For deontological reasons, I've been vegetarian for about a year and a half. I recently decided to make up inaccurate numbers to see if the decision makes sense on utilitarian grounds. The sources I trust seem to agree that eating meat will improve my health*, so on one side of the equation I had [extra lifespan] * [expected earnings per time] * [fraction of earnings I currently donate] * [lives saved per dollar donated]. On the other side of the equation, [expected years of life] * [amount of meat an average American eats per year] / [usable meat per animal].

Conclusion: I don't care about animals that much, compared to humans. The result was two orders of magnitude away from even being a difficult decision, so even my horrible made-up numbers were persuasive. I've been eating meat for a couple of weeks, now.

I was publicly vegetarian for a while, so I was afraid of telling people; it felt like admitting I'd been wrong. Nothing embarrassing happened. I'll remember this next time I fear looking foolish for changing my mind.

I would definitely like to see it as a user preference.

Also, how do people feel about the relatively subtle color change for new comments which has replaced the bright green edge?

Propaganda only works when the reader feels like you've been absolutely fair to other side

As a technique for making good stories, I think this is solid advice. As a technique for making effective propaganda, it's blatantly false. Uncle Tom's Cabin is one-sided. Birth of a Nation is one-sided. Brokeback Mountain is one-sided. MoR is one-sided; no one makes a compelling case against rationality.

This isn't too surprising, considering the source. I've read some of Card's propaganda novels. They're good stories, but I wasn't even a little compelled to become a Mormon.

General remark: At some point I need to write a post about how I'm worried that there's an "unpacking fallacy" or "conjunction fallacy fallacy" practiced by people who have heard about the conjunction fallacy but don't realize how easy it is to take any event, including events which have already happened, and make it look very improbable by turning one pathway to it into a large series of conjunctions. E.g. I could produce a long list of things which allegedly have to happen for a moon landing to occur, some of which turned out to not be necessary but would look plausible if added to the list ante facto, with no disjunctive paths to the same destination, and thereby make it look impossible. Generally this manifests when somebody writes a list of alleged conjunctive necessities, and I look over the list and some of the items seem unnecessary (my model doesn't go through them at all), obvious disjunctive paths have been omitted, the person has assigned sub-50% probability to things that I see as mainline 90% probabilities, and conditional probabilities when you assume the theory was right about 1-N would be significantly higher for N+1. Most of all, if you imagine taking the negation of the assertion and unpacking it into a long list of conjunctive probabilities, it would look worse - there should be a name for the problem of showing that X has weak arguments but not considering that ~X has even weaker arguments. Or on a meta level, since it is very easy to make things look more conjunctive, we should perhaps not be prejudiced against things which somebody has helpfully unpacked for us into a big conjunction, when the core argument still seems pretty simple on some level.

When I look over this list, my reaction is that:

(1) is a mainline assumption with odds of 5:1 or 10:1 - of course future intergalactic civilization bottlenecks through the goals of a self-improving agency, how would you get to an intergalactic civilization without that happening? If this accounts for much of our disagreement then we're thinking about entirely different scenarios, and I'm not sure how to update from your beliefs about mostly scenario B to my beliefs about mostly scenario A. It makes more sense to call (1) into question if we're really asking about global vs. local, but then we get into the issue of whether global scenarios are mostly automatic losses anyway. If (1) is really about whether we should be taking into account a big chunk of survivable global scenarios then this goes back to a previous persistent disagreement.

(2) I don't see the relevance - why does a long time horizon vs. a short time horizon matter? 80 years would not make me relax and say that we had enough serial depth, though it would certainly be good news ceteris paribus, there's no obvious threshold to cross.

Listing (3) and (4) as separate items was what originally made my brain shout "unpacking fallacy!" There are several subproblems involved in FAI vs. UFAI, of which the two obvious top items are the entire system being conducive to goal stability through self-improvement which may require deducing global properties to which all subsystems must be conducive, and the goal loading problem. These both seem insight-heavy which will require serial time to solve. The key hypothesis is just that there are insight-heavy problems in FAI which don't parallelize well relative to the wide space of cobbled-together designs which might succeed for UFAI. Odds here are less extreme than for (1) but still in the range of 2:1-4:1. The combined 3-4 issue is the main weak point, but the case for "FAI would parallelize better than UFAI" is even weaker.

(5) makes no sense to ask as a conditionally independent question separate from (1); if (1) is true then the only astronomical effects of modern-day economic growth are whatever effects that growth has on AI work, and to determine if economic growth is qualitatively good or bad, we ask about the sign of the effect neglecting its magnitude. I suppose if the effect were trivial enough then we could just increase the planet's growth rate by 5% for sheer fun and giggles and it would have no effect on AI work, but this seems very unlikely; a wealthier planet will ceteris paribus have more AI researchers. Odds of 10:1 or better.

On net, this says that in my visualization the big question is just "Does UFAI parallelize better than FAI, or does FAI parallelize better than UFAI?" and we find that the case for the second clause is weaker than the first; or equivalently "Does UFAI inherently require serial time more than FAI requires serial time?" is weaker than "Does FAI inherently require serial time more than UFAI requires serial time?" This seems like a reasonable epistemic state to me.

The resulting shove at the balance of the sign of the effect of economic growth would have to be counterbalanced by some sort of stronger shove in the direction of modern-day economic growth having astronomical benefits. And the case for e.g. "More econ growth means friendlier international relations and so they endorse ideal Y which leads them to agree with me on policy Z" seems even more implausible when unpacked into a series of conjunctions. Lots of wealthy people and relatively friendly nations right now are not endorsing policy Z.

To summarize and simplify the whole idea, the notion is:

Right now my estimate of the sign of the astronomical effect of modern-day economic growth is dominated by a 2-node conjunction of, "Modern-day econ growth has a positive effect on resources into both FAI and UFAI" and "The case for FAI parallelizing better than UFAI is weaker than the converse case". For this to be not true requires mainly that somebody else demonstrate an effect or set of effects in the opposite direction which has better net properties after its own conjunctions are taken into account. The main weakness in the argument and lingering hope that econ growth is good, isn't that the original argument is very conjunctive, but rather it's that faster econ growth seems like it should have a bunch of nice effects on nice things and so the disjunction of other econ effects might conceivably swing the sign the other way. But it would be nice to have at least one plausible such good effect without dropping our standards so low that we could as easily list a dozen equally (im)plausible bad effects.

Even without doing any calculations, it is extraordinarily hard to imagine that the difference between "world at war" and "world at peace" is less than the difference between "world with slightly more parallelization in AI work" and "world with slightly less parallelization;"

With small enough values of 'slightly' obviously the former will have a greater effect, the question is the sign of that effect; also it's not obvious to me that moderately lower amounts of econ growth lead to world wars, and war seems qualitatively different in many respects from poverty. I also have to ask if you are possibly maybe being distracted by the travails of one planet as a terminal value, rather than considering that planet's instrumental role in future galaxies.

Awesome!

One request I'd have is to make the group private or otherwise hidden from Google searches. I've had this problem with Google Groups before, and if we're going to be sharing video links to practise exercises, I think we'd all like these to not come up when Google-searching for our names or usernames.

I've signed up, and created a gmail discussion group for us.

Thanks for all the encouragement.

I'm not overly optimistic that I have many opportunities to change anything, is the problem. If I do wind up at App Academy, I'd be surprised if that didn't make a huge difference for the better. I can't help but feel like that's mostly all I have to bet on, though.

Something that makes this even more frustrating is that, had I realized enough of this just a year or two sooner, my opportunities to do something about it would have been far more numerous, simply by virtue of being at college and having access to more people and places (some of which were not unpleasant). But college was more about academics, and now the matter of paying for it is relevant, and both of those I'd like to avoid if at all possible.

I'm not sure how to respond to suggestions like "Go out and meet people" or "Go buy <-useful object->" (I've gotten these from elsewhere). Anything that involves me leaving the house is ridiculously difficult. I get the impression that this particular detail isn't coming across very well when I try explaining the situation. "Gain the ability to do things outside the house" is more or less one of my current goals, not that I know how to achieve it.

I'm kinda starting to panic. (Warning: Wall-o-text follows.)

I don't like giving out my age, but I was born in mid March 1988. That makes all of these much scarier:

• I live with my parents
• My physical activity consists almost entirely of pacing the house when everyone is asleep/not at home.
• I have ~$180 in paypal, $700.08 in the bank, and $~130-150 in cash, and receive $~630 in disability benefits monthly. My student loan payments ar ~$860. All the loan stuff is hadled through my parents, who, in spite of my waiting until my dad was on the phone to tell the Teller my desired pin, seem to alternate between whether or not they use money from my account or their own to pay for things without warning.
• Meanwhile, someone I went to kindergarten with taught my cousin's seventh grade English class, and my best friend in elementary school(1) is the director of finance at the local university.
• I avoid interacting with anyone else who lives in this house as much as possible. Now that local schools are on summer break, that means much more hiding in one room or another. Which means considerably less physical activity, and only eating things that can be quickly grabbed and taken elsewhere (rather than anything that requires preparation or utensiles). I am worried about my health enough without this.
• I own property and a livable building nearby. I'd much rather live there than move to a city with actual sidewalks and public transportation and people I might be more likely to stand interacting with. This is most likely completely irrational (though I keep reminding myself that this means no rent and low utility costs as though that makes it any better an idea).
• I don't think my parents trust that I can actually do anything. I recently decided to go cross a non-busy street to where one parent was waiting in the parked vehicle to ask about lunch plans, while the other screamed that I would get run over. Notice, I'd been taught how to cross streets unaided annoyingly often since fourth grade by various mobility instructors. My interest in App Academy has been met with constant concerns over where I'll stay/how I'll eat/etc (The San Francisco facility, according to the interviewer I talked to, is livable, which was sufficient that I didn't feel the need to ask any further questions at the time.). I'm basically expected to tell them if ever I need anything.
• I am socially broken. I blame the constant "Don't care what anyone thinks!" / "Say no to peer pressure!" / "Do what's right and stand up for yourself!" / "College education! Seriously, it will magically dump the solutions to everything into your lap!" memes. Combine those with my poor vision, and I'm pretty sure the closest thing I had to a peer group is "people I annoyed the least". Recently, my father declared in a moment of frustration at all the social activity my cousin was trying to have that he selected our current location because it was far away from everyone before all the recent construction. They basically create an atmosphere of "Getting involved with other people will get you in all kinds of trouble!" ... then they turned around and started berating me for not being normal starting after seventh grade when the school started complaining. ... Then sent me to summer camp, which pattern-matched to "You're not submitting to peer pressure. Prepare to be reeducated." so closely that... eh, this is probably where I stopped talking to them. This is also the age where my classmates started behaving less and less like people I wanted to associate with (because sex drugs profanity and insulting people for status were things I'd been told since birth to avoid. Except the sex part. I wasn't told anything about that, so just kinda put it in the same category, since that's what most people seemed to do.). So even though I failed socially for the first half of my life, the second half has been much worse. Actually, that's definitely when I stopped talking to them, since that's also when my already poor vision took a very steep decline, which I never told them about (Other things I never told them about include that time I found a giant lump in the inside of my thigh (I think it turned otu to be some kind of acne that trapped a lot of water, but it was pretty terrifying at the time), that time one of my toes was having such problems that I couldn't do much walking for a while (they found out only because I was at college at the time and my braillist found out and told them), or that time I had horrible stomach problems (I only informed them when it got painful enough that I could only crawl into their room at 3AM in the worst pain I've ever felt). Keep in mind, they're my only means of accessing a doctor.).

I'm happiest when I'm successfully working on something--or at least thinking about it productively. Occasionally awesome things (good music/fiction) help. Actually working on anything is an uphill battle, one not aided by the afore-mentioned summer break. Since I don't prepare food in any involved way when anyone's around (and have no cooking skills better than microwaving or making sandwiches), my food selection is limited. I once got my parents to buy an air filter for my dorm room at college, but they never paid attention when I reminded them that the filters need changing every 60 days.

The end result is me spending a lot of time miserable and probably unhealthy and only occasionally having bursts of enthusiasm strong enough to get around it (usually when people are away).

I've applied to App Academy, and get the impression that my chances of getting accepted are quite high. Since their locations are in San Francisco and New York, if I do attend, I might be able to benefit from annoying the rationalist communities there in person. I'm trying not to plan for this as an eventuality, though; the costs of travel and the $3000 downpayment have to come from somewhere (Remember that I only have ~$1000 that I can use, and I'll lose SSI if ever I have more than $2000), and my independence skills leave everything to be desired. I've looked into local opportunities--there aren't many jobs with online listings in my area that I could actually do, let alone ones I'd have any interest in (never mind the enhanced difficulty that I keep hearing about blind people having at getting employed, ADA or no ADA). The local bus system is... well, it exists, which is pretty much all I can say about it (it certainly doesn't stop anywhere within walking distance of my current location, not that there are any sidewalks within walking distance). Cabs are expensive enough that I wouldn't dare try taking more than one or two without a serious income boost. And this all still runs into the big problem: If I try to do anything on my own and my parents find out, they will say something. I doubt it'd be anything negative, but I have such a strong desire to avoid that sort of conversation that it puts a huge cap on what I'm willing to do with them within 100 miles. To the extent that in the extremely unlikely event that I somehow wind up with a girlfriend, they're the last people in the universe I'd want to know. They're not awful people, or anything; they buy the food and pay the bills, after all; but beyond that, I'd rather go get lost in San Francisco than talk to them about anything important.

The end conclusion that all this leads me to is that I have no reason to expect I'll live all that long, let alone while avoiding depression. And that just sucks.

I'm kinda feeling like I'm close to exhausting what I can do and just need a genie to come save me. But that seems overly pessimistic. I can't seem to come up with a plot more thorough than "Make money somehow", which has the nasty problem of requiring that I can manage people and/or consistently work on something. I kinda feel like imagining what Harry James Potter Evans Verres would do in this situation is a better strategy than what I've been doing, but I can't actually seem to do that (and half suspect it'd involve writing something awesome online, using the charisma to fund a startup, and using said startup to fund his escape).

I'm also tempted to repost this in tomorrow's open thread, but it is a >8kb whine-fest, making me doubt that the utility of doing so outweighs the disutility of annoying everyone more than I have already.

(1) "Best friend" = person I spent the most time with at recess, maybe. The first and only out-of-school interaction we had was when I was 18 (and by complete coincidence it resulted in his new car getting totaled).

Using present pain to reason more mathematically about intertemporal options.

For a while I've been thinking that when facing a trolley problem, I should pinch my left arm once while reasoning about letting the one person be killed. And my right arm five times, for the five people that should be saved. More interestingly it seems that when reasoning about a problem in the far future mental slot versus a near future one, bringing them both to the present in the form of pleasure could aid thinking/motivation accuracy. I see no reason why the same would not work for pain.