I wouldn't say they are doomed to fail because it is a slippery slope to *NO THINKING ABOUT RESISTANCE *, but I would say that is a good reason to object to thought-taboo devices.

I think a law stopping you from creating a second copy of a human or creating a new human counts as a thought crime, if the copy or new human is being run in your mind.

The way I can see it in sci-fi terms:

If human mind is the first copy of a brain that has been uploaded to an computer, than it deserves the same rights as any human. There is a rule against running more than one instance of the same person at the same time.

Human mind created on my own computer from first principles, so to speak of, does not have any rights, but there is also a law in place to prevent such agents from being created, as human minds are dangerous toys.

Plans to enforce thought-taboo devices are likely to fail, as no self-respecting human being would allow such an crude ingerence of third parties into their own thought process. I mean, it starts with NO THINKING ABOUT NANOTECHNOLOGY and in time changes to *NO THINKING ABOUT RESISTANCE *.

EDIT:

Also, assuming that there is really a need to extract some information from an individual, I would reluctantly grant government right to create temporary copy of an individual to be interrogated, interrogate (i.e. torture) the copy and then delete it shortly afterwards. It is squicky, but in my head superior to leaving the original target with memories of interrogation.

From the OP:

What are your best arguments against the reality/validity/usefulness of IQ?

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appeals that would limit testing or research even if IQ's validity is established are not [welcome].

Emphasis mine.

We all know the standard "that's racist" argument already, newerspeak is clearly asking for a factual reason why measures of general intelligence are not real / invalid / not useful. Not to mention that the post did not make any claims about, or even mention, heredity of intelligence or race / gender differences in intelligence.

Speaking of the Principle of Charity...

Doesn't cryonics (and subsequent rebooting of a person) seem obviously too difficult? People can't keep cars running indefinitely, wouldn't keeping a particular consciousness running be much harder?

I hinted at this in another discussion and got downvoted, but it seems obvious to me that the brain is the most complex machine around, so wouldn't it be tough to fix? Or does it all hinge on the "foom" idea where every problem is essentially trivial?

It feels to me like the general pro-cryo advocacy here would be a bit of a double standard, at least when compared to general memes of effective altruism, shutting up and multiplying, and saving the world. If I value my life equally to the lives of others, it seems pretty obvious that there's no way by which the money spent on cryonics would be a better investment than spending it on general do-gooding.

I think the scale on which it is done is the main thing here. Currently, cryonics is performed so infrequently that there isn't much infrastructure for it. So it is still fairly expensive compared to the amount of expected utility -- probably close to the value implied by regulatory tradeoffs ($5 million per life). On a large, industrial scale I expect it to be far better value than anything Givewell is going to find.

Thanks for the response! This puts several misunderstandings I had to rest.

P.S. Why programing of Azathoth? In my mind it makes it sound as if desire to have children was something intristically bad.

Programming of Azathoth because Azathoth doesn't give a shit about what you wish your own values were. Therefore what you want has no impact whatsoever on what your body and brain are programmed to do, such as make some humans want to have children even when every single aspect of it is negative (e.g. painful sex, painful pregnancy, painful birthing, hell to raise children, hellish economic conditions, absolutely horrible life for the child, etc. etc. such as we've seen some examples of in slave populations historically)

No, but cows, pigs, hens and so on are being systematically chopped up for the gustatory pleasure of people who could get their protein elsewhere. For free-range, humanely slaughtered livestock you could make an argument that this is a net utility gain for them, since they wouldn't exist otherwise, but the same cannot be said for battery animals.

I didn't mean for the hermit to be sad, just less happy than the child.

We live in a world full of utility monsters. We call them humans.