I'm too lazy to write a top-level post about it, but the main problem with AGW as I see it is that most people have reference class of "statements said by people like IPCC and Al Gore, who think that AGW is real, and Kyoto Protocol and similar activities are a good idea".

One group of people look at pretty solid evidence that AGW is real, and from this and such reference class infers that Kyoto Protocol type actions must also be good.

Another group of people look at pretty solid evidence that Kyoto Protocol is a very bad idea, and from this and this reference class infers that AGW might not be real.

All media show these issues as highly entangled, even though they're not really (well, if AGW is false, then Kyoto Protocol is almost certainly bad, but all three other combinations are possible).

I have two reference classes - one for AGWers' statements about climate which I estimate to be almost all true, and another for AGWers' statements about proper policy which I estimate to be almost all false.

The psychology research I'm aware of suggests the opposite effect if anything - reading opposing views tends to make you more sure of your original views. This is a feature of confirmation bias.

If the decision is too fundamental to be made by the people, then we're saying that precisely the most important matters should be decided by people with interests that may not be those of the people whose interests we're actually trying to promote, which is the general public.

One of the main ideas behind this type of Constitutional interpretation is that these decisions were already made by the people. That's what the Constitution is, and it's why states and Congress can't pass certain laws, because they conflict with what the people have decided in the Constitution.

Part of the reason for having a Constitution in the first place is supposed to be that there are some things that are so fundamental that they ought not be subjected to ordinary democratic decision-making. If you don't buy that premise, then we don't need a Constitution at all (or at least a Bill of Rights). If you do buy that premise, then the question becomes whether and when that set of things that is above the ordinary law ought to change over time. One defensible position is that it ought never to change unless the change can make it through the very difficult amendment process. But the way that position is usually advanced is by incorrectly claiming that the only alternative to it is judicial tyranny and then daring your opponent to come out on the side of the tyrants, and that is not defensible. And that was the main point of the post.

The "Wise Elders" point is merely that if you take a position other than the "no change except for amendments" one and so allow for some additional (though still limited!) changes over time, then the question becomes who should have the power to make those changes. Presumably they should be people who are in some sense above the political fray, because by assumption we are talking about things that should not be left to ordinary politics. And I can see no reason why the people who are given that power ought to be primarily legal experts.

The Constitution is not a complete system of law (it is, if I remember correctly, the shortest national constitution currently in force) -- so, even if we dismiss the amendment process as airily as you do, the strictest originalism doesn't amount to "live under the exact framework set up by a bunch of very flawed 18th century white dudes forever", because most of that framework was in the form of statutory law. It's not clear to me that the amendment process deserves to dismissed the way you did. You call the Founders "very flawed", which is surely true, but many or most of the ways those flaws were reflected in the Constitution have already been addressed, by amendment. I say that simply to avoid any idea that we need some body such as you suggest simply to make adjustments from time to time.

Nevertheless, a thing may be desirable even if we don't actually need it. So, do we want "a process by which some trusted, relatively non-political body gropes their way to the solutions to problems"?

As it stands, this is a contradiction. Deciding upon solutions to public problems is what politics is. You are proposing to take the politics out of political decisionmaking. If it isn't just nonsense, I can only take this to mean taking the democracy out of political decisionmaking. Therefore what's wanted here is a defense of democracy itself.

Let us suppose that we have some way of knowing that the people chosen really are wise (although I can't imagine what test we could apply) -- we still can't trust them. By the very act of distinguishing them from non-members, we give them distinct interests which may well be contrary to the interests of the people. Their very existence as a body is already contrary to the people's interest in self-government. We are primates, after all, and we derive a significant portion of our subjective happiness from our power and status, which means that having a decision made for you rather than making it yourself is a significant disutility. The decisions would need to be of much higher quality to justify this on utilitarian grounds, but we can't trust a council of wise elders to give us decisions good enough, because, as I said, by virtue of their position they have different interests from us.

If an AI were available I would still object, because even if it seems Friendly we can't trust it that much. It might become aware of the fact that it also has interests.

Addiction still exists.

The process that builds the GLUT has to contain your mind, but nothing else. The deceiver tries all exponentially-many strings of sensory inputs, and sees what effects they have on your simulated internal state. Select the one that maximizes your belief in proposition X. No simulation of X involved, and the deceiver doesn't even need to know anything more about X than you think you know at the beginning.

I downvoted the great-grandparent because it ignores the least convenient possible world where the simulators are implementing the entire Earth in detail such that the simulated Amanda Knox is a person, is guilty of the murder, and yet circumstances are such that she seems innocent given your state of knowledge. You're right that implementing the entire Earth is more expensive then just deluding you personally, but that's irrelevant to Eliezer's nitpick, which was only that 1/(3^^^3) really is just that small and yet nonzero.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted so much (to –3 when I saw it). It's a good point.

If I'm in a simulation, and the "base reality" is sufficiently different from how things appear to me in the simulation, it stops making sense to say that I'm fooled into attributing false predicates to things in the base reality. I'm so cut off from the base reality that few of my beliefs can be said to be about it at all. It makes more sense to say that I have true beliefs about the things in the simulation. I just have one important false belief about them—namely, that they're not simulated. But that doesn't mean that my other beliefs about them are wrong.

The situation is similar to that of the proverbial man who thinks that penguins are blind borrowing mammals who live in the Namib Desert. Such beliefs aren't really about penguins at all. More probably, the man has true beliefs about some variety of golden mole. He just has one important false belief about them—namely, that they're called "penguins".

Now, if it is the case that she didn't, then it follows that, given sufficient information about how-the-world-is, one's probability estimate could be made arbitrarily close to 0.

What, like 1/3^^^3? There isn't that much information in the universe, and come to think, I'm not sure I can conceive of any stream of evidence which would drive the probability that low in the Knox case, because there are complicated hypotheses much less complicated than that in which you're in a computer simulation expressly created for the purpose of deluding you about the Amanda Knox case.