Your poll does not seem to accept ∞, "infinity", or any variant thereof. (Note: my answer is not motivated by thinking that the chickens have lives worth creating.)

The general consensus is that at this stage, it's most important to raise awareness about wild animal suffering so future generations are likely to do something about the issue. This is done by spreading anti-speciesism and by countering the view that whatever is natural is somehow good or that nature "has a plan". It seems especially important to try to change the paradigm in ecology and conservation biology in order to focus more attention on the largest source of suffering on the planet. Some altruists also focus on this issue because of concerns about space colonisation, for instance, future humans might want to colonise the universe with Darwinian life or do ancestor simulations, which would be very bad from an anti-speciesist point of view.

Some imagined long-term solutions for the problem of wild animal suffering range from a welfare state for elephants to reprogramming predators to reducing biomass, but right now people are mainly trying to raise awareness for more intuitive interventions such as vaccinating wild animals against diseases (which is already done in some cases for the benefit of humans), not reintroducing predators to regions for human aesthetic reasons, and helping individual animals in distress as opposed to obeying the common anti-interventionist policies in wildlife parks.

bummer, man :) cute post.

I'm pretty humble about what I know. That said, it sometimes pays to not undersell (when others are confidently wrong, and there's no time to explain why, for example).

I'm not so much talking about humility that you communicate to other people but about actually thinking that the other person might be right.

I don't see what "integral over many possibilities" has to do with consistency, except that it's sometimes the correct (but more expensive) thing to do.

There are cases where the forward backward algorithm gives you a path that's impossible to happen. I would call those paths inconsistent.

That's one of the lessons I learned in bioinformatics. Having a algorithm that robust to error is often much better than just picking the explanation that most likely to explain the data.

A map of the world that allows for some inconsistency is more robust than one where one error leads to a lot of bad updates to make the map consistent with the error.

I care a lot (but not too much) about consistency under the best / most rational reflection I'm capable of.

That value doesn't directly lead to having a belief system where individual beliefs can be used to make accurate predictions. For most practical purposes the forward–backward algorithm produces better models of the world than Viterbi. Viterbi optimizes for overall consitstency while the forward–backward algorithm looks at local states.

If you have uncertainity in the data about which you reason, the world view with the most consistency is likely flawed.

One example is heat development in some forms of meditation. The fact that our body can develop heat through thermogenin without any shivering is a relatively new biochemical discovery. There were plenty of self professed rationalists who didn't believe in any heat development in meditation because the people in the meditation don't shiver. The search for consistency leads in examples like that to denying important empirical evidence.

It takes a certain humility to accept that there heat development during meditation without knowing a mechanism that can account for the development of heat.

People who want to signal socially that they know-it-all don't have the epistemic humility that allows for the insight that there are important things that they just don't understand.

To quote Nassim Taleb: "It takes extraordinary wisdom and self control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own."

For the record, I'm not a member of any religion.

I'll be doing several of these, but what everyone's doing is a psychomotor vigilance task, which my research so far suggests is the most efficient way known to track the whole jumble of things under the heading of "sleep deprivation".

The PVT is a good thing to use. For people not familiar with it, it tracks the ability to maintain focus, which is the primary thing that sleep deprivation destroys (and makes driving while tired so dangerous). There are long-term concerns about mental ability which the PVT will not address- some people who have done these sorts of sleep schedules find that they run out of 'creativity' after a few weeks, which is a serious concern but something hard to measure. (It's also hard for me to differentiate between "I generate ideas for 8 hours of useful work a day, and when I'm awake 20 hours a day that's obviously too little" and "I don't generate ideas anymore" from their reports.)

Hi, have been reading this site only for a few months, glad that this thread came up. My stupid question : can a person simply be just lazy, and how does all the motivation/fighting akrasia techniques help such a person?