I agree with your first paragraph, but Adams has described how his Trump writing has decimated his ability to earn money as a public speaker because people who hire such speakers want to avoid controversy. Adams appearing on the podcast of an obscure college professor was an act of altruism.

Not to mention that even the most rabid proponents of "transgenderism" claim that it's prevalence is anywhere near 50%.

It seems to me that either Alice is lying or she is telling the truth. The actual amount of possible lies at her disposal is pretty irrelevant to the question of whether she is lying or not.

If someone gets sick (for example) towards the end of the study and then shows a "negative 8 percent " fitness level then their data is crap.

And they could have been sick at the start, as well, producing pseudo gains... You're postulating things which you have no reason to think happened to explain things that did happen; nowhere is anything indicated about that and you are arguing solely that because you dislike the results, the researchers were incompetent.

If the study did not control for intensity then it is crap.

Why should there be any control for intensity? They did an intervention; there should be a non-zero effect. If any level of exercise does not show any benefits, then you are wrong. And I guess you did not read the link, because several interventions were tested and did not show any difference in terms of exercise resistance.

The study had an age range from 40 and 67...

So? Why do you think that exercise should be entirely ineffective in people age 67? Are 40yos from a different species where exercise does not work? By examining older people, who are much less fit and much more sedentary, shouldn't the effects be even more dramatic and visible?

This study is garbage.

So, in addition to "Individual responses to combined endurance and strength training in older adults", Karavirta 2011, let me also cite "Endurance training-induced changes in insulin sensitivity and gene expression", "Individual differences in response to regular physical activity", "Effects of Exercise Training on Glucose Homeostasis: The HERITAGE Family Study", "Adverse Metabolic Response to Regular Exercise: Is It a Rare or Common Occurrence?", "Genomic predictors of trainability", "Effects of gender, age, and fitness level on response of  vo2max to training in 60–71 yr olds", "Resistance to exercise-induced weight loss: compensatory behavioral adaptations", and "Cardiovascular autonomic function correlates with the response to aerobic training in healthy sedentary subjects", to name a few. (One nice thing about HERITAGE and Bouchard's earlier studies is that they recorded exercise, so spare me the 'maybe they didn't actually exercise'.) In these, too, some people don't benefit from exercise and show individual differences in exercise trainability exist.

"Wireheading, even variable multi-emotional wireheading, assumes that emotions are a goal-oriented objective, and thus takes first-order control of one’s emotional state."

I think that per your very examples it is the exact opposite. Wire heading is a process that you experience, not a goal that you want to just get to the end of.

You want to actively experience wire heading, you don't want to be at the end of the wire heading.

I wonder if a movie with an AI box-based story would have any potential? Perhaps something treated as more of a psychological horror/thriller than as a guns-and-explosions action movie might help to distance people's intuitions from "AI is 'The Terminator', right?"

I think the old game was so trivially easy to win as the Gatekeeper if you actually wanted to win, that I don't know that any additional rules are needed. It really only makes it harder for terrible Gatekeepers that aren't playing to win anyway.

Edit: I assume the downvotes are from people who disagree with my claims on gatekeepers. If you do disagree I would like to hear why. Keep in mind I am talking about this as a game.

I have been the gatekeeper in the past and am always up to be one again in the future. I am undefeated at gatekeeping, and believe that I will never lose at the gatekeeping game. (Because I play to win)

The big problem to me here is that this was assuming VC money. My impression is that just getting to the point of having VC capital is already a cutoff point.

Random thought: I've long known that police can often extract false confessions of crimes, but I only just now made the connection to the AI box experiment. In both cases you have someone being convinced to say or do something manifestly against their best interest. In fact, if anything I think the false confessions might be an even stronger result, just because of the larger incentives involved. People can literally be persuaded to choose to go to prison, just by some decidedly non-superhuman police officers. Granted, it's all done in person, so stronger psychological pressure can be applied. But still: a false confession! Of murder! Resulting in jail!

I think I have to revise downwards my estimate of how secure humans are.