ?

The key is that signing up for inverse cryonics should be mathematically identical to not signing up for cryonics.

Actually, no, it is not. In inverse cryonics what you place at risk is a few decades of your life. That's the most you can lose. Say, around 60 years. And what you can win is 60 * 365 = about $22K. In actual cryonics you are guaranteed to lose some $X and you can win your IMMORTAL SOUL, err... sorry, I mean some very large number of years in PARADISE, um, there seems to be some interference going on, I meant in a technologically advanced society. These two bets are not identical at all.

There's about 3200 species of mosquito. < 200 bite humans and perhaps a dozen are major disease vectors for humans.

We extinct about 150 species per day without really trying. Increasing the number of species we push to extinction by 10% for a single day would save half a million lives per year.

It's not clear to me how this "fairness" criteria is supposed to work. If you simply don't include S among the predictors, then for any given x in X, the classification of x will be 'independent' of S in that a counterfactual x' with the exact same features but different S would be classified the exact same way. OTOH if you're aiming to have Y be uncorrelated with S even without controlling for X, this essentially requires adding S as a 'predictor' too; e.g. consider the Simpson paradox. But this is a weird operationalization of 'fairness'.

introducing this business about "The Problem" adds nothing but obfuscation.

Point taken. will think about how to better describe the thing.

You encountered someone who seemed to have lots of problems. You concluded that he has lots of problems. Amazing!

Prior to talking me; some of these problems had been around for a number of years. These problems didn't come from one day to the next; they built up. The spiral problem is maybe better described as a problem with the approach to the rest of the problems. In that sense it's one that is hard to see when you are too busy tackling the object-level problems...

Uncharitable paraphrase of this post: "The Problem is that this person actually has not one problem but many problems."

try: "the problem is the person's other problems are getting in the way of actually fixing any of the problems."

One way would be to expose an API to plugins but remain closed-source.

Another way would be to open-source the code but not release it under a CC license.

Yet another would be to release the app as {share|nag|beg|cripple|etc}ware.

Yet another would be to make the app free but charge for support and enhancements (freemium).

Technology:

• "The Slow Winter" (Mickens)
• "Helium Dreams: A new generation of airships is born"
• "A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names", Meiklejohn et al 2013
• "Liking What You See: A Documentary", by Ted Chiang

Economics:

• "The Emergence of an Informal Health-Care Sector in North Korea", Soh et al 2016
• "The True Story Of The Great Marijuana Crash Of 2011"
• "How Interest Rates Were Set, 2500 BC - 1000 AD"
• "How America's Favorite Sports Betting Expert Turned A Sucker's Game Into An Industry"
• "Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money"
• "Information, Beliefs, and Trading"
• "Yet another modest proposal: The Roentgen Standard"

Philosophy:

• "Squashed Philosophers"
• "SCP-988"

Fiction:

• There Is No Anti-Memetics Division, by Sam Hughes
• "Seventy-Two Letters", by Ted Chiang
• "Equoid", by Charles Stross
• "Calvin & Muad'dib" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
• "The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane", by John Myers Myers (The fall of the Alamo, in alliterative verse.)
• "Suminoe Beach", by Kuramochi Chitose
• "Poverty", by Moon Byung-ran
• Sanderson's First Law

Everything is heritable:

• "Predicting educational achievement from DNA", Selzam et al 2016 (supplement; polygenic scores now predict 3.5% of intelligence, 7% of family SES, and 9% of education)
• "Chinese scientists to pioneer first human CRISPR trial: Gene-editing technique to treat lung cancer is due to be tested in people in August"
• "Genetically-Mediated Associations Between Measures of Childhood Character and Academic Achievement", Tucker-Drob et al 2016
• "The continuing value of twin studies in the -omics era", van Dongen et al 2012
• "Estimate of disease heritability using 4.7 million familial relationships inferred from electronic health records", Polubriaginof 2016
• "Evolution Is Happening Faster Than We Thought" (Coyne commentary)
• "Diagnoses in Siblings of Probands With Autism Spectrum Disorders", Jokiranta-Olkoniemi et al 2016 (see also "Different neurodevelopmental symptoms have a common genetic etiology", Pettersson et al 2013)
• "Autism As a Disorder of High Intelligence", Crespi 2016 (Seems to overemphasize the role of common variants and underplay all the severe de novo mutations discovered in autism cases.)
• "Detecting Genome-wide Variants of Eurasian Facial Shape Differentiation: DNA based Face Prediction Tested in Forensic Scenario", Qiao et al 2016
• "Healthy ageing of cloned sheep", Sinclair et al 2016

Politics/religion:

• "Preparing for the Possibility of a North Korean Collapse", Bennett 2013 (I didn't know many of those details about how the East German collapse was able to go so smoothly, or that Kim Jong-Il had intimidated his subordinates during the '90s famines with footage of impoverished East German elites.)
• "Police, Prosecutors and Judges Rely on a Flawed \$2 Drug Test That Puts Innocent People Behind Bars"
• "How Successful Was Christianity?"
• "Opium Made Easy"
• France's untouchables
• "Seeds of Doubt: An activist's controversial crusade against genetically modified crops"
• "Hell is the Absence of God", by Ted Chiang
• "The shadow commander: Qassem Suleimani is the Iranian operative who has been reshaping the Middle East. Now he's directing Assad's war in Syria"

AI:

• "Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems", Taylor et al 2016
• "Assessing Human Error Against a Benchmark of Perfection" (Difficulty of a chess endgame position predicts mistakes far better than time constraints or chess ability. Not necessarily surprising - as chess AIs demonstrate, humans only span a fraction of the possible range of objective chess playing ability, so individual human differences in ability won't matter much.)
• "Accelerating Eulerian Fluid Simulation With Convolutional Networks" (neural network all the things)

Statistics/meta-science:

• "Preventing future offending of delinquents and offenders: what have we learned from experiments and meta-analyses?", Mackenzie & Farrington 2015
• "Why It Took Social Science Years to Correct a Simple Error About 'Psychoticism'"
• "Can Results-Free Review Reduce Publication Bias? The Results and Implications of a Pilot Study", Findley et al 2016 (on result-blind peer review)
• "Laplace the Bayesianista and the Mass of Saturn"
• "Our Fathers of Old", Rudyard Kipling

Psychology/biology:

• Do Portia spiders have a mind? (commentary)
• "The Medical Mystery Behind the Itch"
• "United States of Paranoia: They See Gangs of Stalkers"
• "New Drug Development: Estimating entry from human clinical trials", Adams & Brantner 2003
• "The Efficacy of Psychological, Educational, and Behavioral Treatment: Confirmation From Meta-Analysis", Lipsey & Wilson 1993 (incidentally, published studies yield mean effects 0.14 SDs larger than unpublished studies.)
• "Could Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?"
• "Breast-feeding the microbiome"
• "Dengue fever cases drop 91% in neighbourhood of Piracicaba, Brazil, where Oxitec's Friendly Aedes were released"
• "Genetically Engineering an Icon: Can Biotech Bring the Chestnut Back to America's Forests?"
• "A Cavity-Fighting Liquid Lets Kids Avoid Dentists' Drills"
• Have a nice day

I think killing babies is uniquely horrible rather than uniquely harmful.

Professor Moriarty's evil plan to destroy the world and kill everyone is nearing completion. All he has to do is to press the big red button on the world-destroying machine. You are standing nearby with a hand grenade and could kill Moriarty. But, anticipating this sort of problem, he has taken care to have the whole area filled with cute babies.

You should probably throw the hand grenade even though it will kill lots of babies. But if your response to this situation is anything like "Yessss! Finally I get to kill some babies!" then, although I suppose in some sense I'm glad it's you rather than someone more scrupulous in this bizarre situation, you are a terrible person and the world needs fewer people like you and in the less-artificial contexts that make up maybe 99.9999% of real situations your enthusiasm for baby-killing will not be any sort of advantage to anyone.

(There is a big difference, in principle, between the questions "Will doing X make the world a better place on balance than not doing X?" and "Is X the sort of thing a good rather than a bad person would do?". Unfortunately, everyday moral discourse doesn't make that distinction very clearly. Fortunately, in most actually-arising situations (I think) the two questions have similar answers.)

(separate reply, so you can downvote either or both points)

I don't think anyone's tried to poll abortion feelings on LW, and expect the topic to be fairly mind-killing. For myself, I tend not to see moment-of-birth as much of a moral turning point - it's about the same badness to me whether the euthanasia takes place an hour before, or during, or an hour after delivery. Somewhere long before that, the badness of never existing changes to the badness of probably-but-then-not existing, and then to the badness of almost-but-then-not-existing, and then to existing-then-not, and then later to existing-and-understanding-then-not.

It's a continuum of unpleasant to reprehensible, not a switch between acceptible and not.

How would you have this conversation? Where would you have asked other questions differently to what I asked?

A few weeks ago I punched a housemate in the face ten times, breaking her nose;

So, why isn't he in jail? or that's considered to be a normal interaction in his social circles?

Good article overall but if the people at the Center for Policing Equity found no racial bias in police shootings do you think they would have published the results? And if they did publish such a study would Salon have let you publish an article uncritically citing its conclusions? In short: shouldn't file drawer effects cause us to be wary of this part of your article?

No, mainly because Elon Musk's concern about AI risk added more prestige than Thiel had.

It seems like you lack in your list that moving usually destroys a lot of established habits and provides room for new habits.

Interestingly, no notable historical group has combined both the genocidal and suicidal urges.

Actually such groups existed, for example the Khmer Rouge turned in on themselves after killing their enemies. Something similar happened with the movement lead by Zhang Xianzhong only to a much greater extent, i.e., they more-or-less depopulated the province of Sichuan, including killing themselves.

In 20 century most risks were created by superpowers. Should we include them in the list of potential agents?

Also it seems that some risks are non-agential, as they result from collective behaviors of a group of agents, like arms race, capitalism, resource depletion, overpopulation etc.

Furthermore, implementing stricter regulations on CO2 emissions could decrease the probability of extreme ecoterrorism and/or apocalyptic terrorism, since environmental degradation is a “trigger” for both.

Disregarding any discussion of legitimate climate concerns, isn't this a really bad decision? Isn't it better to be unblackmailable, to disincentivize blackmail.

tl;dr Obama doesn't really now what he's talking about but tries to use talking points to make sense of the new project.

"Utilitarianism is a theory in normative ethics holding that the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility." -Wikipedia

The very next sentence starts with "Utility is defined in various ways..." It is entirely possible for there to be utility functions that treat sentient beings differently. John Stuart Mill may have phrased it as "the greatest good for the greatest number" but the clutch is in the word "good" which is left undefined. This is as opposed to, say, virtue ethics which doesn't care per se about the consequences of actions.

https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-get-Wi-Fi-for-free-at-a-hotel/answer/Yishan-Wong

Want free wifi when staying at an hotel? Ask for it. Of course!, Duh, seems so obvious now that I think about it.