Today's blog post by Yvain starts:

Anxiety disorders are the most common class of psychiatric disorders. Their US prevalence is about 20%. They’re also among the least recognized and least treated...

I had not. And I will avoid that in the future. However, that has very little bearing on my overall post. Please ignore the single sentence that references works of fiction.

creating a google form is not hard.

Benefit: standardised response disadvantage: have to drag people to another forum. Not sure of the response rate of doing so, or whether I would be able to account for that fairly.

I am of the opinion that you're probably right. That AI will likely be the end of humanity. I am glad to see others pondering this risk.

However, I would like to mention that there are 2 possible/likely modes of that end coming about.

First is the "terminator" future, and second is the "Wall-e" future. The risk that AI war machines will destroy humanity is a legitimate concern, given "autonomous drones", and other developmental projects. The other side has a LOT more projects and progress. Siri, Emospark, automated factories, advanced realdolls, AI, even basic things like predictive text algorithms lead toward the future where people relate to the digital world, rather than the real world, and, instead of being killed off, simply fail to breed. Fail to learn, fail to advance.

However, here's the more philosophical question, and point.

Organisms exist to bring their children to maturity. Species exist to evolve.

What if AI is simply the next evolution of humanity? If AI is the "children" of humanity?

If humanity fails to get out of this solar system, then everything we are, and everything we ever were is for nothing. It was all, from Gilgamesh to hawking, a zero sum game, nothing gained, all for nothing. But if we can make it out to the stars, then maybe it was all for something, Our glory and failings need not be lost.

So while I agree that it's likely that AI will end humanity, it's my opinion that A) it will probably be by "coddling" us to death, and B) either way, that's okay.

As a general note on conducting surveys, I'd advise constraining the responses a bit more, by using a platform for getting responses. Google forms survey + Text fields for comments are easier to use, easier to analyze, and are more comparable between people, since you know they see the same scales, etc.

The downside is that it requires just a bit more work on your part - which is usually a good trade-off.

I think you missed a step...

Did we spend 5 minutes holding off on proposing solutions, or define the problem yet?

You should note which domains make you surprised frequently, and consider explicitly revisiting your models and assumptions in that domain.

You should notice which domains don't have great models, and check that you are surprised there as frequently as you'd expect - or note that you fail to be surprised, or that you treat everything as equally likely in those domains, and consider if you're doing well.

I think it's great to see a member of this forum doing something to make the world a more rational place. I'd love to hear more about what other members are doing.

Thanks! I'm sure Germany and Sweden aren't that different in this regard.

There are of course many expert groups inside and outside government working on what in a broad sense could be called "evidence-based policy" in most countries (whether or not that very term is used). Most of these groups have the problem that you mention - they have good advice, but the politicians don't listen to them. That's why we don't want to be another group of that kind, but also a campaigning organization. We want to push the message of political rationality fairly aggressively in the media and on social media (though you have to be careful not to trigger the "Straw Soviet"). That way, we'll try to force politicians' to listen to ours and other expert organizations' advice.

I don't know if there is any similar organization in Germany, though I think there should be.

You're absolutely right about getting civil servants onboard. A few has joined since we wrote the article, and we are working on recruiting more. We lack a bit of practical know-how now, since most of us are academics or students, but I'm confident we will be able to get more people onboard.

Yes, younger politicians are probably more interested in this than older, for several reasons. We are not affiliated with any party, but are independent. We do talk to the parties, though - and the Pirate Party is among them.

I'll talk about this on Saturday in Berlin, by the way, at the LW meeting. Will you be there?

As a side point, of possible interest to the author, Coalition4Evidence was subsumed under http://www.arnoldfoundation.org/ - per this announcement. http://coalition4evidence.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Coalition-Board-of-Advisors-Update-04-24-15.pdf

Other may be interested in the fact that the EU has done some real work in this direction, at least for childhood and family interventions, under the heading of "evidence based practices"; http://europa.eu/epic/topics/evidence-based-practices_en.htm