I filled in the survey! Like many people I didn't have a ruler to use for the digit ratio question.

I think I preferred the old version of 85 more than the new one. "The phoenix only comes once" seems a lot more made-up than Harry's original determination to abandon comic-book morality as soon as someone died, which felt very much in character.

86 is certainly interesting, even if it largely felt like a wrapping-up restatement of what we knew. That said, I loved the Moody duel, and after six months a bit of restatement is quite useful. Also, I'm torn between how to interpret Snape's last question - my first thought was that he was verifying the truth of a story he had been told("Your master tortured her, now join the light side already!" being the most likely), but upon rereading, I wonder if he was worried that she had been used as Horcrux fuel.

Slightly off topic, but I'm very interested in the "policy impact" that FHI has had - I had heard nothing about it before and assumed that it wasn't having very much. Do you have more information on that? If it were significant, it would increase the odds that giving to FHI was a great option.

Possible consideration: meta-charities like GWWC and 80k cause donations to causes that one might not think are particularly important. E.g. I think x-risk research is the highest value intervention, but most of the money moved by GWWC and 80k goes to global poverty or animal welfare interventions. So if the proportion of money moved to causes I cared about was small enough, or the meta-charity didn't multiply my money much anyway, then I should give directly (or start a new meta-charity in the area I care about).

A bigger possible problem would be if I took considerations like the poor meat eater problem to be true. In that case, donating to e.g. 80k would cause a lot of harm even though it would move a lot of money to animal welfare charities, because it causes so much to go to poverty relief, which I could think was a bad thing. It seems like there are probably a few other situations like this around.

Do you have figures on what the return to donation (or volunteer time) is for 80,000 hours? i.e. is it similar to GWWC's $138 of donations per $1 of time invested? It would be helpful to know so I could calculate how much I would expect to go to the various causes.

Something on singletons: desirability, plausibility, paths to various kinds (strongly relates to stable attractors)

"Hell Futures - When is it better to be extinct?" (not entirely serious)

Recommendations are up!

Maybe some kinds of ems could tell us how likely Oracle/AI-in-a-box scenarios were to be successful? We could see if ems of very intelligent people run at very high speeds could convince a dedicated gatekeeper to let them out of the box. It would at least give us some mild evidence for or against AIs-in-boxes being feasible.

And maybe we could use certain ems as gatekeepers - the AI wouldn't have a speed advantage anymore, and we could try to make alterations to the em to make it less likely to let the AI out.

Minor bad incidents involving ems might make people more cautious about full-blown AGI (unlikely, but I might as well mention it).

Pleased to see that when asked about the relationship of FHI and SIAI, Nick gives the same answer I did.

SL0 people think "hacker" refers to a special type of dangerous criminal and don't know or have extremely confused ideas of what synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence are.

Agreed, especially since it is presented with no explanation or context. If the aim was "here's a picture of what we might achieve," I would personally aim for more of a Shock Level 2 image rather than an SL3 one-- presuming, of course, that this is being written for someone around SL1 (which seems likely). That said, I might omit it altogether.