You cannot impose a reward schedule on yourself...

I complete a task, I roll a d4 once, and in case of success I eat a chocolate. What exactly is the problem with this?

I was kinda surprised to see IQ as an external factor; my impression is that internal vs. external locus of control is actually personality traits vs. circumstances and environment, and IQ obviously falls into the first category.

If you consider IQ and mental health external factors, what are the internal factors, then? Willpower? But willpower is determined by the brain structure just as IQ and mental health and other personality traits.

Basically, if you assign everything to the "external" category, so that the "internal" is an empty set (or almost empty), then one's success is determined by "external" factors. No surprise here.

This is consistent with my experience with European life-extension movements. Generally speaking we just don't have a clear idea of where we should be going. Neither do we even always agree an what research or project is even relevant. So we have a collection of people sharing a vaguely defined goal of life-extension, all pushing for their pet projects and hypotheses. No one is really willing to abandon what they came up with because no clear evidence-based project under which they could assemble exists (or is perceptible)(this therefore of course includes all such personal pet projects and ideas). Additionally, few if any really seem to believe strongly in life extension (as a way of life or something important enough to take precedence over other projects in their life), and newly interested people turnover is very high with little retention beyond a few months.

Thanks. Interesting. I think one issue is maintaining the will to live indefinitely, not getting tired of life, of cumulative stress, basically anti-depresison. I think it would be more useful to focus on fixing that, and when everybody totally wants to live on and on and on, then that generates motivation to throw more resources on anti-aging. Without that, there is a lesser motivation, as people who are not very happy, like myself, will not support it vigorously. Senescence is an acceptable, honorable, non-shameful way of slow suicide, suitable if you are only lightly depressed. You can get old and die without ever having to admit you are depressed or you want to die. If life is extended, you basically either have to endure it longer, or have to own up to, admit defeat, admit you fail at life, and choose suicide. Neither are very attractive options. This is why I recommend fixing the will to live i.e. light depression first.

Fixing the will to live is not going to be easy because it goes against the logic of evolution (which does not care if you are depressed or dead after you have reproduced) and much of human biology. You essentially want to keep people in a constant "expecting rewards" mindset, biologically speaking. In a look forward to tomorrow because something cool with happen mindset. However, it is likely that would lead to some kind of burnout, like, dopamine receptors becoming desensitized from over-use or something like that. Fixing this would be a major brain rewiring.

Interesting opinion. I rarely browse open threads, mainly because I find them a mess, and it takes a longer time to find if there's anything which would interest me in there. Discussion posts have their own page with neatly ordered titles, you get an idea at a glance, and can on a first filter sort through around 20 topics in around 2 seconds.

Please do note the delicious irony here :

I don't see much good in associating rationality with extreme caution.

I don't think that teaching people to expect worse case scenarios increases rational thinking.

Which in essence looks suspiciously like cautiously assuming a bad case scenario in which this story won't help the rationality cause, or even a worst case scenario in which it will do more wrong than right.

If you want to go forth and create a story about rationality, then do it. Humans are complex creatures, not everyone will react the same way to your story, and anybody who thinks they can accurately predict the reaction of all the different kinds of people who'll read your story (especially as this story hasn't even been written yet) is either severely deluded as to their ability, or secretly running the world behind curtains already.

When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.

It seems to me that you can find out a lot about people's intelligence by talking with them a little, though I've underestimated people who were bright enough but didn't present as intellectual.

If this is true, then unstructured interviews should be a good way to determine how effective a candidate will be in a position. The literature is clear that unstructured interviews are worthless, and IQ testing is the best measure we have, typically explaining about half of the variance.

Lots of people have tried to dethrone IQ as a measure for a very long time, trying lots of things. They've never succeeded; IQ really is that good a measure of cognitive ability, and cognitive ability really is that important for almost everything.

Either that or maybe either OrphanWilde or his sister or someone else close to him really enjoys messing with everyone and making it seem that the house is haunted.

Then on the other side of this question you could consider creating new sentiences who couldn't suffer at all. But why would these have a priority over those who exist already?

From the point of view of those who'll actually create the minds, it's not a choice between somebody who exists already and a new mind. It's the choice between two kinds of new minds, one modeled after a mind that has existed once, and one modeled after a better design.

One might also invoke Big Universe considerations to say that even the "new" kind of a mind has already existed in some corner of the universe (maybe as a Boltzmann brain), so they'll be regardless choosing between two kinds of minds that have existed once. Which just goes to show that the whole "this mind has existed once, so it should be given priority over a one that hasn't" argument doesn't make a lot of sense.

Maybe we should distinguish between the information and the unpleasant sensation it brings to us. Eliminating the second may make sense, so long as you know chopping your leg off is most often not a good idea.

Yes. See also David Pearce's notion of beings who've replaced pain and pleasure with gradients of pleasure - instead of having suffering as a feedback mechanism, their feedback mechanism is a lack of pleasure.

Suffering Criticism: An ancestral simulation would recreate a huge amount of suffering.

Response: Humans suffer and live in a world that seems to suffer greatly, and yet very few humans prefer non-existence over their suffering. Evolution culls existential pessimists.

Recreating a past human will recreate their suffering, but it could also grant them an afterlife filled with tremendous joy. The relatively small finite suffering may not add up to much in this consideration. It could even initially relatively enhance subsequent elevation to joyful state, but this is speculative.

Even if the future joy of the recreated past human would outweigh that of the suffering (s)he endured while being recreated, all else being equal it would be even better to create entirely new kinds of people, who wouldn't need to suffer at all, from scratch.