Yes, but most people reading his book are considerably less important (at least, for my purposes) than people watching Laurence O'Donnell when he spends five minutes next week making fun of Glen Beck's book. Or Maureen Dowd's column when she does the same. Obviously if this is just a few pages in a little noticed book there is no problem with it at all (it's basically neutral). If Beck decides to spend a lot of time talking about it, to the point that it becomes identifiable as "one of Beck's ideas", that would be bad. I don't have a well-calibrated idea of how much publicity Beck gets these days or how often he puts out books which is why I'm unsure of the effect.

We are talking about a cost on the order of magnitude of $100k to preserve your body - about as much as the average American manages to save for retirement. A dozen times the cost of a standard funeral. Enough to save dozens of lives. You may not be able to be reanimated, and there may be large future costs of reanimation as well as curing whatever fatal diseases you may have.

The benefit, hopefully, is "enjoy long life in a high-tech future." That may well be worth the expense to you. But if we are just optimizing utils in the world, we might focus on shorter-term goals. Even if we hypothesize that life in that future world is amazing, we could commission a eugenically-optimized baby in the future world rather than preserving our own flawed selves at great cost. The desire that the future beneficiary be me rather than someone else is not coming from a strictly Utilitarian place.

"Do that and you'll wind up with the universe tiled with paperclips" cracks me up. Even hearing it out of context, its overly familiar, but to a bystander its completely nonsensical. What makes it even better, there is no jargon or uncommon vocabulary that would make someone assume they misheard you, an outsider overhearing this would be forced into a state of complete bafflement. Kind of reminds me that old Lewis Black stand-up about overhearing a girl say "If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college."

I've thought about this too. I was traumatized by reading I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream as a kid, and I still shudder whenever I think of that story.

I know it is silly, and there is no plausible reason such an evil AI would come into existence. But even so, it really reinforces how awful a world with advanced technology can be (immortality + complete knowledge of psychology/neurology = eternal, perfect suffering). I find that I fear those hell scenarios a lot more than I appreciate the various eutopia scenarios I've seen described. If Omega offered me a ticket to Eutopia with a 1 in a Million chance of winding up in I Have No Mouth, I don't think I would take it.

I'm confused about your opening statement regarding 'different rules apply to the elite class.' Drug usage is not limited to the upper class, nor is admitting that you've used drugs limited to the upper class either. Obama could have hardly been called elite when he was using drugs, and barely even when he was writing that book. My friends and acquaintances are equally open about their past drug use.

To put it more succinctly, he was treated the same way most lower class drug users are. They receive no punishment and eventually grow up and do fine in life.

Your paragraph on 'Obama Winning, Penn is not' is similarly confusing. Obama is the President of the USA and presumably sitting on the hugest pile of utility on earth, but Penn Jillette is exceedingly rich sitting atop an estimated $175 million net worth. By my estimation, both are winning.

I can feel this post triggering a little BlueVsGreen thinking habits. Instead I'm going to attempt to stay Bruce Banner, and simply ask for clarification, but if my comments appear frustrated/insulting- please forgive me.

Can someone, OP or otherwise, explain to me, directly, the connection being made between Penn's rant and rationalists loving hedonism? Even if I accept each assertion, the materials don't construct a train-track capable of being traveled for my brain:

• What does Penn's rant have to do with the nature of the goals we choose and should choose?
• Winning short term goals can be destructive to long term goals; I got it. Again though, not seeing the connection to prior prior paragraphs. The seduction of short term, even wanting seemingly human-long(years) instead of generations-long goals. Got it. Important topic. However, again: how does this relate to previous paragraphs of Obama/Penn/society/elites/etc?

My inklings-

• There is a lot of talk about Penn- or is this a hidden discussion of high-utility Obama and HIS hedonistic behavior? Not accusing, but when I supported a color team, I found it difficult to directly associate faults the team leader.
• Am I over analyzing due to repeated pattern-exposure/anchoring to difficult not-how-homo-sapians-were-evolved-to-think bias Articles of Truth+3? Should this instead be taken as a loose interior monologue to explain how one event (the video) sparked a series of associations to bring up a topic worthy of further discussion (devilish attraction of short-term/winnable goals)?

Again, ending topic is very worthy of discussion- but I'm not seeing how it fits together

Edit: fixed link error with a bigger error, then fixed again.

This is a great post full of low investment methods with potentially high payoffs.

Yet, I find the structure of this post to be personally hilarious! My favorite technique/provocation is not listed: randomly matching successful systems(or their principles) into new pairs. While effective, this notion is commonly rejected- that a new combination of old ideas/principles is not new, unworthy of respect, and furthermore can be considered criminal behavior(a violation of intellectual ownership). I find the absence here understandable and even defensible- but the irony of starting the post with a quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is too much.

Seems like a lot words to express:

• Akrasia is an adaptive response to conserve energy while in an exploiting hierarchy.

Mental Health

• Just my opinion, but I think for those with anxiety, depression, or habitual negative thinking, measuring aspects of life can be very detrimental. The siren call of self-help pulls on those who feel inadequacy, this is similar, "if I track 'things' I can find what's wrong with me and fix it." But turning a spotlight on one's life without treatment(like CBT), will just provide evidence to feed a bias.

Motivation

• I'm more likely to do a project I'm tracking in detail. I find I vastly overestimate my ability to remember tasks, and even simple charts are great reminders. However, this is very different than the claims that tracking a goal increases motivation. It 'seems' reasonable, but it hasn't worked for me. If anything tracking details of a task I'm unmotivated for makes the problem worse by adding complexity.

Yeah, the anti-population-control screed is the prequel about Ender's parents.