I won't be able to create a new Open thread on monday (I will be at our national version of Comic-Con). Can someone East of US create it?
Community service is good karma. Literally.

It sounds pretty spectactular!

I found one paper about comets crashing into the sun, but unfortunately they don't consider as big comets as you do--the largest one is a "Hale-Bopp sized" one, which they take to be 10^15 kg (which already seems a little low, Wikipedia suggests 10^16 kg.)

I guess the biggest uncertainty is how common so big comets are (so, how often should we expect to see one crash into the sun). In particular, I think the known sun-grazing comets are much smaller than the big comet you consider.

Also, I wonder a bit about your 1 second. The paper says,

The primary response, which we consider here, will be fast formation of a localized hot airburst as solar atmospheric gas passes through the bow-sock. Energy from this airburst will propagate outward as prompt electromagnetic radiation (unless or until bottled up by a large increase in optical depth of the surrounding atmosphere as it ionizes), then in a slower secondary phase also involving thermal conduction and mass motion as the expanding hot plume rises.

If a lot of the energy reaching the Earth comes from the prompt radiation, then it should arrive in one big pulse. On the other hand, if the comet plunges deep into the sun, and most of the energy is absorbed and then transmitted via thermal conduction and mass motion, then that must be a much slower process. By comparison, a solar flare involves between 10^20 and 10^25 J, and it takes several minutes to develop.

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.

Any insights about the following calculation?

If 100 km size body will fall on the Sun it would produce the flash 1000 times stronger than the Sun’s luminosity for 1 second, which would result in fires and skin burns for humans on day side of Earth.

The calculation is just calculation of energy of impact, and many “ifs” are not accounted, which could weaken consequences or increase them. Such body could be from the family of Sun grazing comets which originate from Oort cloud. The risk is not widely recognized and it is just my idea.

The basis for this calculation is following: Comets hit the Sun with speed of 600 km/s, and mass of 100 km size body (the comets of this size do exist) is 10e18 kg, so the energy of impact is 3.6x10e29 J, while Sun’s luminosity is 3x10e26 W.

Do the exercise where you look into the other person's eyes for 10 minutes by the clock, that's a fun social skills building exercise that brings you closer to the person you do it with.

Do pre-mortems of things. I.e. supposing we're 5 years in the future and we look back at the problems we had, what do we expect those problems to have been? Can we change them?

You have failed to answer my question. Why does anything at all matter? Why does anything care about anything at all? Why don't I want my dog to die? Obviously, when I'm actually dead, I won't want anything at all. But there is no reason I cannot have preferences now regarding events that will occur after I am dead. And I do.

Where I live, people sometimes organize "markets" where they bring stuff that is potentially useful but they have no use for it. Everyone brings whatever they want, and everyone takes whatever they want (first come, first served). Sometimes there is a specific topic, e.g. "clothes" or "stuff for kids", sometimes there is no topic.

In theory, I would expect that such place would attract e.g. all homeless people around, which could make it quite unpleasant for other participants. But in practice, this doesn't happen, probably because those activities are usually organized online or through personal lines, so it's mostly middle-class people coming there, and many of them bring more than they take. Usually people take home all the stuff they brought but nobody else wanted; but sometimes there is an explicit rule (e.g. with the clothes) that at the end, all the untaken stuff will be collected by the organizers and donated to some charity (so it will "trickle down" towards poorer people until someone takes it).

So, if this is important for you, I recommend first doing some research (online, asking your neighbors), and if you can't find, maybe you can organize it. Find a few people to help you, rent a room with some tables (is best case, some organization sympathetic to your goals would lend you the room for free), send invitations on facebook. Call it a "no-money market" or "neighbors' exchange" or whatever. Maybe the first time you organize it, make sure you have at least five people who don't know each other and want to get rid of some potentially useful stuff.

I'd guess it's something between "I'm pretty sure I'm right but I don't want to argue about it with you right now" and "fuck off brah".

If anyone here has been treated for neurosis (?) using low doses of Sulpiride - did you find life duller, afterwards?

Native Americans were "neutralized" mostly as a side effect of the diseases brought by colonists, and then outcompeted by economically more successful cultures. Instead of strategic effort to prevent WW1 and WW2 happening on another continent, settlers from different European nations actually had "violent clash over resources" with each other. (also here)

The reasoning may seem sound, but it doesn't correspond to historical facts.

I thought more after I posted and concluded that:

Most likely the energy will be released below sun’s photosphere, as its density is very low like 1 to 6000 of air. This would prevent immediate flash visibility.
The resulting hot gas will flow up eventually but it will cooler and energy less concentrated. But even if it takes several minutes, it still could produce burns on Earth.

Also something like large Solar flash could happen because of integration of the hot gas from the comet with Sun's magnetic field, and it hypothetically will result in superflare with strong Solar wind and magnetic effect on Earth.

The temperature during impact will be around 5 mln K on the edge of the comet, as I calculated, which is not enough for any meaningful nuclear reactions. But it doesn't include any additional heating connected with rising pressure because - and pressure would rise as the comet will compress as it decelerate in the solar medium.

If such reaction will happen it could add more energy to explosion and also produce some radioactive isotopes, which could later become part of Solar find and fallout on Earth. I saw an article long time before about possibility of nuclear reaction during impacts, and I will find it.

Insert peg A into slot B. Pleasure should ensue for both parties. Follow emergent heuristics.

If pleasure is not evoked or in case of mismatching heuristics, try to vary peg and/or slot and/or frequency/speed/depth of insertion.

In case of further problems please call your local support.

Every now and then someone rediscover this idea in one form or another.
Besides the obvious limitation, and the silliness of saying "it becomes you", it can be a great gift to the relatives. Of course, it could be abused...

any suggestions?

Naturally if I were mistaken it would be appropriate to concede that I was mistaken. However, it was not about being mistaken. The point is that in arguments the truth is rarely all on one side. There is usually some truth in both. And in this case, in the way that matters, namely which I was calling important, it is not possible to accidentally wipe out alien civilizations. But in another way, the unimportant way, it would be possible in the scenario under consideration (which scenario is also very unlikely in the first place.)

In particular, when someone fears something happening "accidentally", they mean to imply that it would be bad if that happened. But if you accidentally fulfill your true values, there is nothing bad about that, nor is it something to be feared, just as you do not fear accidentally winning the lottery. Especially since you would have done it anyway, if you had known it was contained in your true values.

In any case I do not concede that it is contained in people's true values, nor that there will be such an AI. But even apart from that, the important point is that it is not possible to accidentally wipe out alien civilizations, if that would be a bad thing.

Because you wrote one sentence without actually giving the argument. So I went with my prior on your argument.

That's what I'm suggesting you not do.

Writing out arguments, and in general, making one's thought processes transparent, is a lot of work. We benefit greatly by not having a norm of only stating conclusions that are a small inferential distance away from public knowledge.

I'm not saying you should (necessarily) believe what I say, just because I say it. You just shouldn't jump to the conclusion that I don't have justifications beyond what I have stated or am willing to bother stating.

Cf. Jonah's remark:

If I were to restrict myself to making claims that I could substantiate in a mere ~2 hours, that would preclude the possibility of me sharing the vast majority of what I know.

You make the decision to send the resources necessary to transform a galaxy without knowing much about the galaxy. The only things you know are based on the radiation that you can pick up many light years away.

Once you have sent your vehicle to the galaxy it could of course decide to do nothing or fly into the sun but that would be a waste of resources.

I think we can all agree that an entity's anticipated future experiences matter to that entity. I hope (but would be interested to learn otherwise) that imaginary events such as fiction don't matter. In between, there is a hugely wide range of how much it's worth caring about distant events.

I'd argue that outside your light-cone is pretty close to imaginary in terms of care level. I'd also argue that events after your death are pretty unlikely to effect you (modulo basilisk-like punishment or reward).

I actually buy the idea that you care about (and are willing to expend resources on) subjunctive realities on behalf of not-quite-real other people. You get present value from imagining good outcomes for imagined-possible people even if they're not you. This has to get weaker as it gets more distant in time and more tenuous in connection to reality, though.

But that's not even the point I meant to make. Even if you care deeply about the far future for some reason, why is it reasonable to prefer weak, backward, stupid entities over more intelligent and advanced ones? Just because they're made of similar meat-substance as you seems a bit parochial, and hypocritical given the way you treat slightly less-capable organic beings like lettuce.

Woodchopper's post indicated that he'd violently interfere with (indirectly via criminalization) activities that make it infinitesimally more likely to be identified and located by ETs. This is well beyond reason, even if I overstated my long-term lack of care.

It looks like similar to CEV, but not extrapolated into the future, but applied to a single person desire in the known context. I think it is good approach to make even simple AIs safe. If I ask my robot to take out all spheres from the room it will not cut my head.

This is why people sometimes make comments like "goal functions can themselves be learning functions." The problem is that we don't know how to take natural language and unlabeled inputs and get any sort of reasonable utility function as an output.