I wonder at the timing of this article and upcoming workshops.

I'm not deep in the AI community... did something happen recently to spark greater interest and preparation for AI? Any big news story I somehow missed?

Maybe the topic's been on the backburner at the White House and they're only just getting it started now; regardless, it sounds promising.

Last week was a gathering of physicists in Oxford to discuss string theory and the philosophy of science.

From the article:

Nowadays, as several philosophers at the workshop said, Popperian falsificationism has been supplanted by Bayesian confirmation theory, or Bayesianism...

Gross concurred, saying that, upon learning about Bayesian confirmation theory from Dawid’s book, he felt “somewhat like the Molière character who said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been talking prose all my life!’”

That the Bayesian view is news to so many physicists is itself news to me, and it's very unsettling news. You could say that modern theoretical physics has failed to be in-touch with other areas of science, but you could also make the argument that the rationalist community has failed to properly reach out and communicate with scientists.

Gwern has written an article for Wired, allegedly revealing the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto:

http://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-this-unknown-australian-genius/

How does it support MWI?

Why doesn't your list of "things I've considered" include an option like, "Nutrition science is real science, and Campbell's work is correct"?

Sorry, I know this is the start of an ambitious sequence about economics and I shouldn't spoil that; and I know that you are defining "scarcity" according to some jargon definition that is part of academic economic discourse.

But do you understand that, by the ordinary understanding of the word, "scarcity is the presence of choice" is an utter inversion of reality? In the ordinary meaning, scarcity means shortage, it means lack, it means you don't have something that you need. And that means you don't have a choice! That you don't have the luxury of choice; that you will walk because you can't afford a bus, that you will borrow because you have run out of cash.

None of the replies to this post actually address the crucial part of the argument: the step from the existence of mathematical truths beyond the reach of a specific formalization of mathematical reasoning, to the existence of a reality beyond or outside a specific physical theory of everything, on the grounds that a mathematical theory of physics must be subject to Goedelian incompleteness.

e.g. do you consider yourself to be the cause of other people?

To the extent that there is a cause, yes. Other people are a surface phenomenon.

Maybe "more fundamental" is clearer. In the same way that friction is less real than electromagnetism.

My own existence is more real than this universe. Humans and our objective reality are map, not territory.