I think ultimately, we should care about the well-being of all humans equally - but that doesn't necessarily mean making the same amount of effort to help one kid in Africa and your brother. What if, for example, the institution of family is crucial for the well-being of humans, and not putting your close ones first in the short run would undermine that institution?

I do not believe that assigning agents moral weight as if you are getting these weights from some source outside yourself is a good idea.

Suppose I get my weights from outside of me, and you get your weights from outside of you. Then it's possible that we could coordinate and get them from the same source, and then agree and cooperate.

Suppose I get my weights from inside me, and you get yours from inside you; then we might not be able to coordinate, instead wrestling each other over the ability to flip the switch.

Your question is: after an airliner accident, how often do any of the next n flights following the same route also have an accident?

Guessing (2/3 confidence) lower than the base rate.

I totally know I suck at editing. Or writing. Yes, my posts are dumps of internal dialogue, a "save as" on my brain set. Can you recommend an e-book or something that would teach me this? At some level this is the issue with the Internet: everybody can publish, but most of us do not have access to a professional editor. I wonder if I could find an editor on Fiverr. It would totally worth me $5 per article.

Pop-psych, well, the issue is, 1. people suffer 2. there are basically NO ideas kicking around why. Any beginning is better than none. Even if the only result is someone disproving the whole thing in a good way gets us a step closer to some kind of a solution.

I see my role here as a non-scientific shaman healer trying to treat diseases by random herbs. It may work, out of pure luck, but even if not, you have to start your medicine somewhere, a real doctor executing a professional takedown on the shaman could accidentally solve the problem.

I suspect most people here find this post very confusing as they don't know who you are (I don't recognize your username), and it's not really clear what you're getting at or why we would want to ask you anything.

A bit of a nitpick (which could explain some of the reception you're getting here): I don't think the term "Pragmatarianism" is a good description for your proposal, it's just an unrelated name that sounds good. Might as well say 'I'm calling this proposal "Sensible Tax Policy"' or 'My idea, called "Reasonablism", is that...', etc.

A more modest and descriptive name would probably be better received, especially in places who dislike marketing.

And how is it going?

Cool project! Do you think those robots are going to be a big commercial success?

Robotics will get scary very soon. quoted from link:

The conference was open to civilians, but explicitly closed to the press. One attendee described it as an eye-opener. The officials played videos of low-cost drones firing semi-automatic weapons, revealed that Syrian rebels are importing consumer-grade drones to launch attacks, and flashed photos from an exercise that pitted $5,000 worth of drones against a convoy of armored vehicles. (The drones won.) But the most striking visual aid was on an exhibit table outside the auditorium, where a buffet of low-cost drones had been converted into simulated flying bombs. One quadcopter, strapped to 3 pounds of inert explosive, was a DJI Phantom 2, a newer version of the very drone that would land at the White House the next week.

I have anti-predictions:

• We won't have robot butlers or maids in the next ten years.
• Academic CV researchers will write a lot of papers, but there won't be any big commercial successes that are based on dramatic improvements in CV science. This is a subtle point: there may be big CV successes, but they will be based on figuring out ways to use CV-like technology that avoids grappling with the real hardness of the problem. For example, the main big current uses of CV are in industrial applications where you can control precisely things like lighting, clutter, camera position, and so on.
• Assistant and intent-based technology will continue to be annoying and not very useful.
• Similar to CV, robotics will work okay when you can control precisely the nature of the task and environment. We won't have, for example, robot construction workers.