Salemicus

Epistemic status: 90% confident. Inspiration: Arjun Narayan, Tyler Cowen. > The noblest charity is to prevent a man from accepting charity, and the best alms are to show and enable a man to dispense with alms. Moses Maimonides. Background Effective Altruism (EA) is "a philosophy and social movement that applies...

As many of you may be aware, the UK general election took place yesterday, resulting in a surprising victory for the Conservative Party. The pre-election opinion polls predicted that the Conservatives and Labour would be roughly equal in terms of votes cast, with perhaps a small Conservative advantage leading to...

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: * Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.) * Do not quote yourself. *...

From the BBC: > [Hawking] told the BBC:"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." > > ... > > "It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological...

One of my favourite Less Wrong articles is Politics is the mindkiller. Part of the reason that political discussion so bad is the poor incentives - if you have little chance to change the outcome, then there is little reason to strive for truth or accuracy - but a large...

Dr. Aaron Sell recently wrote an interesting piece about political incentives and shoddy statistical work in science. In particular, he was highly critical of the much-publicized Conley article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which attempted to demonstrate that "large gender differences... [in willingness to engage in] casual...

The finance professor John Cochrane recently posted an interesting blog post. The piece is about existential risk in the context of global warming, but it is really a discussion of existential risk generally; many of his points are highly relevant to AI risk. > If we [respond strongly to all...