I'll admit to bias, because I am a professional financial advisor, but I'll make the case against index funds for completeness' sake.

If you have the discipline to invest a significant portion of your income, can weather storms in the market without panicking, and are in a simple enough taxation situation that you can figure out how best to shelter your income without needing professional advice, then you don't need an advisor. Empirically, however, most people do not meet this description. I know some who do, but a lot more say things like "I don't want to be bothered", or they have taxation situations that are complex enough they can't practically keep track(which is easier than it sounds - even having a company is more than enough to put you over that line), or they talk about how they sold all their investments and went to cash in January 2009. Active investments aren't terribly wonderful in their own right, but active investment with an advisor is empirically superior to passive non-advised investment for most people.

Also, the system does need some active management - passive investors are freeloading and not aiding price discovery, so if the whole market went passive then active investment would win handily. This isn't an issue right now, but it could well be if the passive school of thought gets much more prominent.

That is a neat hack - who said there's no such thing as a free lunch?

Does this stack with amazon smile? For example, how much money goes where when comparing this link to this one?

It might be useful to feature a page containing what we, you know, actually think about the basilisk idea. Although the rationalwiki page seems to be pretty solidly on top of google search, we might catch a couple people looking for the source.

If any XKCD readers are here: Welcome! I assume you've already googled what "Roko's Basilisk" is. For a better idea of what's going on with this idea, see Eliezer's comment on the xkcd thread (linked in Emile's comment), or his earlier response here.

"generally proponents" doesn't sound nearly like "putting lots of efforts into". As I said, an effective animal altruist would dedicate some serious time to figuring out better ways to reduce animal suffering. Being boxed in the propaganda-only mode certainly doesn't seem like an effective approach. If you are serious about the issue, go into an Eliezer mode and try to do the impossible. Especially since it's a lot less impossible than what he aspires to achieve.

Did the survey (a couple days ago).

I wasn't here for the last survey- are the results predominantly discussed here and on Yvain's blog?

Dale's blog apparently doesn't have many readers, judging by how few comments his posts have. But I find it interesting because he has uncritically bought into the Enlightenment's wishful thinking about democracy, equality, human fungibility and so forth, while he dismisses "robot cultism" as a competitive utopianism based on other people's fantasies he doesn't share.

Reading technical material at 600 WPM would still be much faster than the average person.

There seems to be a moderately hard speed-comprehension tradeoff curve. A few techniques might shift the curve outward, letting you have more speed and more comprehension, but mostly they give you more flexibility to choose where you want to be on the curve.