so you decide to only do the least prestigeful work available, in order to prove that you are the kind of person who doesn't care about the prestige of the task!

Another variant is to minimize how much you directly inform your comrades of the work you're doing. You tend to get more prestige when people find out about your work through accidental-seeming ways instead of through you telling them. Also, you have aces up your sleeve with which you can play the martyr ("Well, I have been doing such and such and you didn't even know about it!").

This is not much about Singularity Institute as an organization, so I'll just answer it here in the comments.

• I do not regulate my information diet.
• I do not have a reading schedule.
• I do not follow the news.
• I haven't read fiction in years. This is not because I'm avoiding "fun stuff," but because my brain complains when I'm reading fiction. I can't even read HPMOR. I don't need to consciously "limit" my consumption of "fun stuff" because reading scientific review articles on subjects I'm researching and writing about is the fun stuff.
• What I'm trying to learn at this moment almost entirely dictates my reading habits.
• The only thing beyond this scope is my RSS feed, which I skim through in about 15 minutes per day.

I don't think you're a Christian. I do think you want Christianity to have a chance in hell, because... well, I'm not going to speculate. Meta-contrarianism would be one reason. Everyone voting down shminux, please note that they never said they thought Goetz was a Christian.

Wow! A 20 page essay on "why I'm breaking up with you"? That's just... brutal!

So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked.

LOL

(Just couldn't resist posting my reaction, even though there's already an essentially identical comment.)

It seems that this was made a lot more amusing by you apparently having great social skills these days.

(And makes me all the more glad I've never broken up with anyone, even though this requirement made it kinda hard to get into a relationship in the first place.)

Since moving back to the Bay Area I've been out with four other people too, one of whom he's also seeing; I've been in my primary's presence while he kissed one girl, and when he asked another for her phone number; I've gossiped with a secondary about other persons of romantic interest and accepted his offer to hint to a guy I like that this is the case; I hit on someone at a party right in front of my primary. I haven't suffered a hiccup of drama or a twinge of jealousy to speak of and all evidence (including verbal confirmation) indicates that I've been managing my primary's feelings satisfactorily too.</bragging> Does this sort of thing appeal to you?

No.

But I do expect that if humans become immortal superbeings, then given enough time, most people currently in fairytale monogamous relationships will switch to poly. (Though when people are immortal superbeings, I also expect it to become common that they'll spend a very long time if necessary searching for an instance of fairytale monogamy to be their first relationship.)

I guess my philosophy is that fairytale monogamy is optimal for the young (say under 200 years or so), while poly and other non-traditional arrangements are the choice of the adult.

Relax, I doubt anyone with the ability to produce high-quality thinking is so insecure that (s)he'd be scared of getting a few downvotes on a website.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the ability to produce high-quality thinking actually correlated with insecurity. People who spend time developing intellectual skills often neglect developing social skills, and a lack of friends/real social contact then makes them feel insecure.

I would love to see a post on the rational behind the reputation system on this site.

Imagine a thousand professional philosophers would join lesswrong, or worse, a thousand creationists. If that happened, would someones karma score still reflect the persons rationality? I'm not saying that this is the case right now, since most people who don't agree with lesswrong won't join or bother to stay around for very long. But technically the lesswrong reputation system is susceptible to failure, it would just need one call by someone like P.Z. Myers to have thousands of mediocre rationalists, or trolls, join and start messing up the voting system.

But that's just the most obvious problem. The availability of a reputation system also discourages people to actually explain themselves by being able to let off steam or ignore cognitive dissonance by downvoting someone with a single mouse click. If people had to actually write a comment to voice their disagreement, everyone would benefit. The person who is wrong would benefit by being provided an actual explanation for why someone disagrees and therefore wouldn't be able to easily believe that the person who disagrees just doesn't like their opinion for irrational reasons. The person who disagrees would have to be more specific and maybe name some concrete reasons for their disagreement and that way notice that it might be them who is wrong or that their disagreement with the other person isn't as strong as they thought. Everyone else reading the conversation would be able to discern if all parties involved in the discussion actually understand each other or talk past each other.

Another problem is that a reputation system might drive away people with valuable insights about certain agreed upon topics. The initial population of a community might have been biased about something and the reputation system might provide a positive incentive to keep the bias and a negative incentive for those who disagree.

That is among the reasons why I keep telling SIAI people to never reply to "AI risks are small" with "but a small probability is still worth addressing". Reason 2: It sounds like an attempt to shut down debate over probability. Reason 3: It sounds like the sort of thing people are more likely to say when defending a weak argument than a strong one. Listeners may instinctively recognize that as well.

Existential risks from AI are not under 5%. If anyone claims they are, that is, in emotional practice, an instant-win knockdown argument unless countered; it should be countered directly and aggressively, not weakly deflected.

I tend to treat anger and frustration as resulting from my map not matching the terrain somewhere. I suspect that your frustration is rooted in inaccurate mapping concerning the prior commitment that prevented you from meeting Patri. My guess is that you correctly assumed that there would be a small chance that something “better” than your commitment would pop-up that you would have to miss; but, you failed to properly assess the emotional impact this unlikely scenario would have on you. Now you can update your priors, do some re-mapping and be better prepared emotionally to deal with low-probability/high-annoyingness events.

Also, how similar is the present Patri-hysteria in Finland to the Beatles-hysteria in the 60's?