Consequentialism (usually) has a slightly richer vocabulary than just "This is the right act": there's usually a notion of degree. That is, rather than having an ordinal ranking of actions, you get a cardinal ranking. So action A could be twice as good as action B. The translation you've proposed collapses this. I'm not sure how big a problem that is, though.

To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing quite like SIAI or lesswrong in continental western Europe. People aren't into AI as much as in the US, and if there's rationality thinking being done, it's mostly traditional rationality, skepticism, etc.

Atheism can score high in many countries, as a rule of thumb countries to the north are more atheistic, those to the south (Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc.) are more religious.

There are a few scattered transhumanist as well as a few life-extension organizations, which are loosely starting to cooperate together.

The European commission itself started prioritizing small-scale healthy life extension a year or two ago. This could help focus more people on such questions in the years to come.

This assumes a large genetic aspect of being "weird".

Americans being more willing to be weird could explain both rationality as a project and religiosity.

What ideas or knowledge do you have for optimizing your social network and sqeezing it for all it's worth?

Is this really the best attitude to take? I tend to think that friends you can tell anything to, and who can tell anything to you, are the most valuable contacts.

Threads like that make me want to apply Bayes theorem to something.

You start with probability 0.03 that Eliezer is sociopath - the baseline. Then you do Bayesian updates on answers to questions like: Does he imagine grandiose importance to him or is he generally modest/in line with actual accomplishments? Does he have grand plans out of the line with his qualifications and prior accomplishments, or are the plans grandiose? Is he talking people into giving him money as source of income? Is he known to do very expensive altruistic stuff that is larger than self interested payoff or not? Did he claim to be an ideally moral being? And so on. You do updates based on the likehood of such for sociopaths and normal people. Now, I'm not saying he is something, all I am saying is that I can't help it but do such updates - first via fast pattern matching by the neural network, then if I find the issue significant enough, explicitly with a calculator if i want to doublecheck.

edit: I think it will be better to change the wording here as different people understand that word differently. Let's say we are evaluating whenever the utility function includes other people to any significant extent, in presence of communication noise and misunderstandings. Considering that some people are prone to being pascal wagered and so the utility function that doesn't include other people leads to attempts to pascal-wager others, i.e. grandiose plans. On the AI work being charitable, I don't believe it, to be honest. One has to study and get into Google (or the like) if one wants the best shot at influencing morality of future AI. I think that's the direction into which everyone genuinely interested in saving the mankind and genuinely worried about the AI has gravitated. If one wants to make impact by talking - one needs to first gain some status among the cool guys, and that means making some really impressive working accomplishments.

Nice post with much interesting material.

I wonder when I read the following:

"Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a highly successful approach for breaking habits, which requires only a very subtle alteration to this process. You notice that you are biting your nails...."

Do you know of any studies on this, or could you link me to some other source of further reading? (eg on the specifics of the method, on the evidence for them, whether there are any high-quality meta-reviews, etc)

Maybe there's some confounding factor - like sudden recent interest in Singularity/transhumanist topics forcing the cite count up?

Carl, following that link to its source brought me here: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/index.jsp?action=download&o=33188, where several randomized trials are mentioned. But I see no meta-analysis, so I still worry about publication selection biases, etc. Anyone know of a meta-analysis of this lit?

Generally, to me, a cross-linking dedicated x-risk-forum, a literature list and perhaps also a wiki seem like useful things which don't already exist.

There are several small organizations which are created by one person and limited to a small website that nobody reads.

Seems like a good idea to write a discussing post gathering the names and links to the websites of such groups (or persons), as well as more well-known groups, aiming to get a comprehensive list. In addition to being useful in itself such a list could provide a starting point for people to contact about your ideas of a forum and a wiki.

1. Open complete library of all literature on existential risks.

Similarly, it seems like a comprehensive bibliography of X-risk literature would be a useful resource. Seth Baum's GCR bibliography might be a good starting point.