So, is the story real, and why did you include the spider (I reckon that is not real, too perfect)?

I really can't help but correct your math: 12! would be if you could choose how to order the 12 toppings, but that's not what you're doing - you're choosing a subset of them - that's 2^12 options. Don't worry, you were only off by five orders of magnitude.

Sorry about that.

Would we expect those who consciously learned the Dark Arts to be more or less responsible with them (that is, using them ethically) than those who are naturally skilled?

You pirating a book will, personally, make you poorer more than it will richer? Even though it's impossible that you will get even 100% of the amount you would otherwise pay for a book?

I suppose you might feel guilty about it, and the negative utility of guilt might be greater than the economic cost, but purely economically, it's clearly good for you personally to get something for free that you would otherwise pay for.

(although it's clearly good selfishly)

Not so clear for those of us who make a living in the content industries.

gigapedia dot org. I get electronic versions of my paper books there also books I'm not sure about buying. 70% success for my interests, which largely overlap with the others here as far as I can tell.

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers - psychological stress damages human health - tedious but important (and well sourced)

Probability Theory - the Logic of Science (Jaynes) - only halfway through it. I can't justify its length unless I were really willing to work through all the computation shown (I'm not). The text is still somewhat meaningful if you merely read it.

Long, unexplained list:

• The Wasp Factory, The Player of Games, Matter (Iain Banks)
• Return from the Stars
• Lilith's Brood
• Cyteen
• Godel, Escher, and Bach (EGB)
• His Dark materials (juvenille, mediocre movie, but fun)
• Black Company
• Malazan Book of the Fallen
• The Glass Bead Game
• Jane Eyre
• The Dispossessed
• The Feynman Lectures on Physics
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• The Gods Themselves
• The Ugly Little Boy
• Permutation City
• A Fire Upon the Deep
• Neuromancer
• Diamond Age
• Anathem
• Lovelock
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
• Songmaster
• Enchantment
• Kushiel's Dart
• The Shadow of the Torturer (Book of the New Sun)
• The Deed of Paksenarrion
• Flatland
• White Light
• The Eyre Affair
• Pronoun Music
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
• Air: Or, Have Not Have
• Never Let Me Go

Up to chapter 31 now. I don't understand how Eliezer is going to paint the central conflict. Granted, Quirrell is awesome and has had several successes already. But the main motivation of the Death Eaters is blood purism (as in canon), and Harry has already proved it to be false, and our Quirrell is rational enough to agree with the proof if he hears it. So to make the central conflict happen Eliezer has to invent something else, something secret, that makes Quirrell tick.

(Wherein I seek advice on what may be a fairly important decision.)

Within the next week, I'll most likely be offered a summer job where the primary project will be porting a space weather modeling group's simulation code to the GPU platform. (This would enable them to start doing predictive modeling of solar storms, which are increasingly having a big economic impact via disruptions to power grids and communications systems.) If I don't take the job, the group's efforts to take advantage of GPU computing will likely be delayed by another year or two. This would be a valuable educational opportunity for me in terms of learning about scientific computing and gaining general programming/design skill; as I hope to start contributing to FAI research within 5-10 years, this has potentially big instrumental value.

In "Why We Need Friendly AI", Eliezer discussed Moore's Law as a source of existential risk:

Moore’s Law does make it easier to develop AI without understanding what you’re doing, but that’s not a good thing. Moore’s Law gradually lowers the difficulty of building AI, but it doesn’t make Friendly AI any easier. Friendly AI has nothing to do with hardware; it is a question of understanding. Once you have just enough computing power that someone can build AI if they know exactly what they’re doing, Moore’s Law is no longer your friend. Moore’s Law is slowly weakening the shield that prevents us from messing around with AI before we really understand intelligence. Eventually that barrier will go down, and if we haven’t mastered the art of Friendly AI by that time, we’re in very serious trouble. Moore’s Law is the countdown and it is ticking away. Moore’s Law is the enemy.

Due to the quality of the models used by the aforementioned research group and the prevailing level of interest in more accurate models of solar weather, successful completion of this summer project will probably result in a nontrivial increase in demand for GPUs. It seems that the next best use of my time this summer would be to work full time on the expression-simplification abilities of a computer algebra system.

Given all this information and the goal of reducing existential risk from unFriendly AI, should I take the job with the space weather research group, or not? (To avoid anchoring on other people's opinions, I'm hoping to get input from at least a couple of LW readers before mentioning the tentative conclusion I've reached.)

ETA: I finally got an e-mail response from the research group's point of contact and she said all their student slots have been taken up for this summer, so that basically takes care of the decision problem. But I might be faced with a similar choice next summer, so I'd still like to hear thoughts on this.

Why is LessWrong not an Amazon affiliate? I recall buying at least one book due to it being mentioned on LessWrong, and I haven't been around here long. I can't find any reliable data on the number of active LessWrong users, but I'd guess it would number in the 1000s. Even if only 500 are active, and assuming only 1/4 buy at least one book mentioned on LessWrong, assuming a mean purchase value of $20 (books mentioned on LessWrong probably tend towards the academic, expensive side), that would work out at $375/year.

IIRC, it only took me a few minutes to sign up as an Amazon affiliate. They (stupidly) require a different account for each Amazon website, so 5*4 minutes (.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr), +20 for GeoIP database, +3-90 (wide range since coding often takes far longer than anticipated) to set up URL rewriting (and I'd be happy to code this) would give a 'worst case' scenario of $173 annualized returns per hour of work.

Now, the math is somewhat questionable, but the idea seems like a low-risk, low-investment and potentially high-return one, and I note that Metafilter and StackOverflow do this, though sadly I could not find any information on the returns they see from this. So, is there any reason why nobody has done this, or did nobody just think of it/get around to it?

SEO paperclipping is result of two forces - websites trying to get better ranks, and search engines which build up their defenses.

We might have little competition for rationality, but getting through search engine filters is not as easy as it used to be a decade ago.