Modifying yourself that way would just demonstrate that you value the means of fun more than the ends. Even if you could make that modification, would you?

Yes, Ben Jones, I sincerely would. (I also value the means of friendship, love, sex, pleasure, health, wealth, security, justice, fairness, my survival and the survival of my friends and loved ones more than the ends. I have a very compact system of terminal values. I.e., very few ultimate ends.)

I am fully aware that my saying that I value friendship as a means to an end rather than an end in itself handicaps me in the eyes of prospective friends. Ditto love and prospective lovers. But I am not here to make friends or find a lover.

People have a bias for people with many terminal values. Take for example a person who refuses to eat meat because doing so would participate in the exploitation of farm animals. My hypothesis is that that position helps the person win friends and lovers because prospective friends and lovers think that if the person is that scrupulous towards a chicken he has never met then he is more likely than the average person to treat his human friends scrupulously and non-exploitatively. A person with many terminal values is trusted more than a person with with fewer and is rarely called on to explain the contradictions in his system of terminal values.

There are commercials for cars in which the employees of the car company are portrayed as holding reliable cars with zero defects as a terminal value. Or great-tasting beer as a terminal value. And of course advertiser tend to keep using a pitch only if it helps sell more cars or beer. It is my hope that some of the readers of these words realize that there is something wrong with an agent of general intelligence (a human in this case or an organization composed of humans) holding great-tasting beer as a terminal value.

I invite the reader to believe with me that Occam's Razor -- that everything else being equal, a simple system of beliefs is to be preferred over a complex system -- applies to normative beliefs as well as positive beliefs. Moreover, since there is nothing that counts as evidence for or against a normative belief, a system of normative beliefs should not grow in complexity as the agent gathers evidence from its environment the way a system of positive beliefs does.

Finally, if Vladimir Slepnev has written up his ethical beliefs, I ask him to send them to me.

Julian, I agree: becoming a wirehead who will never again have a external effect aside from being a recipient of support or maintenence is no better than just shooting yourself under my system of valuing things.

Keep questioning, ShardPhoenix. And note that Eliezer never answered your question, namely, if you can modify yourself so that you never get bored, do you care about or need to have fun?

Sure, everyone living now has to attend to their own internal experience, to make sure that they do not get too bored, too sad or too stuck in another negative emotional state -- just like everyone living now has to make sure they have enough income -- and that need for income occupies the majority of the waking hours of a large fraction of current humanity.

But why would negative emotional states press any harder on an individual than poverty or staying disease free or avoiding being defrauded by another individual once we are able to design a general intelligence from scratch and to redesign our own minds? What is so special about the need for fun postsingularity that makes it worth a series of posts on this blog whereas, e.g., avoiding being defrauded postsingularity is not worth of series of posts?

Amphetamine (Ritalin, Adderall) did not help me on net, and I took >~30 mg Adderall on many days, once went up to 60 mg and tried it in combination with a benzodiazapine. Point is that I explored a wide variety of doses, including 7.5 mg, 10, 15, 20 mg / day.

Moreover, besides alcohol, amphetamine has the highest correlation with violent behavior of any drug, and even behavior that suggest that one might become violent has a significant change of very costly socioeconomic consequences.

So, John Maxwell, is electing officials important work that necessitates valuing truth over happiness? Going to school-board meetings? Raising children?

The self help route. I've seen good bloggers succumb to it. Please don't go there.

Will the writer of that please explain why? I take it that the warning is against using self help advice in one's own life -- not against writing about it in a blog.

To summarize, Michael Vassar offers Bison on the Great Plains as evidence that maybe farming was not clearly superior to hunting (and gathering) in the number of humans a given piece of land could support. Well, here is a quote on the Bision issue:

The storied Plains Indian nomadic culture and economy didn’t emerge until the middle of the eighteenth century. Until they acquired powerful means to exploit their environment—specifically the horse, gun, and steel knife—Indians on the plains were sparsely populated, a few bands of agrarians hovering on the margins of subsistence. Their primary foods were maize, squash, and beans.

Hunting bison on foot was a sorry proposition and incidental to crops. It couldn’t support a substantial population.

Source

Michael Vassar: excavation reveals that native Americans habitually stampeded bison herds over a cliff, yielding vastly more meat than they could use, so perhaps your estimate of the efficiency with which hunters were able to utilize bison meat is overoptimistic?

Douglas Knight: no, I cannot point to actual calorie counting, and maybe I misremember.

When I was reading about the spread of farming across Europe, starting about 7000 years ago, it was asserted that most European land could support 100 times as many farmers as hunters. I was left with the impression that that was determined by counting calories in the game on the land versus the calories in the crops that were grown back then. If farming was not able to support manyfold more people per acre, then we are without an explanation of why the hunters of Europe were unable to stop the spread of the farmers across Europe. The hunters would have stopped the spread if they could have because most of the time they were unable to switch to the farming lifestyle: I think we have genetic evidence that the new land put under farming was populated mostly by the descendants of farmers. Also, the steadiness of the rate of spread of farming over many generations suggests that the farmers never encountered effective resistance from the hunters despite the obvious fact that the hunters were specialized in skills that should have conferred military advantages.

Earlier on this page Eliezer writes,

I have sometimes been approached by people who say "How do I convince people to wear green shoes? I don't know how to argue it," and I reply, "Ask yourself honestly whether you should wear green shoes; then make a list of which thoughts actually move you to decide one way or another; then figure out how to explain or argue them . . .

That piece of advice is also in Eliezer's "Singularity Writing Advice" where I saw it in 2001. I decided to adhere to it and for what it is worth have never regretted the decision. It works as far as I can tell even for my outre moral beliefs.