I suffer from this severely and pervasively, and was already aware of that before reading this post. So I just wanted to comment that your post fits spot-on with my experience. I tend to develop ugh fields around projects at work when I get stuck on them for awhile, and get emails from people asking when they will be done, and start to fear getting email about them at all, and then about thinking about them, and so on.

I have also gone through periods of 'ugh'ness centered on my voicemail box and my email inbox, each time when I knew or suspected they contained items likely to make me feel shittier about myself for whatever reason (e.g. reminding me about some thing I was in the process of failing to get done.)

We can't use the universal prior in practice unless physics contains harnessable non-recursive processes. However, this is exactly the situation in which the universal prior doesn't always work. Thus, one source of the 'magic' is through allowing us to have access to higher levels of computation than the phenomena we are predicting (and to be certain of this).

Also, the constants involved could be terrible and there are no guarantees about this (not even probabilistic ones). It is nice to reach some ratio in the limit, but if your first Graham's number of guesses are bad, then that is very bad for (almost) all purposes.

Discussion, mostly ad-hoc. On some occasions the discussion has been more focused it was assumed participants had read certain LW related things.

What happens at the meetups?

When I contribute to charity, it's usually to avoid feeling guilty rather than to feel good as such... imagining myself as being the guy who doesn't rescue a drowning swimmer because he doesn't want to get his suit wet isn't a state I want to be in.

These charities can save someone's life for about $1,000. If you spend $1,000 on anything else, you've as good as sentenced someone to death. I find this to be really disturbing, and thinking about it makes think about doing crazy things, such as spending my $20,000 savings on a ten year term life insurance policy worth $10,000,000 and then killing myself and leaving the money to charity. At $1,000 a life, that's ten thousand lives saved. I suspect that most people who literally give their lives for others don't get that kind of return on investment.

Curiously -- not indignantly -- how should I interpret your statement that all but a handful of parents are "lousy"? Does this mean that your values are different from theirs? This might be what is usually meant when someone says someone is "lousy".

Your explicit argument seems to be that they're selfish if they're purchasing fleeting entertainment when they could invest that money in cryonics for their children. However, if they don't buy cryonics for themselves, either, it seems like cryonics is something they don't value, not that they're too selfish to buy it for their children.

Yes, it is. How could examples of X not be evidence that the "norm is X"? It may not be sufficiently strong evidence, but if this one example is not sufficiently damning, there are certainly plenty more.

"If it is, it would be surprising if nobody in the powerful organizations I'm talking about realizes it, especially if a few breakthroughs are made public and as we get closer to AGI."

Nobody in powerful organizations realizes important things all the time. To take a case study, in 2001, Warren Buffett and Ted Turner just happened to notice that there were hundreds of nukes in Russia, sitting around in lightly guarded or unguarded facilities, which anyone with a few AK-47s and a truck could have just walked in and stolen. They had to start their own organization, called the Nuclear Threat Initiative, to take care of the problem, because no one else was doing anything.

I'd guess that legalizing gay marriage would be pretty low-hanging fruit, but I don't know how politically possible it is.

I agree with your point here -- strongly. But I also think you're being unfair to Caplan. While his position is (I now realize) ridiculous, the example you gave is not.

In his "gun to the head" analogy, Caplan suggests that OCD isn't really a disease! After all, if we put a gun to the head of someone doing (say) repetitive hand washing, we could convince them to stop. Instead, Caplan thinks it's better to just say that the person just really likes doing those repetitive behaviors.

His position would not be that they like doing those behaviors per se, but rather, they have a very strange preference that makes those behaviors seem optimal. Caplan would probably call it "a preference for an unusually high level of certainty about something". For example, someone with OCD needs to perceive 1 million:1 odds that they're hands are now clean, while normal people need only 100:1 odds.

So the preference is for cleanliness-certainty, not the act of hand-washing. To get that higher level of certainty requires that they wash their hands much more often.

Likewise, an OCD victim who has to lock their door 10 times before leaving has an unusually high preference for "certainty that the door is locked", not for locking doors.

Again, I don't agree with this position, but it's handling of OCD isn't that stupid.