Hell yes this is a problem! Hours worked and hourly pay are very much correlated (it costs a lot to get someone to work that 80th or 120th hour in a week) and part time jobs often don't come with health benefits. Many workers have the opposite problem - the local retail store won't increase their hours and they never hire anyone full time ever because then they would have to provide health insurance.

Needing to have a job to support myself. But I suspect that is a problem that entrepreneurs will have great difficulty solving.

Sorry, can't see why situation III is so bad. I generally like the fact that I like spending time with my husband. On the other hand, I can almost imagine the 'and then zombie apocalypse happened and she had to bash his head in with the frying pan' end of story. What exactly did you have in mind?

The development of Native Americans has been stunted and they simply exist within the controlled conditions imposed by the new civilization now. They aren't all dead, but they can't actually control their own destiny as a people. Native American reservations seem like exactly the sort of thing aliens might put us in. Very limited control over our own affairs in desolate parts of the universe with the addition of welfare payments to give us some sort of quality of life.

We create friendly AI that maximizes the happiness of humans. This AI figures that we would be happiest in our galaxy if we were alone.

His name is literally Dagon.

You misunderstood my point.

The Europeans did not "proceed with a controlled extermination of the population". Yet, what happened to that population?

You don't need to start with a deliberate decision to exterminate in order to end up with almost none of the original population. Sometimes you just need to not care much.

I'm surprised to find such rhetoric on this site. There is an image now popularized by certain political activists and ideologically-driven cartoons, which depict the colonization of the Americas as a mockery of the D-Day landing, with peaceful Natives standing on the shore and smiling, while gun-toting Europeans jump out of the ships and start shooting at them. That image is even more false than the racist depictions in the late 19th century glorifying the westward expansion of the USA while vilifying the natives.

The truth is much more complicated than that.

If you look at the big picture, there was no such conquest in America like the Mongol invasion. There wasn't even a concentrated "every newcomer versus every native" warfare. The diverse European nations fought among themselves a lot, the Natives also fought among themselves a lot, both before and after the arrival of the Europeans. Europeans allied themselves with the Natives at least as often as they fought against them. Even the history of the unquestionably ruthless conquistadors like Cortez didn't feature an army of Europeans set out to exterminate a specific ethnicity. He only had a few hundred Europeans with him, and had tens of thousands of Native allies. If you look at the whole history from the beginning, there was no concentrated military invasion with the intent to conquer a continent. Everything happened during a relatively long period of time. The settlements coexisted peacefully with the natives in multiple occasions, traded with each other, and when conflict developed between them it was no more different than any conflict at any other place on the planet. Conflict develops sooner or later, in the new world just as in the old world. Although there certainly were acts of injustice, the bigger picture is that there was no central "us vs them", not in any stronger form than how the European powers fought wars among themselves. The Natives had the disadvantage of the diseases as other commenters have already stated, but also of the smaller numbers, of the less advanced societal structures (the civilizations of the Old World needed a lot of time between living in tribes and developing forms of governments sufficient to lead nations of millions) and of inferior technology. The term out-competed is much more fitting than exterminated, which is a very biased and politically loaded word.

You cannot compare the colonization of the Americas to the scenario when a starfleet arrives to the planet and proceeds with a controlled extermination of the population.

designing technology is a special case of prediction

It's possible to be very good at prediction but still rather bad at design. Suppose you have a black box that does physics simulations with perfect accuracy. Then you can predict exactly what will happen if you build any given thing, by asking the black box. But it won't, of itself, give you ideas about what things to ask it about, or understanding of why it produces the results it does beyond "that's how the physics works out".

(To be good at design you do, I think, need to be pretty good at prediction.)

To the speed section, you might want to add examples of parallel learning. Parallelizing learning of robot arm manipulation, or parallel playing of Atari games, which are both (much) faster in terms of wallclock time and also can be more sample and resource efficient (A3C actually can be more sample-efficient than DQN with multiple independent agents, and it doesn't need to waste a great deal of RAM and computation on the experience replay).

This.

Also, schlep alert: this might be the densest regulatory thicket outside of healthcare, with huge variation in standards at (at least?) the state/province level. In my little environment of 13 million Ontarians, a recent arbitrary change of the teacher/child ratio allegedly drove a good many daycares out of business.

Also, parents are insane (source: am parent).

Seconding resuf's comments: both that this is a pretty good, professional looking video, but also that it's another instance of you seeming to listen to some of the exact-letter-of-the-request when people ask you to stop or do things differently, without understanding the underlying reasons why people are upset.

And that this is especially important if your goal is to be a public-facing outreach organization.

Having more workers (shorter hours for each worker) adds administrative costs. I have no idea whether employers are over-estimating those costs.

Can someone here come up with any sort of realistic value system a foreign civilisation might have that would result in it not destroying the human race, or at least permanently stunting our continued development, should they become aware of us?

Not being bored. Living systems (and presumably more so for living systems that include intelligence) show more complex behavior than dead systems.

The part about healthcare is USA-specific, but the relationship between total hours and total pay is nonlinear at other places, too.

In Slovakia, the healthcare is set up so that everyone pays a fixed fraction of their income, and then everyone receives exactly the same healthcare regardless of how much they paid. So it shouldn't have any impact on hourly rate.

Yet, it is difficult to find a part-time work on the market. When I tried it, I had to work for 50% of my previous salary just to reduce the work to 4 days a week, and the employer still believed they were doing me a favor. (After a few weeks I decided that getting 50% of money for 80% of time is not a smart deal, so I quit.)

I believe the problem is signalling. Almost everyone is okay with working full-time; especially men. (Women can use having small kids as an excuse for a part-time job, but that also dramatically reduces their hourly rate, which is an important part of the pay gap.) If you are a man unwilling to work full-time, it makes you weird.

So it's not like the employer literally needs you there 5 days a week. It's simply a decision to not hire a weirdo, when there are non-weird candidates available. If you differ from the majority by not willing to work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, who knows what else is weird about you? Why take the unnecessary risk? Also, well-paid employees are supposed pretend they love their job; and by asking for a part-time job you show too clearly that you actually care about something else more.

Thus, I sometimes had jobs where I was able to spend up to 50% of my working time just browsing websites from the company computer. But no comparably well paid option where I could officially work 4 days a week, or 6 hours a day, and then simply go home.

(I was also trying to get home office, so that instead of browsing the web I could do something useful. But the companies where the employees spend much time online are usually on some level aware of what is happening, so they don't allow home office. As long as everyone must stay in the building the whole day, the management can keep pretending that people are actually working.)

I believe that if for example 50% of people working in some profession would demand part-time work, this problem would mostly disappear. Then, wanting to work part-time would simply be normal. But that's a coordination problem, and I don't even know how many people would actually be interested in working part-time if that would be a legitimate option (with the same hourly rate).

The Europeans did not "proceed with a controlled extermination of the population". Yet, what happened to that population?

They still exist... so they were not exterminated? They did not carry out purposeful extermination, and in fact the indigenous people were not exterminated. So what exactly are you arguing?

The only thing that was very truly devastating to indigenous populations was smallpox exposure, and that was an accident. Also lots of internal wars, famine, civilization collapse, etc. But most of that was triggered by the smallpox plague 30+% die-off.

The fact that Europeans outnumber indigenous people 100:1 in north america (less so in central and south america) isn't some purposeful, master plan of the European colonialists. It's just the inevitable outcome of a number of historical accidents with compounding effects.

The issue is the standard "The AI neither loves you nor hates you, but you're made out of atoms...". The Europeans did not desire to wipe out Native Americans, they just wanted land and no annoying people who kept on shooting arrows at them.

Because it would not fit into our values to consider exterminating them as the primary choice.

Did you ask the Native Americans whether they hold a similar opinion?

If we developed practical interstellar travel, and went to a star system with an intelligent species somewhat below our technological level, our first choice would probably not be annihilating them. Why? Because it would not fit into our values to consider exterminating them as the primary choice. And how did we develop our values like this? I guess at least in some part it's because we evolved and built our civilizations among plenty of species of animals, some of which we hunted for food (and not all of them to extinction, and even those which got extinct, wiping them out was not our goal), some of which we domesticated, and plenty of which we left alone. We also learned that other species besides us have a role in the natural cycle, and it was never in our interest to wipe out other species (unless in rare circumstances, when they were a pest or a dangerous disease vector).

Unless the extraterrestrial species are the only macroscopic life-form on their planet, it's likely they evolved among other species and did not exterminate them all. This might lead to them having cultural values about preserving biodiversity and not exterminating species unless really necessary.

Should probably have been posted in the open thread (not meant as a reproach)

The premise this article starts with is wrong. The argument goes that AIs can't take over the world, because they can't predict things much better than humans can. Or, conversely, that they will be able to take over because they can predict much better than humans.

Well so what if they can predict the future better? That's certainly one possible advantage of AI, but it's far from the only one. My greatest fear/hope of AI is that it will be able to design technology much better than humans. Humans didn't evolve to be engineers or computer programmers. It's really just an accident we are capable of it. Humans have such a hard time designing complex systems, keeping track of so many different things in our head, etc. Already these jobs are restricted to unusually intelligent people.

I think there are many possible optimizations to the mind to improve at these kinds of tasks. There are rare humans that are very good at these tasks, showing that human brains aren't anywhere near the peak. An AI that is optimized for them, will be able to design technologies we can't even dream of. We could theoretically make nanotechnology today, but there are so many interacting parts and complexities, humans are just unable to manage it. The internet has so much bugged software running it. It could probably be pwned in a weekend by a sufficiently powerful programming AI.

And the same is perhaps true with designing better AI algorithms, an AI optimized towards AI research, would be much better at it than humans.

Along the lines of my earlier GCTA, I've written a Wikipedia article on genetic correlations.

what's the most annoying part of your life/job?

Pain. Moderate but constant pain from old sports injuries makes me: spend money on pain meds and counter irritants, work longer hours because the pain is distracting and reduces my productivity, limit physical activity and travel, deviate from an optimal exercise routine, fall into a black hole of grumpiness occasionally.

how much would you pay for a solution?

If by "solution" you mean an easy, one-time, guaranteed fix: $10,000

You are literally asking me to solve the FAI problem right here and now.

No, I'm asking you to specify it. My point is that you can't build X if you can't even recognize X.

You seem to think Value Learning is the hard problem, getting an AI to learn what humans actually want.

Learning what humans want is pretty easy. However it's an inconsistent mess which involves many things contemporary people find unsavory. Making it all coherent and formulating a (single) policy on the basis of this mess is the hard part.

From your point of view. You gave me examples of values which you consider bad, as an argument against FAI. I'm showing you that CEV would eliminate these things.

Why would CEV eliminate things I find negative? This is just a projected typical mind fallacy. Things I consider positive and negatve are not (necessarily) things many or most people consider positive and negative. Since I don't expect to find myself in a privileged position, I should expect CEV to eliminate some things I believe are positive and impose some things I believe are negative.

Later you say that CEV will average values. I don't have average values.

If they knew all the arguments for and against religion, then their values would be more like ours. They would see how bad killing people is, and that their religion is wrong.

I see no evidence to believe this is true and lots of evidence to believe this is false.

You are essentially saying that religious people are idiots and if only you could sit them down and explain things to them, the scales would fall from their eyes and they will become atheists.This is a popular idea, but it fails real-life testing very very hard.

Define "rationality things"...

they're full of guys who'll hit on her no doubt!

So what? Do you think that is different in any street or store? On the opposite I would say that rationality meetups would tend to be more respectful of boundaries than the average group of human beings.

It is on the bets registry. I am Unknown with a new username.

This comment taken out of context kind of delighted me.

Nice plus-size women's clothing is obnoxiously expensive, compared to standard sizes.

Slashdot comment:

why do people slap "AI" label on unnecessarily? ... this is mere data analysis.

I would appreciate a service that would provide long-term guidance to programmers. More like a guild than like a job agency.

I imagine something like this: You would pay a small yearly membership fee. In return you would get an access to a guild forum (where members provide information to each other), and a subscription to a digital newspaper (where the guild provides the most important information to the members). For a higher fee, you could get some personal counseling or training. The guild would provide information about the job market; e.g. which technologies are currently in demand, and how much salary get the people who know them. It would also provide information about new technologies; e.g. a short description and a link to more resources, with an expert opinion about why this is an important thing, and how is it connected with other technologies.

Essentially, the problem I am trying to solve here is that as long as I work in a company, it is easy to lose the sight of the larger picture. My company may use a technology X, while the rest of the world is moving towards Y, but I don't notice it because I spend most of my time reading about X and solving problems related to X; the nature of my work creates a huge selection bias. And the people I talk with most often, i.e. my colleagues, have a selection bias in exactly the same direction.

Of course, once in a while I will hear about Y; but I don't know whether it is really a trend, or just another hype. Even looking at the job market, which technologies are most required, provides a distorted picture: sometimes companies are looking for X because it's the new trend, and sometimes companies are looking for X because it's a crappy technology no one wants to use, so those job positions remain open forever.

I would also love to be able to get better background info about my possible future employers; to be blunt, how much "what they tell you at the job interview" differs from how things are actually done once you are there. (I realize this would be difficult, probably impossible. First, there is a risk of the bad employers suing you for libel. Second, people may have various incentives to provide false information; e.g. to astroturf for their own company, or to badmouth competition.) Or some insider info; for example if the company is working on a several large projects, you may want to get to the project A, but you should really avoid the project B.

Some of these things can be (at least partially) solved by other ways, such as specialized websites (e.g. stack exchange, including their workplace forum) or tech conferences or knowing the right people and keeping in touch with them. But it would be convenient to have everything in one package, also with some coaching. Someone you could ask to help you with your career, to identify some blind spots you may have, to give you a honest estimate of how much money you could make with your skills if you apply for the right job or learn the additional technology that is currently missing in your portfolio. In best case, to also give you some advice about passive investment and early retirement, work-life balance, etc.

Is this a validation of "What tangled webs we weave when we seek to lie and deceive"?

Such things exist (e.g. Action Day Primary Plus where I live). They are among the more expensive options. One reason is that the brand allows them to price themselves higher, but it is also true that their costs are fundamentally higher. Their competition is home daycares that not only don't pay for added rent and employees, but take a tax write-off for using their home as their business location.

The reason daycare is expensive is because of state laws regulating daycares that mandate a certain number of kids (e.g. 6) per licensed adult. Divide a living wage for your area by that number and you'll realize there really isn't much overhead at all.

No it's not necessarily a negative outcome. I think it could go both ways, which is why I said it was "my greatest fear/hope".

Native American population is at 3 million (not included "mixed race") and the trend is that it's growing.

The native American thing isn't analogous to paperclipping because they weren't exterminated as part of a deliberate plan.

The alien encounter thing isn't all that analogous, either. It makes a little sense for paperclippers to take resources from humans, because humans are at least nearby. How much sense does it make sense to cross interstellar space to take resources from a species that is likely to fight back?

The ready made economic answer to intra species conflict is to make use of the considerable amounts of no-mans-land the universe has provided you with to stay out if each other's way.

Fortunately, Native American populations didn't plummet because they were intentionally killed, they mostly did so because of diseases brought by Europeans.

<shrug> it's consumption. Does it annoy you that a lot of money, time, and effort is spent on a big fancy dinner and then it just turns into poop? Which also emits chemical substances including the notorious dihydrogen monoxide...

Can someone here come up with any sort of realistic value system a foreign civilisation might have that would result in it not destroying the human race, or at least permanently stunting our continued development, should they become aware of us?

As has come to light with research on super intelligences, an actor does not have to hate us to destroy us, but rather realise we conflict, even in a very minor way, with its goals. As a rapidly advancing intelligent civilisation, it is likely our continued growth and existence will hamper the goals of other intelligent civilisations, so it will be in their interests to either stunt our growth or wipe us out. They don't have to hate us. They might be very empathetic. But if their goals are not exactly the same as ours, it seems a huge liability to leave us to challenge their power. I know that I would stop the development of any other rapidly advancing intelligent species if I could, simply because struggles over our inevitably conflicting goals would be best avoided.

So, my question is, can you see any realistic value system a superintelligent alien civilisation might hold that would result in them not stopping us from going on growing and developing our power as a civilisation in a self-directed way? I cannot.

Given this, why is it in any way legal to broadcast our existence and location? There have been efforts in the past to send radio signals to distant solar systems. A superintelligent civilisation may well pick these up and come on the hunt for us. I think that this is one of the biggest existential threats we face, and our only real advantage is the element of stealth and surprise, which several incomprehensibly stupid individuals seem to threaten with their attempts to contact other actors in the universe. Should the military physically bomb and attack installations that attempt to broadcast our location? How do we get the people doing this stuff to stop?

A reading experience that is comparable to that offered by printed books.
E-book readers are clunky to configure and to upload to, have shitty impagination, are very slow.

Well so what if they can predict the future better? That's certainly one possible advantage of AI, but it's far from the only one. My greatest fear/hope of AI is that it will be able to design technology much better than humans.

The way I think of it, designing technology is a special case of prediction. E.g. to design a steam engine, you need to be able to predict how steam behaves in different conditions and whether, given some candidate design, the pressure from the steam will be transformed into useful work or not.

I have trouble falling asleep at normal times and have been blocking blue light at night sometimes by wearing blue-blocking glasses but also by having red lights in my home office. I would like a bright lamp whose light would automatically change based on the time of day. I recently spent $75 buying smart light bulbs whose color can be changed by my iPad but I have to change the color myself several times each day.

So your problem is that it's much harder for you to find part time work than full time work, at the same average hourly rate?

Yeah, I think people today have a major anti-trashing bias. Manufacturing and distribution have gotten so good and cheap that we should all be anti-hoarders trashing lots of stuff, then ordering new stuff as needed.

Well, but is there any value there? If you can't even give your old comics away, trashing them is not a "waste". Your 10-year-old modem might still be functioning, but if no one wants it, it has no value.

This is what annoys me the most currently in my life: perfectly fine things going to the trash.
I've read that comic series, and probably won't pick it up again. What do I do? I do not have the storage space to save them indefinitely, nor anybody is going to accept it (comics are at an all time low marketing value where I live). So I throw them away.
The same thing for books, old hdds, modems, keyboards, laptop, cd's, etc.
There's an enormous waste of material goods.

Haha the problem is that even if you have a pretty souped up gaming desktop, its computing power is probably worth less than the power costs, so you'd basically be selling just your room's power.

Maybe you live in a dorm and you don't have to pay for that power, but even then, we're talking about pennies.

The problem of "college students are annoyingly poor" is a big niche. What do you know about converting your time to money through your computer?

I don't think there's a business model there at all. Once anyone sells a forecast to anyone it's OUT THERE and hard to sell again, and this is a HARD problem, basically the definition of chaos, severely limited by supercomputer time and raw data from dedicated satellites and thousands if not millions of instruments around the world and subject to exponentially diminishing returns. Weather forecasts basically perfectly fit the definition of a public good.

Now, if you were talking establishing a new network of weather sensors and selling that DATA to institutions...

Your reaction was a lot of why I changed the title-- I clearly wasn't saying what I meant.

The original title (from memory) "Blinded by the light-- how people shut down thought because of high-status halos". It still could use some work.

This should be right up LW's alley. Reconstruct dead people as... chatbots? Quote:

And one day it will do things for you, including keeping you alive. You talk to it, and it becomes you.

The world is certainly not going to change

We'll see about that...

The study is more about how telling lies primes (for lack of a better word) you to tell more lies, not just lies to cover up the original lie.

I assume that if you want to talk with someone, ambient white noise is better.

Those of us who have read MoR already knew!

If a fliter works and you feel like sending me $100/year, I won't turn it down.

Ha.

I find your faith in the government's benevolence... disturbing.

A lot of humans care (or at least signal that they care in far-mode) about what happens in the future. That doesn't make it sane or reasonable.

Why does it matter to anyone today whether the beings inhabiting Earth's solar system in 20 centuries are descended from apes, or made of silicon, or came from elsewhere?

I am pretty sure this is not the main issue, nor is being "weird." But it is the fact that you want to work unusually few hours. That shows, as Viliam said, that you are less interested in working than on average. Employers would prefer not to have people unusually disinterested in working. The guy paying 50% of the money for 80% of the time was probably being reasonable, in terms of the expected value of a worker disinterested in working.

I agree that if everyone worked less, the supposed problem would go away. But that could only happen if everyone became less interested in working. I note that the average work week used to be much longer than 40 hours. So the fact that it has gone down somewhat, but not more, shows that people are not infinitely interested in working, but also not totally disinterested.

Tyler Cowen, talking about why the standard work week hasn't gone down to even less than 40 hours, says it is because people "like money, and like working," but that the reason they like working is that they don't like their personal lives that much. If he is right, then future improvements to personal life, as well as to the ability of less money to buy things, might end up leading to shorter work weeks. But it does not look like there is any short term solution that works well for people who are simply less interested in working than on average.

Better that there be too much food than too little!

Each human differs in their values. So it is impossible to build the machine of which you speak.

I really like that you mention world government as an existential risk. It's one of the biggest ones. Competition is a very good risk reduction process. It has been said before that if we all lived in North Korea, it may well be that the future of humanity would be quite bleak indeed. North Korea is less stable now than it would be if it was the world's government because all sorts of outside pressure contribute to its instability (technology created by more free nations, pressure from foreign governments, etc).

No organisation can ever get it right all the time. Even knowing what right is is pretty hard to do and the main way humans do it is with competition. We know certain things work and certain things don't simply because of policy diversity between nations - we can look and see which countries are successful and which aren't. A world government would destroy this. Under a world government I would totally write off humanity. I suspect we would all be doomed to die on this rock. People very much forget how precarious our current civilisation is. For thousands of years humanity floundered until Britain hit upon the ability to create continued progress through the chance development of certain institutions (rule of law, property rights, contracts, education, reading, writing, etc).

There have been wars over land since humans have existed. And non interaction, even if initially widespread, clearly eventually stopped when it became clear the world wasn't infinite and that particular parts had special value and were contested by multiple tribes. Australia being huge and largely empty didn't stop European tribes from having a series of wars increasing in intensity until we had WW1 and WW2, which were unfathomably violent and huge clashes over ideology and resources. This is what happened in Europe, where multiple tribes of comparable strength grew up near each other over a period of time. In America, settlers simply neutralized Native Americans while the settlers' technological superiority was overwhelming, a much better idea than simply letting them grow powerful enough to eventually challenge you.

Why? Provide some reasoning.

Non interaction was historically an option when the human population was much lower. Since the universe appears not to be densekey populated , my argument is that the same strategy would be favoured.

"then it can only do that if it is the true extrapolation of human values. Which can hardly be called an accident." Good point, but what if we don't understand our true values and accidently implement them via AI?

The problem is, you have rigged the example to explode and so, naturally enough it exploded.

Specifically: you hypothesise an AI that is given a goal, but a term used in that goal has been left underspecified (by an assumption that you inserted, without explanation ... voila! the ticking time bomb), and then you point out that since the term has an underspecified definition, the AI could decide to maximize its performance by adjusting the term definition so as to make the goal real easy to achieve.

Besides which, all definitions are "incomplete". (See the entire literature on the psychology of concepts)

But notice: real intelligent systems like humans are designed to work very well in the absence of "perfectly complete" definitions of pretty much everything they know. They are not in the least fazed by weak definitions, and they do not habitually go crazy and exploit the weakness of every definition in the universe.

Well, okay, teenagers do that. ("I took out the garbage: look, the wastebasket in my room is empty!"). But apart from that, real humans perform admirably.

As far as I can tell the only AIs that would NOT perform that well, are ones that have been especially constructed to self-destruct. (Hence, my Maverick Nanny paper, and this comment. Same basic point in both cases).

That assumes that AIs maximize things, and in my opinion they won't, just as humans don't. But in any case, if you think that the AI is simply implementing the true extrapolation of human values, then it can only do that if it is the true extrapolation of human values. Which can hardly be called an accident.

Not what you were asking for, but: have you encountered Eliezer's list of sleep interventions? It's the last section of this author's note at HPMOR. There might be a different helpful intervention there.

I would expect that most maid services do this. You could just hand the person who cleans additional money to do the job.

Philipps Hue can be controlled internally with scenes and with IFTTT. It can also be controlled with Alexa (and Alexa can trigger scenes).

According to the Mayo clinic swimming in clorinated water is a risk factor for dry skin. To me that suggest this might be an issue that's about the bacteria that live on your skin.

https://ubiome.com/ used to provide a skin kit but might not do it anymore (their website currently only shows the gut product).

It might be possible to develop a probiotics solution.

Good idea but I've tried it already. I furthermore never use shampoo and just wash my hair with water. (I'm no poo.)

we'd only really need the 5 big crops + plants for photosynthesis , insects and impollinators in order to survive and thrive

Time and time it turned out that we underestimated the complexity of the biosphere. And time and time again our meddling backfired horribly.

Even if we were utterly selfish and had no moral objections, wiping out all but a handful of "useful" species would almost certainly lead to unforeseen consequences ending in the total destruction of the planet's biosphere. We did not yet manage to fully map the role each species plays in the natural balance, but it seems like it's very deeply entangled, everything depending on lots of other species. You cannot just remove a handful of them and expect them to thrive on their own.

True, the scenario is not implausible for a non-hostile alien civilization to arrive who are more efficient than us, and in the long term they will out-compete and out-breed us.

Such non-hostile assimilation is not unheard of in real life. It is happening now (or at least claimed by many to be happening) in Europe, both in the form of the migrant crisis and also in the form of smaller countries fearing that their cultural identities and values are being eroded by the larger, richer countries of the union.

/facepalm

If a more intelligent self-sustaining agent or group comes along and replaces humans, good.

Define "good".

I predict your toiletries are the problem. Next time it flares up, try showering without soap or hair products for one week - only use water. It may sound gross, but this is a needed experiment.

If I've correctly identified the problem and your feet feel better, I think it would be fair if you gave $200 a year (or a $2,000 lump sum) to the charity of my choosing, don't you?

Disclaimer: I do not receive any compensation or services from my recommended charity.

You can design things based on a priori prediction, but you don't have to in many cases...you can also use trial and error instead.

I think Val's argument is that "no realistic value system implies not destroying alien civilizations" implies "either our value system is unrealistic, or we would take the first opportunity to destroy any alien civilization we came across." Perhaps you intended your comment to imply that we would do that, but I am skeptical. And if we would not do that, Val's argument is a good one. The only intelligent species we know does not desire to wipe out aliens, so it is more likely than not that alien species will not be interested in wiping us out.

"Once we do so, we may very well just apply CEV to them and get the best compromise of our values again. Or we may keep our own values, but still allow them to live separately and do their own thing, because we value their existence."

The problem I have with what you are saying is that these are two different things. And if they are two different things in the case of the aliens, they are two different things in the case of the humans.

The CEV process might well be immoral for everyone concerned, since by definition it is compromising a person's fundamental values. Eliezer agrees this is true in the case of the aliens, but he does not seem to notice that it would also be true in the case of the humans.

In any case, I choose in advance to keep my own values, not to participate in changing my fundamental values. But I am also not going to impose those on anyone else. If you define CEV to mean "the best possible way to keep your values completely intact and still not impose them on anyone else," then I would agree with it, but only because we will be stipulating the desired conclusion.

That does not necessarily mean "living separately". Even now I live with people who, in every noticeable way, have values that are fundamentally different from mine. That does not mean that we have to live separately.

In regard to the last point, you are saying that you don't want to eliminate all potential aliens, but you want to eliminate ones with values that you really dislike. I think that is basically racist.

There is some truth in it, however, insofar as in reality, for reasons I have been saying, beings that have fundamental desires for others to suffer and die are very unlikely indeed, and any such desires are likely to be radically qualified. To that degree you are somewhat right: desires like that are in fact evil. But because they are evil, they cannot exist.

I stopped reading at "Ra hates communication and introspection."
The marked difference between that post and Scott's Moloch is that the Scott had a lot of examples all pointing at the same concept. Here the author seems to have in mind one concept but starts explaining all the ramifications, without bothering to defining it. I still think that Ra doesn't exists, it's just a coalescence of many things that feel like they should come from a single source, only that source has never been defined.
That does it for me.