I appreciate and agree with the principle behind this post, but when a store wants to charge me for using the bathroom I either find a friendlier store or else I hand them the money with a smile and never buy anything from that store ever again.

There are certainly sources of knowledge that are not cheap to produce and which deserve our funding and our appreciation. But I am not going to give eg gated journals one cent more than I am absolutely forced to, and I consider it morally important to make attempting to profiteer off of other people's scientific research as unprofitable and unpleasant as possible.

I thought he was taking the "don't bother" approach by not giving a probability estimate or arguing about probabilities.

In any case, there's still the question of what is rational for those of us who do think SIAI's chance of success is "small".

I propose that the rational act is to investigate approaches to greater than human intelligence which would succeed.

Have you tried vaporizing medical sleepy weed? That helped a lot with my insomnia :)

Your right, I was being too rhetorical when i said that. The final point of my piece was simply a way of explaining the quote, i can agree that

human sleep patterns are not completely dependent on external stimuli. and hopefully we will research them more.

no known human cultures that engage in polyphasic sleep (not counting biphasic sleep).

Look, our sun forces us into a monophasic pattern because of the day/night cycle that occurs everywhere around the earth but our body's don't naturally fall into it. We sleep at night because our brain is wired to sleep when its dark and that's an evolved mechanism but the behavioral pattern that polyphasic sleep requires isn't evolved into our system its just a natural response to the natural light patterns of our world . In parts of the world where light comes less often sleeping patterns are different than near the equator as evidenced by biphasic sleepers around the world who follow the Siesta pattern naturally.

It was dangerous, to try and guess at evolutionary psychology if you weren't a professional evolutionary psychologist; but when Harry had read about the Milgram experiment, the thought had occurred to him that situations like this had probably arisen many times in the ancestral environment, and that most potential ancestors who'd tried to disobey Authority were dead. Or that they had, at least, done less well for themselves than the obedient. People thought themselves good and moral, but when push came to shove, some switch flipped in their brain, and it was suddenly a lot harder to heroically defy Authority than they thought. Even if you could do it, it wouldn't be easy, it wouldn't be some effortless display of heroism. You would tremble, your voice would break, you would be afraid; would you be able to defy Authority even then?

Harry blinked, then; because his brain had just made the connection between Milgram's experiment and what Hermione had done on her first day of Defense class, she'd refused to shoot a fellow student, even when Authority had told her that she must, she had trembled and been afraid but she had still refused. Harry had seen that happen right in front of his own eyes and he still hadn't made the connection until now...

All i'm saying is that people attribute evolutionary reasons to things that have many separate causes and are unproven because they think they understand it. That's what both these quotes illustrate as far as i know :)

If i asked the question "why did humans form a hibernative monophasic sleep cycle? most people would say because at night we slept in caves and shelter to escape the dark and we evolved to sleep that way" even though that's not the case with out genes at all. People often attribute things that are entirely behavioral to evolutionary reasons and that's what i think the quotes trying to illustrate.

Baby's start out sleeping Polyphasically but soon adapt a natural night/day cycle due to the humans around them (mirror neurons, reinforcement, lighting). Now i dont know if this proposed experiment would-be very feasible or ethical but most people discount it because they "understand" evolution.

Great post, great review of the literature.

Where do you get most of your references? Do you wade through the literature, or do you use review papers? I'd love to see a book length compilation with the same density as this post.

but it's difficult to imagine

I believe that is the point they are trying to illustrate. If you are trying to QS your way to one in several million events then you had better start imagining pretty hard and consider every possible unexpected event of that order of improbability, including black swans. You can influence the relative probability of various failure modes but you must acknowledge that the failure modes become magnified alongside the win outcome.

This consideration is probably not a problem when playing a simple low-n roulette. It becomes insurmountable when you are trying to brute force 4096 bit encryption. You just have to hope the machine breaks gracefully instead of doing something unexpectedly bad.

If I were to build a death machine it would be based on high explosives. I would encase my head in a mound of C4 clay (or perhaps a less stable material). The machine could fail, most likely at the detonator, but it's difficult to imagine how it could maim me.

You mean alieve, not believe. This is a technique to alieve what you already believe.