The only part I object to what you wrote is * emotions shouldn't interfere with cognition*.

This is an ideal which Objectivists believe in, but it is difficult/impossible to actually achieve. I've noticed that as I've gotten older, emotions interfere with my cognition less and less and I am happy about that. You can define cognition how you wish, but given the number of people who see it as separate from emotion it's probably worth having a backup definition in case you want to talk to those people.

RE: emotions, affect, moods. I do think that emotions should be considered when making rational decisions, but they are not the tools by which we come to decisions, here's an example.

If you want to build a house to shelter your family, your emotional connection to your family is not a tool you will use to build the house. It's important to have a strong motivation to do something, but that motivation is not a tool. You'll still need hammers, drills, etc to build the house.

I believe we can and should use drugs (I include naturally occurring hormones) to modify our emotions in order to better achieve our goals.

If your hunches have a bad track record, then you should learn to ignore them, but if they do work, then ignoring them is irrational.

If your hunches have a good track record, I think you should explore that and come up with a rational explanation, and make sure it's not just a coincidence. Additionally, while following your hunches isn't inherently bad, rational people shouldn't be convinced of an argument merely based on somebody else's hunch.

Even if emotions are suboptimal tools in virtually all cases (which I find unlikely), that doesn't mean that ignoring them is a good idea.

Nobody is suggesting we ignore emotions, merely that we don't let them interfere with rational thought (in practice this is very difficult).

It's like how getting rid of overconfidence bias and risk aversion is good, but getting rid of overconfidence bias OR risk aversion is a terrible idea. .

I don't follow this argument. Your biases can be evaluated absolutely, or relative to the general population. If everybody is biased underconfidence, the being biased in towards overconfidence can be an advantage. There's a similar argument for risk aversion.

Everything we've added since emotion was built around emotion. If emotion will give you an irrational bias, then you'll evolve a counter bias elsewhere

I'm not sure I agree with this, do you think that The Big Bang Theory is based on emotion? You can draw a path from emotion to the people who came up with the Big Bang Theory, but you can do that with things other than emotion as well.

My issue with emotions is only partly that they cause biases, it's also that you can't rely on other people having the same emotions as you. So you can use emotions to better understand your own goals. But you won't be able to convince people who don't know your emotions that your goals are worth achieving.

Very interesting... it would seem that Rand doesn't actually define emotion consistently, that was not the definition I was using. But the Ayn Rand Lexicon has 11 different passages related to emotions.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/emotions.html

Rand doesn't deny that emotions are part of rationality, she denies that they are tools of rationality. It is rational to try to make yourself experience positive emotions, but to say "I have a good feeling about this" is not a rational statement, it's an emotional statement. It isn't something that should interfere with cognition.

As for emotions affecting humans behavior, I think all mammals have emotions, so it's not easy for humans to discard them over a few generations of technological evolution. Emotions were useful in the ancestral environment, they are no longer as useful as they once were.

How does the definition you link to contradict Rand's statement? You can acknowledge emotions as real while denying their usefulness in your cognitive process.

I don't know, but if you ask intelligent people what they think about x-risk related to AI it's unlikely they'll come to the exact same conclusions that MIRI etc have.

If you present the ideas of MIRI to intelligent people, some of them will be excited and want to help with donations or volunteering. Others will dismiss you and think you are wrong/crazy.

So to expand on my question... if you find intelligent people who disagree with MIRI on significant things, will you work with them?

OK, so it seems like FLI promotes the conclusions of other x-risk organizations, but doesn't do any actual research itself.

Do you think it's not worth questioning the conclusions that other organizations have come to? Seems to me that if there are four xrisk organizations (each with reasonably strong connections to each other) there should be some debate between them.

I cringe at the term x-risk.

Can you think of another five letter description? The shorter the term, the easier of a time people will have remembering it and thus the meme will spread faster than a longer term.