Obviously this is not a likely extinction event, but I believe it is still worth considerable resources to reduce its probability.

The second part of that sentence oh so does not follow from the first part.

climate change (a tail end existential risk

What kind of scenario are you thinking of when you argue that climate change is an existential risk? How do you think it might kill all or even 90% of the population?

Democrats (and parties of the left) are since they're more likely to favor policies which reduce the threat of climate change

While the Obama administration did a few symbolic actions for climate change it didn't move significantly on the issue. I don't think there good reason to assume that things would be different under another Clinton.

Nixon went to China and the Obama administration waged it's war against whistleblowers. There might be more political room for a Republican government to make substantial action on climate change than for a Democrat government.

climate change (a tail end existential risk

What kind of scenario are you thinking of when you argue that climate change is an existential risk? How do you think it might kill all or even 90% of the population?

Democrats (and parties of the left) are since they're more likely to favor policies which reduce the threat of climate change

While the Obama administration did a few symbolic actions for climate change it didn't move significantly on the issue. I don't think there good reason to assume that things would be different under another Clinton.

Nixon went to China and the Obama administration waged it's war against whistleblowers. There might be more political room for a Republican government to make substantial action on climate change than for a Democrat government.

I'm curious which of the two major political parties in the US (and left wing vs. right wing parties more generally) people think is most likely to reduce existential risk. My current view is that the Democrats (and parties of the left) are since they're more likely to favor policies which reduce the threat of climate change (a tail end existential risk and a potential destabilizing force) and are more likely to favor nuclear non-proliferation. However, I know my own opinions might be biased by the fact that I agree with left wing parties on most other less important issues. Which party do you think would do the most to reduce existential risk and how substantial do you think the difference is?

I'm having some major psychological health issues lately and am feeling lost and hopeless. Ideally, I'd like to seek advice and/or counseling from someone in the EA/LW community because they would be better able to relate to my goals/motivations and might be able to offer me particularity useful advice. Is there anywhere I could go for this, anyone I can reach out to, or does anyone know of a psychiatrist/psychologist in the DC area who is in the EA/LW community? Thanks so much.

Could I have some advice on salary/benefit negotiations?

I just got a formal job offer from the company where I interned last summer, and it's about what I expected/think I'm worth. I really want to just take the job, but I don't want to leave money on the table; my understanding is that expected value of trying to negotiate should be positive regardless. On the other hand, the company basically knows I'm going to take the job, so I don' t believe I have much power in these negotiations.

Since the whole reason I want more money is to be able to donate more, I'm thinking it might make sense to try to negotiate for employee gift matching instead of a greater salary. However, as a small employer, I don't believe they have such a program for any employees. Is it still worth trying that angle? If so, how might I go about it? Thanks a lot for the advise.

I’m considering creating a Linkedin profile. I probably should have made one long ago, but, because of my severe social anxiety and a visceral reaction to any activity which involves selling myself, I have avoided it. However, I think it’s probably best to bite the bullet and work through creating the profile and to at least send connection requests to people who I am currently working with. However, first I’d like to know if it looks bad to have a profile with only a few connections. Is that worse than having no profile at all?

Right now, I bet that over 50% of the people who vote in a US presidential general election couldn't explain how the electoral college works, and over 10% think they are voting directly for president (if anyone is less lazy than me and looks up relevant surveys, let me know.) This doesn't stop them from voting. My system would still have the individual candidates on the top, and only advanced voters would even care about going further. Is this really so much more complicated than the electoral system, compared to a direct voting system?

I know this has no chance of happening in a real government anytime soon, but I'd still like to talk about it. There are voting systems that are more complex than ones used in "production" and only used privately. (I can't name any off-hand, but I'm not so familiar with voting theory.)

Also, if this is more optimal than what's being done now, then we can educate voters, or at least know that it's better so one day when people are ready, we can switch. What led me to this idea was thinking about the National Popular Vote, which only goes into effect if it itself gets a cetain number of votes (or rather, the strategy of the states that adopted it is to do something different if enough other states also do so.)

That's why I said a "standard" option would still be available. That would just be a standard vote for one candidate. Also, raising the sanity line for voters might be a net positive ...

(Reposted from http://thinkingornot.tumblr.com/post/104694726216/a-voting-proposal . I'm not taking the time to rewrite this from tumblr-quality to lw-jargon. The idea should be clear enough as written.)

I was thinking about an idea for voting; I don’t know if it’s been talked about before, or how feasible it is. The main purpose is to allow strategic voting in a way that makes a difference.

Basically, every vote should be not for a person, but for a short program. Every candidate is assigned a number. There is a system which maps any name to a number, so as to allow write ins. There is also another mapping from numbers to programs.

Each program gets as input all the other programs, and how many votes each of them got. Each program must output a number which corresponds to a candidate. To simplify, there will still be a standard slot for each candidate that qualifies (like today) that just runs the program “vote for candidate X no matter what”. Each program is limited in the amount of time it can run. Obviously, if your program is given the numbers of votes for the “standard” candidates, it won’t have a problem with running them in time, but there might be a problem with running other programs that try to run you. This may be solvable, similiar to the way Prisoner’s Dilemma problems with mutual cooperation can be solved when the programs can access each other’s source code.

The programs would be in a special language that is deterministic and “simple”. (In an intuitive sense, it should be a function from inputs to output that only depends on the inputs.)

One thing I should point out: this doesn’t take a lot of time to finish after the votes have been counted, as each program only has to be run once no matter how many votes it got. You could perhaps have a minimum number of votes each program needs to get before it is run at all, and put programs on the ballot that get a certain number of petition signers, or so on.

Any comments of refinements on this idea are welcome. I’d especially be interested if it turned out something like this has been talked about already.