After learning the constant rule, you find a ruleset that doesn't seem too awful, and then don't learn it.

Hell is trying to abstain from pattern matching.

Taking a hobby costs a lot of time.

For me I don't see any reason to prefer archery over a martial art. The martial art does provide a bunch of secondary benefits.

Seriously, citation needed; all the claims I've seen are that cycling is dramatically safer.

You don't enjoy company of most members-of-your-preferred-sex, but are hopeful that there are people out there that you could spend your life with. The problem is that finding them is painful, because you have to spend time with people whose company you won't enjoy during the search.

You seem to be assuming a model where one can only meet a potential mate selected at random from the population, and one'd need to spend a lot of time with her before being allowed to rule her out.

Isn't there anything you already know but wouldn't like to forget? SRS is for keeping your precious memory storage, not necessarily for learning new stuff. There are probably a lot of things that wouldn't even cross your mind to google if they were erased by time. Googling could also waste time compared to storing memories if you have to do it often enough (roughly 5 minutes in your lifetime per fact).

What other skills work nicely with spaced repetition?

In my experience anything you can write into brief flashcards. Some simple facts can work as handles for broader concepts once you've learned them. You could even record triggers for episodic memories that are important to you.

I don't know what you work on, but many fields include bodies of loosely connected facts that you could in principle look up, but which you'd be much more efficient if you just memorized. In programming this might mean functions in a particular library that you're working with (the C++ STL, for example). In chemistry, it might be organic reactions. The signs of medical conditions might be another example, or identities related to a particular branch of mathematics.

SRS would be well suited to maintaining any of these bodies of knowledge.

If you don't enjoy the company of members-of-your-preferred-sex, what do you want a relationship for (that you couldn't also get from one-night stands or even prostitutes), anyway?

(Possibility of having children in the future?)

Thanks for taking the time to conduct and then analyze this survey!

What surprised me:

• Average IQ seemed insane to me. Thanks for dealing extensively with that objection.
• Time online per week seems plausible from personal experience, but I didn't expect the average to be so high.
• The overconfidence data hurts, but as someone pointed out in the comments, it's hard to ask a question which isn't misunderstood.

What disappointed me:

• Even I was disappointed by the correlations between P(significant man-made global warming) vs. e.g. taxation/feminism/etc. Most other correlations were between values, but this one was between one's values and an empirical question. Truly Blue/Green. On the topic of politics in general, see below.
• People, use spaced repetition! It's been studied academically and been shown to work brilliantly; it's really easy to incorporate in your daily life in comparison to most other LW material etc... Well, I'm comparatively disappointed with these numbers, though I assume they are still far higher than in most other communities.

And a comment at the end:

"We are doing terribly at avoiding Blue/Green politics, people."

Given that LW explicitly tries to exclude politics from discussion (and for reasons I find compelling), what makes you expect differently?

Incorporating LW debiasing techniques into daily life will necessarily be significantly harder than just reading the Sequences, and even those have only been read by a relatively small proportion of posters...

This situation reminds me of the Ultumatum game.

Say there are three candidates: Alice, Bob and Chandrakant. Everybody knows Chandrakant doesn't have a chance. Between Alice and Bob, you prefer Alice, but would like her to support the ban on transgenic oysters. So, along with a small vocal minority, you threatedn to vote for Chandrakant if she doesn't support the ban.

This plays out like this:

Round 1, Alice decides whether or not to add the ban on transgenic oysters to her platform.

Round 2, you decide whether to vote for her or Chandrakant.

Alice's decision in round 1 depends on how seriously she takes your threat to vote for Chandrakant in round 2. If you're the kind of person who is known for "not wanting to throw his vote away", then you'll end up still voting for her and eating transgenic oysters. If you (and people like you) are known for being stubborn as a mule, she may change her platform.

(note that none of this requires that you actually prefer Chandrakant to Alice - voting for a third-party guy can also be strategic voting!)

No, there's no particular reason to think an FAI would be better at learning than an UFAI analogue, at least not as far as I can see.

However, one of the problems needed to be solved for FAI (stable self-modification) could certainly make an FAI's rate of self-improvement faster than a comparative AI which has not solved that problem. There are other questions that need to be answered there (does the AI realize that modifications will go wrong and therefore not self-modify? If it's smart enough to notice the problem, won't it's first step be to solve it?), and I may be off base here.

I'm not sure it's that useful to talk about an FAI vs a analogue UFAI, though. If an FAI is built, there will be many significant differences between the resulting intelligence and the one that would have been built if the FAI was not, simply due to the different designers. In terms of functioning, the different design choices, even those not relevant to FAI (if that's even meaningful - FAI may well need to be so fully integrated that all the aspects are made with it in mind), may be radically different depending on the designer and are likely to have most of the effect you're talking about.

In other words, we don't know shit about what the first AGI might look like, and we certainly don't know enough to do detailed separate counterfactuals