So, now replying knowing your context, this actually came up in discussion with Eliezer at the dinner after his talk at MIT. The most agreed upon counterexample was more restrictive drug laws. But if one interprets Eliezer's statement as being slightly more poetic and allowing that occasional slips do occur but that the general trend is uni-directional, that looks much more plausible. And the opinion of the general American population in 1850 in many ways doesn't enter into that: most of that population took for granted factually incorrect statements about the universe that we can confidently say are wrong (e.g. not just religious belief but belief in a literal global flood and many other aspects of the Abrahamic religions which are demonstrably false).

Did you mean to make this as a reply to another comment or was "This" meant to link somewhere?

This is an extraordinary claim by Eliezer Yudkowsky that progress is a ratchet that moves in only one direction. I wonder what, say, the native Americans circa 1850 thought about Western notions of progress? If you equate "power" with "progress" this claim is somewhat believable, but if you're also trying to morally characterize the arc of history then it sounds like you've descended into progressive cultism and fanaticism.

For me it's Nietzsche by a wide margin. After Nietzsche, you can safely throw away most of your philosophy books. Nietzsche brought psychological insight that Western philosophy had never seen before. Nietzsche dared to deconstruct and challenge the foundations of Judeo-Christian morality, rationalism and liberalism. Nietzsche created potent memes like the Ubermensch, the Last Man, God is Dead, the Will to Power, and the coming of the strangest of all guests, Nihilism, that shape our intellectual discourse to this day. Nietzsche was perhaps the closest thing the West has seen to a prophet -- a dark Buddha or Antichrist who haunts the Western philosophical enterprise like a specter. Nietzsche has been ignored, misinterpreted and criticized relentlessly, but his challenges to the philosophers are as potent as ever.

These are my thoughts.

I wonder how to detect and exorcise one's inner asshole. Or whether this is even an instrumentally useful thing to do.

These are some fast guesses-- my impression is that it can take years [1] to track down this sort of thing. Also, I don't know how much of this has already been done.

Start with five minutes thought. What does Eliezer know about his symptoms? Can anything be deduced by mulling over them?

I'd start with poking around to find out whether other people have the same pattern of symptoms. Does it have a medical name? What does medical research say about what works? What do people say about what works? Do the symptoms ever become better or worse? Does this correlate with something that could be experimented with?

Hire MetaMed, but also look for anecdotal information.

Exercise might be bad for some people.

I'm going to recommend some caution about experiments-- so far as I know, Eliezer has fairly good health. He's got some energy problems, an inability to lose weight, reacts very badly to missing a meal, and doesn't get any good from exercise. There's a lot of room for making things worse.

I'm in substantial agreement with this, but I do think the bad reaction to missing a meal is enough to be of at least a little concern. On the other hand, the cultural issues around fat are weird and extreme enough that it could explain the lack of thought that's gone into Eliezer's efforts to lose weight.

[1] Something in the neighborhood of 2 years or more for people who report success. Original research takes time.

This will cross the biggest bottleneck to eugenics in today's world - educated women not having enough children.

This may be the biggest bottleneck for eugenics. But decreasing the birthrate among the poor who lack the support network to raise children is a bigger problem for improving the average outcome, and is much lower hanging fruit.

In short, lowering the birthrate among the underclass while holding the upper class birthrate constant has much more payoff and is easier to implement than raising the upper class birthrate while leaving the underclass birthrate constant.

The correct and rational way to vote is to stay home and do something productive instead, unless you're a weirdo like me who gets some utility (entertainment value?) from spending hours researching candidates in the rueful knowledge that there's effectively zero probability of actually affecting anything via the effort.

The only way I can see to eliminate the tragedy of the commons of voting (anybody can have more personal time for themselves at the cost of making the commons of "how good is the election outcome" worse) would be allowing people to delegate their votes. If people who respect my intelligence can easily delegate to me, and there's no major transaction costs for me to delegate our votes to someone whose decision making ability I respect, and so on, then eventually the election "shares" entrusted to non-delegating voters grows to the point where they start to have rational incentives to put in the time to validate that trust.

Of course, in practice this would just make tribalism worse, make secret ballots impossible, and leave elections in the hands of whichever bosses and/or union leaders were the best at bullying votes out of people. So now I'm out of ideas.

The space conquest spirit disappeared along with the conquest spirit in general. Without a great power struggle like the Cold War, the motivation simply hasn't been there do anything on the scale of Apollo again. This the great irony of the human condition that I as a Sith find so amusing: strife is the source of so much of our progress, yet "progressives" always strive to make peace. As Harry Lime put it in The Third Man:

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Many of you are probably too young to understand that there has been a great cultural deconstruction over the past 50 years which has moved Western nations away from higher "imperial" visions toward more mundane ideals like equality, GDP growth, peace, technological progress and a hedonistic ethos. As Peter Thiel put it, "the hippies won," and the falling out of favor of von Braun, et al's "conquest of space" ideals was one of the first casualties of that defeat.

Old school civilization theorists usually associate the onset of liberalism with the declining or terminal phase of a nation, when it no longer has any strong ethos, vision or sense of collective destiny. Space could/should have been our collective destiny, but it seems that other ideas prevailed, and now we all may have to live in the ruins of that ideological failure. Meanwhile, in rising nations like China, the imperial spirit is returning and they are showing the kind of energy and cosmic ambition that the West had prior to our cultural deconstruction. Their space program is proceeding methodically according to a long-term vision, and there is no reason to doubt that they will own the Moon and Mars by mid-century. In my view, the West's liberalism and lack of a great enemy has been our undoing in space, and our democratic capitalism has been discredited as a system capable of sending mankind to the stars.