Don't get bored with the small shit. Cancers, heart disease, stroke, safety engineering, suicidal depression, neurodegenerations, improved cryonic tech. In the next few decades I'm probably going to see most of you die from that shit (and that's if I'm lucky enough to persist as an observer), when you could've done a lot more to prevent it, if you didn't get bored so easily of dealing with the basics.

Eliezer it's a good question and a good thought experiment except for the last sentence, which assumes a conservation of us as subjective conscious entities that the anthropic principle doesn't seem to me to endorse.

You can also add into your anthropic principle mix the odds that increasing numbers of experts think we can solve biological aging within our life time, or perhaps that should be called the solipstic principle, which may be more relevant for us as persisting observers.

MZ, I disagree to a limited extent, for reasons I explained on my blog. I think Intrade may have specifically predicted McCain's temporary lead in the electoral college before a reasonable expert could (about 1 week in advance of its occurence). Being able to predict events accurately one week in advance is about as good as our best weather prediction. It's not trivial.

Eliezer, whatever you're doing here with this post, it's not enlightenment. In my opinion you're pretending to understanding that you don't have. It's not to say that you're position is wrong (I doubt either of us know enough to know conclusively), but that it's presented in an overreductionist, unhelpful way. Take the best arguments for the short-sell ban seriously (some of them seem to be presented in the comments here), I feel intellectually dirty after reading your post as written.

It's ironic that Murray is largely a myth-promoter posing as a politically incorrect empiricist attacked my pc myth-promoters. This quote is a good illustration of that.

Unsurprisingly I agree with Carl, especially the tax-farming angle. I think it's unlikely wet-brained humans would be part of a winning coalition that included self-improving human+ level digital intelligences for long. Humorously, because of the whole exponentional nature of this stuff, the timeline may be something like 2025 ---> functional biological immortality, 2030 --> whole brain emulation --> 2030 brain on a nanocomputer ---> 2030 earth transformed into computonium, end of human existence.

I'm not saying the irony is intentional (although I would claim it if I was Eliezer) but note who the soldier quote is from, and also note the content of the quote it succeeds.

Michael, well-articulated. BTW I encourage you to start up your blog again.

Those quotes seem rather weak to me. Especially the last one. Armchair psychology, you're worried about your own propensity towards irrationality, so you seek to master it by focusing on irrationality external to you, as by seeking to wipe it out. Kind of analogous to evangelical christianity. I'm not sure rational heroes and irrational villians in a morality play is as valuable to us trying to build our best models of the world, including of various irrationalities as natural phenomena. Whether we should expend effort to convince people not to engage in various irrationalities is an empirical question, and maybe one that has different answers in each instance.

What do you think of the philosophy faculty of MIT and Cal-Tech? I ask because I suspect the faculty there selects for philosophers that would be most usual to hard scientists and engineers (and for hard science and engineering students).

http://www.mit.edu/~philos/faculty.html

http://www.hss.caltech.edu/humanities/faculty

"I await the proper timing and forum in which to elaborate my skepticism that we should focus on trying to design a God to rule us all. Sure, have a contingency plan in case we actually face that problem, but it seems not the most likely or important case to consider."

I agree with Robin. Although I'm disappointed that he thinks he lacks an adequate forum to pound the podium on this more forcefully.