There are factors pointing both ways here. If getting a job means giving up benefits for the unemployed, or means-tested welfare that you'll become ineligible for, that's a disincentive to get a job. But utility isn't linear in money, and so a job paying N dollars will always be more attractive to someone making zero dollars than the same job is to someone on UBI worth K dollars -- and increasingly so the higher K is. That's also a disincentive.

Which of these disincentives is bigger depends on the sizes of N and K and the specifics of the welfare system. I think I'd usually expect the incentive landscape on the margins to be friendlier under UBI, but it's by no means a certainty.

Mocking tombstones is edgy and transgressive. Mocking pencils is just weird.

If you find yourself so engrossed with abstract epistemic considerations that you can't deal with concrete ones, it may be time to start wondering how much instrumental rationality your approach to this epistemic rationality thing is buying you.

The best players of any game usually do a lot of systematizing, but there is such a thing as too much meta.

Maybe, but I've rarely gotten more than one offer from a given headhunter -- actually, I've gotten multiple offers from one company more often than through one headhunting agency. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that most of them have a library of openings and look in real time for candidates matching them, rarely going into their back catalog.

Multiple offers might be more common for people with less specialized skillsets than mine, though.

I haven't read the Potter books for a long while, but from what I recall they're pretty good at avoiding instant-gratification solutions when there's some specific plot coupon that the protagonists need to master. The Patronus charm, the Polyjuice potion, etc. Harry even tries hard and fails to learn an essential skill once, with Occulemency, which is practically unheard of in fiction.

It doesn't seem to generalize very well, though. The protagonists are mediocre students aside from Hermione, and after the first couple of books her studiousness seems to be treated more as a character quirk than a serious advantage. And it's rarely more than a plot coupon that they need: most of their final successes come from dumb luck or outside intervention.

In the short term, rehearse well with as close a simulation of your eventual stage as you can manage, or use prescription or nonprescription anxiolytics, or try one of the many speakers' tricks for reducing stage fright. Most of the latter probably won't work, but some might.

In the long run, the best way is probably exposure: doing a lot of public speaking, perhaps in front of progressively larger audiences.

Higher minimum wage means the poorest people have more money, then they turn around and spend that money at Walmart.

The poorest people do not directly benefit from minimum wage, because they don't have jobs. Many participants in the informal economy are also very poor.

One option I didn't think of in the ancestor is that people pushed into the informal sector may still be showing up as employed in the sources being referenced: people making a lower-than-minimum-wage living as e.g. junk collectors are sometimes counted as such depending on methodology. We could pick out this effect by asking for personal earnings as well as employment status: if higher minimum wages are coming out of corporate margins somewhere, we'd expect average earnings (at least in the lower segment of the workforce) to go up, but we wouldn't expect that if it's pushing people into the informal sector. A survey would probably have to be carefully designed to have the resolution to pick this up, though.

Actually, I'd interpret this very differently - inviting someone back for coffee is, on the face of it, saying that the reason you are inviting them is for coffee, not sex. Its a false pretext.

It's a pretext, sure. That's the point. The standard getting-to-know-you script does not allow for directly asking someone for sex (unless you're already screwing them on the regular; "wanna get some ice cream and fuck?" is acceptable, if a little crass, on the tenth date) so we've developed the line as a semi-standardized cover story for getting a couple hours of privacy with someone. You shouldn't read it as "I want coffee", but rather as "I want to be alone with you, so here's a transparent excuse". There are more creative ways to ask the same thing, but because they're more creative (and therefore further outside the standard cultural script), they're more prone to misinterpretation.

Compare the Seventies-era cliche of "wanna come look at my etchings?"

It's almost always creepy in the context of an early relationship: whether you've kissed or not, it's a strong signal of contempt for or unfamiliarity with sexual norms. About the only exceptions I can think of would occur in very sex-positive cultures with very strong norms around explicit verbal negotiation. There aren't many of those cultures, and even within them you'd usually want some strong indications of interest beforehand.

On the other hand, if you've invited someone up for coffee (or just said "do you want to come back to my place?", which is pretty much the same offer), that's not license for them to tear your clothes off as soon as the door closes either. Doing that would be creepy, unless you've practically been molesting each other on the way over, but normally the script goes more like this: you walk in, there's maybe some awkward chitchat, you sit down on the bed or couch, they sit down next to you, you start kissing, and things progress naturally from there. If at any point they break script or the progression stalls out... well, then you make coffee.

Of course we can - because UFAI is defined as superintelligence that doesn't care about humans!

For a certain narrow sense of "care", yes -- but it's a sense narrow enough that it doesn't exclude a motivation to sim humans, or give us any good grounds for probabilistic reasoning about whether a Friendly intelligence is more likely to simulate us. So narrow, in fact, that it's not actually a very strong assumption, if by strength we mean something like bits of specification.