If you want this post to be discussion about the copyright status of posts on LW, then you should change the title. I expect that a lot of people who would be interested in commenting on that issue might skip over this post because the title gives no indication of the actual topic.

You obviously cannot retroactively change the copyright status of already published posts without the express consent of their authors, but I'd support a move to add a text saying "by pressing submit, you agree to license your post under [some CC license]" to the submission form. Or possibly an option to choose under which license you wish to publish your post, though that would more work for the site programmers.

Also, I hereby declare all of my past and future posts on Less Wrong to be licensed under CC-BY. EDIT: No wait, I can't make such a declaration, because part of my posts are written for MIRI, who owns the copyrights according to the work-for-hire clause in my contract. I'll try to mark these posts somehow, but ask me if you want to be sure.

Others have already pointed to HN comments arguing that 23andme is mostly for novelty, but for those just skimming lw discussion that don't want to wade through pages of material, I'll highlight the strongest argument against taking 23andme seriously:

Recent research hints that 10% of ordinary healthy people have genes that we understand to be indicative of major disease. In other words, if these people bought 23andme's service, they would receive results that would be extraordinarily distressing, even while being nonetheless healthy.

See the study in question. Relevant quote: "[O]ur current best mean estimates of ∼400 damaging variants and ∼2 bona fide disease mutations per individual [is an underestimate]". (The study was brought to my attention by NPR. Note that I have not read the actual paper, but only listened to a news report on it and read the abstract.)

Either way, should we or shouldn't we have trusted the rest of their answers to be statistically reliable?

After a very short amount of time listening to a Text to Speech voice I now prefer it to almost any narrator. They are very good these days so I won't be making use of this.

This is also the reason why I don't think we are very likely to be in an ancestral simulation

I use stronger language. The chance that we are in an ancestor simulation is in the neighborhood of epsilon.

All the arguments which imply that we might be living in a simulation would imply that the universe which is simulating us is also a simulation. I assume there's got to be a ground universe somewhere in the chain.

An extreme Singularity doesn't seem necessary to get a lot of simulations.

Whether we can be sure we've gotten out may be a different problem than whether we can get out.

Technically, I think this is more Trike's problem, so it would be more like 'how much more of Trike's time is this supposed to take up or be diverted from other LW maintenance/improvements?'

Konkvistador brought up the idea about two months ago, but to the best of my knowledge the idea is still being researched.

There are a few primary issues to consider:

1. What are the costs? How much time would instructors have to put into preparing the materials for the class, teaching the class, and learning the system? Who would host it, and how much would that cost? Who would analyze the data from the course?
2. What are the benefits? How many people would take the class? What percentage would become LW, CFAR, or SI contributors? How much would the course improve their lives?
3. What are the alternatives? Even if we knew how many CFAR-hours it would take to put on the class, and how many dollars would be donated to CFAR as a result (simplifying the problem to one cost and one benefit), we need to compare that ratio to marginal CFAR-hour to decide if it's worth doing.

One big issue for CFAR in particular is it seems like this could compete with the educational offering of their camps; indeed, a potential first course would just be to tape the minicamp materials and expect people to watch an hour a week. The trouble is that the educational value of the camp is not its sole value, and CFAR might end up cannibalizing the market for its camps by offering free videos.

There's also a question of how much advertising is worth. Supposing there are, say, three courses worth of rationality material, and that camps and courses teach a comparable amount of material, then one could imagine putting the first course online and having the second course taught at camp. This would drastically increase the demand for the camps- but I get the impression that they already have years worth of demand lined up, and so investing in supply improvements will have far higher returns on their end.

I recently took the time to compile a list of my favorite philosophy podcasts and finally realized in the process that I spend a disproportionate amount of time on podcasts in general. However, since I've been pretty happy about how much time I spend on podcasts, I'm unsure if changes to my current behavior are warranted.

My current plan is to cut the bottom third of podcasts I prefer out and see how I feel. If it turns out that I'll be just as content with only 2/3 of the time invested, that'll definitely free up some time I can spend on other projects. But my prediction is that I'll miss a lot of them and just end up re-adding them after a few weeks' hiatus. I'll guess I'll find out in a month or two.

Remember that the pledge is not to give money to GWWC; it's a pledge to give to effective charities in general.

It's not; the whole message of GWWC is about the strong reasons we in the relatively wealthy west have to give significant portions of our income to cost-effective global poverty charities. I completely respect those who think we have even stronger reasons to donate to cost-effective charities focused on causes like animal welfare or x-risk, but GWWC is focused on global poverty (which does earn it more mainstream credibility than, say, EAA or SingInst).