Welcome to LW!

I'm more concerned with the social engineering challenge. From my current reading, I gather that EY and the SIAI folks here believe that is all rolled up into the FAI task.

Not entirely. Less Wrong is about raising the sanity waterline, not just recruiting FAI theorists.

Also, as an aside, I'm curious about the note for theists.

Theists in the usual supernatural sense, not the (rare, and even more rarely called 'theism') simulation or future-'god' senses.

I've always felt this great isolation imposed by my worldview: something one cannot discuss in polite company

It seems to me that there are plenty of open-minded, technical circles in which one can do this, as long as one takes basic care not to sound fanatical.

But we should, for example, consider the projected enjoyment of people we imagine visiting our nature preserves 500 years from now, as if their enjoyment were as important as our own, not discounting at all for the risk that they may not even exist.

Eliezer doesn't disagree: as he says more than once, he's talking about pure preferences, intrinsic values. Other risks do need to be incorporated, but it seems better to do so directly, rather than through a discounting heuristic. Larks seems to implicitly be doing this with his P(AGI) = 10^-9.

Seconded, tentatively. I'm afraid that all arguments of this form (for x-risk reduction, Pascal's Wager, etc.) can't avoid being rejected out of hand by most people, due to their insatiability: buying even a little bit into such an argument seems to compel a person to spend arbitrary amounts of resources on the improbable thing, and open them to harsh criticism for holding back even a little. That said, a few sincere consequentialists actually will react positively to such arguments, so maybe making them on LW is worthwhile on balance.

The folks here, for a start.

We all already know about this pattern match. Its reiteration is boring and detracts from the conversation.

What does taking this seriously imply?

Anyway, what I notice from the Wiki entry is that one of the most important ideas, recursive improvement, that might directly support the claims of existential risks posed by AI, is still missing.

Er, there's a post by that title.

If you'd like to connect with other LWers in real life, we have periodic meetups in various parts of the world. So far there have been meetups in the following places:

I wonder if this should list contact people for those areas, especially the ones besides SF and NYC. (I can serve for Pittsburgh.)

Seconded, plus I don't understand what the link from "worth it" has to do with the topic.

the anthropic trilemma (my preferred resolution is incompatible with single-world interpretations)

Ooh, tell us more!