Not much lives 1000m under the surface.

Under the surface (for example, below the European continent) or in the deep seas? I'm not sure about the former but I'm quite confident that the following applies to the latter:

My layman impression is that investigating lower altitudes becomes increasingly (perhaps exponentially) difficult the lower you go. Wikipedia also says that "Humans have explored less than 2% of the ocean floor" so I would disagree with your assessment of "not much lives 1000m under the surface".

I'm honestly interested in how you came to that conclusion though - If you have an interesting and reputable text that refutes me, please share. I came to mine based on reading Wikipedia too much.

Don't send heat underwater, it's a bad idea for everything that lives under there (and for us if we don't want these things going up).

I'm curious though, how would you "send" heat ?

Large scale heat management: controlling or influencing temperature flows on a geographic (regional or global) scale. Heat management is one of the deep fundamental problems in life and engineering, but humans have never tried to do anything smarter or more ambitious in this area than standard HVAC stuff.

Humans like moderate temperatures, say 55-75 F, but we spend quite a lot of our time in discomfort or even pain because the actual temperature is outside this range. But the problem isn't that heat (or cold) is in short supply, it's just distributed unevenly. This fact hit home for me when I was riding in an Uber because terrible winter weather knocked out Boston's subway system, and the driver told me she had just returned from a trip to Brazil, which was mostly unpleasant because the heat made it impossible to do anything outside.

Here are some options:

• Heat banking: store heat during the summer in large reservoirs of water. Release it during the winter.
• Heat trade: hot regions send heat to cold regions; both sides are happier.
• Heat sequestration: there are huge pools of cold water about 1000m underneath the ocean surface, when your city is too hot, send some heat down there.

I'm actually quite confident some version of this idea will work, because there are two vastly powerful forces working in its favor:

• Economics: in heat trade, both parties feel that they are exchanging a good for a bad. This kind of exchange almost never happens, most normal trade relies on the parties valuing something at a different magnitude of positive or negative value, but with the same sign.
• The Great Second Law: Humans suffer from temperature unevenness but Nature actually prefers temperatures to equilibriate. We just have to help Nature do what it already wants to do.

I'll go first. I'm' in the process of applying for jobs in software. Furthermore, it'll be my first job out of college.

Any advice? What will I, five/ten years from now, wish that I had known now?

Should I take a job in a topic that I don't see myself in long-term?

I find your list of historical examples less than perfectly convincing. The single biggest success story there is probably science, but (as ChristianKl has also pointed out) science is not at all "based on aligning individual self-interest with the interests of the society as a whole"; if you asked a hundred practising scientists and a hundred eminent philosophers of science to list twenty things each that science is "based on" I doubt anything like that would appear in any of the lists.

(Nor, for that matter, is science based on pursuing the interests of others at the cost of one's own self-interest. What you wrote is orthogonal to the truth rather than opposite.)

I do agree that when self-interest can be made to lead to good things for everyone it's very nice, and I don't dispute your characterization of capitalism, criminal justice, and democracy as falling nicely in line with that. But it's a big leap from "there are some big examples where aligning people's self-interest with the common good worked out well" to "a good moral system should never appeal to anything other than self-interest".

Yes, moral exhortation has sometimes been used to get people to commit atrocities, but atrocities have been motivated by self-interest from time to time too. (And ... isn't your main argument against moral exhortation that it's ineffective? If it turns out to be a more effective way to get people to commit atrocities than appealing to self-interest is, doesn't that undermine that main argument?)

There may be an ethically relevant distinction between a rule that tells you to avoid being the cause of bad things, and a rule that says you should cause good things to happen. However, I am not convinced that causality is relevant to this distinction. As far as I can tell, these two concepts are both about causality. We may be using words differently, do you think you could explain why you think this distinction is about causality?

The best strategy to produce ethical behavior is simply to appeal to self-interest

This is only true of ethical behaviours that can be produced by appealing to self-interest. That might not be all of them. I don't see how you can claim to know that the best strategies are all in this category without actually doing the relevant cost-benefit calculations.

I see in the "Recent on Rationality Blogs" panel an article entitled "Why EA is new and obvious". I'll take that as a prompt to list my three philosophical complaints abouts EA:

• I believe in causality as a basic moral concept. My ethical system absolutely requires me to avoid hurting people, but is much less adamant about helping people. While some people claim to be indifferent to this distinction, in practice people's revealed moral preferences suggest that they agree with me (certainly the legal system agrees with me).
• I also believe in locality as an ontologically primitive moral issue. I am more morally obligated to my mother than to a random stranger in Africa. Finer gradations are harder to tease out, but I still feel more obligation to a fellow American than to a citizen of another country, ceteris paribus.
• I do not believe a good ethical system should rely on moral exhortation, at least not to the extent that EA does. Such systems will never succeed in solving the free-rider problem. The best strategy to produce ethical behavior is simply to appeal to self-interest, by offering people membership in a community that confers certain benefits, if the person is willing to follow certain rules.

a fun little article on training a neural network to recognize images.

https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-part-3-deep-learning-and-convolutional-neural-networks-f40359318721#.k34ceav8z

and an integration paper too

Towards an integration of deep learning and neuroscience

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/13/058545

It's a moral imperative that we must create this.

John Carmack, speaking of the Holodeck/Virtual World concept.

Quoted by David Kushner in Masters of Doom, see also here.