saving lives and saving souls are nearly equally important.

If souls actually exist (and could go to heaven and hell) then saving souls is far more important than saving lives! Your disagreement with them is surely not about relative importance, it is about ontology.

If someone takes a cursory glance at something you should only compute its rough details and only when someone looks at it closely, with a microscope say, do you need to fill in the details.

(Previously seen in)

Huh? Jack said that there two sides to the ledger with respect to tobacco. He didn't say which side would necessarily prevail in this case. Furthermore, there is no reason why the side that's stronger for one drug is necessarily stronger for another.

A lot of industries are going to look really bad if you only score one side of the ledger. Given that a huge number of people continue to smoke and enjoy it, despite knowing the negative implications for their health it seems reasonable to assume that tobacco companies supply the world with a great deal of utility, in addition to the lung cancer.

So basically, my hypothesis is, the reason intelligent people are so often socially clumsy is because it's a facade, a self-imposed handicap they keep up because evolution has programmed us to have repulsion towards unfairly manipulating others. Because they can make others do anything, they choose to do nothing. This manifests as being easily led, a kind of "doormat", lacking their own will or ego, even.

This is more or less true of me, though I don't know why evolution is being singled out etiologically, it seems like even a blank slate mind could learn to be inhibited this way. Anyhow I avoid meeting people's eyes or generally looking at people's faces because my automatic inclinations are to nod along, smile, make them feel like I'm their ally &c., even when I don't actually agree with them or think what they're doing or saying is right. Like when someone tells a self-deprecating joke and they expect you to smile or laugh, or when they fish for a compliment, or when they tell you about something they think is important that you don't think is important. Those are obvious examples that everyone notices, but human conversation is chock full of subtler games that are harder to be reflective about and have bright line rules for. You either implicitly lie to them or you constantly disappoint them. This is extremely salient to me because I'm abnormally good at reading people's facial expressions. Not meeting their eyes and being generally evasive is a way to keep myself honest. I still stand by this decision, even if it means constantly handicapping my status, attractiveness, and generally my life. Integrity is important.

Transhumanism is a cause of some folk visiting here despite being less interested in epistemic rationality as such, so I would expect an enrichment of self-identified transhumanists anong the authors of badly received posts. It's also a political tribe for a number of people, so there is room for mind-killing.

However, I'd be curious to see your links to examples.

Downvoted for roundaboutness

*Pros for Up: Spreading rationality, positive news on progress *Pros for Down: conflictory use of strenght buildup and bypass, low focus on the title issue, post category confusion (is this an advert, news report, job offering or methodology query?), low topic cohesion: transhumanisms is a tack on

I strongly suspect that the primary result of such an algorithm would be very wide error bars on the timeline, and that it would indeed outperform most experts for this reason. You can't get water from a stone, nor narrow estimates out of ignorance and difficult problems, no matter what simple algorithm you use. Though I would be quite intrigued to be proven wrong about this, and I have seen Fermi estimates for quantities like e.g. the mass of the Earth apparently extract narrow and correct estimations out of the sums of multiple widely erroneous steps.