Whilst I really, really like the last picture - it seems a little odd to include it in the article.

Isn't this meant to seem like a hard-nosed introduction to non-transhumanist/sci-fi people? And doesn't the picture sort of act against that - by being slightly sci-fi and weird?

Due to the absence of any signs of intelligence out there, especially paper-clippers burning the cosmic commons, we might conclude that unfriendly AI could not be the most dangerous existential risk that we should worry about.

I view this as one of the single best arguments against risks from paperclippers. I'm a little concerned that it hasn't been dealt with properly by SIAI folks - aside from a few comments by Carl Shulman on Katja's blog.

I suspect the answer may be something to do with anthropics - but I'm not really certain of exactly what it is.

What initiatives is the Singularity Institute taking or planning to take to increase it's funding to whatever the optimal level of funding is?

What's a "philosophy student", I wonder?

Are we encouraged to estimate IQ from SAT tests and the like? That's what I did. That could reduce the excluded-middle bias that Gedusa mentions.

This is great! I hope there's a big response.

It seems likely you're going to get skewed answers for the IQ question. Mostly it's the really intelligent and the below average who get (professional) IQ tests - average people seem less likely to get them.

I predict high average IQ, but low response rate on the IQ question, which will give bad results. Can you tell us how many people respond to that question this time? (no. of responses isn't registered on the previous survey)

Unfortunately, it seems that the best choices for which animals to eat are opposite depending on whether your goal is killing fewer animals or minimizing your carbon footprint.

I can't remember where I saw it (I hope it wasn't on here), but someone recommended that someone with vegetarian sympathies could do some good just by switching from chicken to beef. The idea is that if you're eating a constant amount of meat by weight, you have to kill a couple hundred chickens to get the same amount of meat as killing one cow. If you don't believe there's a significant "personhood" difference between cows and chickens, that's cutting your death toll by orders of magnitude.

I'm not sure what I think of this argument, because small differences in intelligence can have major differences in "personhood" - for example, I can't even name a number of cows it would take such that I would be equally comfortable killing X cows as one person. That means that even a small intelligence difference between cows and chickens could more than cancel out the gains from extra weight.

Really, what we need is some sort of animal which is both very large and very stupid. If only a stray prehistoric asteroid hadn't killed off our ideal food source.

I take it that you partially changed "my mistakes" to include nicotine. I enjoyed your article on it - but how are you using it?

Are you rotating with other stimulants on a regular basis, using when you like, using to promote habit formation etc.

Would anyone care to comment on the recent Mt Gox hack n' crash?

Personally, I'm thinking that this very bad. The currency won't look as good the mainstream, and I'm anticipating panic sells as soon as the exchanges get up and running again. I'm agnostic as to whether Bitcoin will die or not though...