The logic sounds like: "Given that I already have big problems paying my mortgage, what is the problem if on top of that I also decided to drive drunk?"
Does not sound plausible to me. If all worries about AI somehow magically disappeared overnight (God descends from Heaven and provides a 100% credible mathematical proof that any superhuman AI will necessarily be good), Yudkowsky would still be the guy who wrote the Sequences, founded the rationalist community, created a website where the quality of discourse is visibly higher than on the rest of the internet, etc. With the threat of AI out of the way, the rationalist community would probably focus again on developing the art of human rationality, increasing the sanity waterline, etc.
Also, your argument could be used to dismiss anything. Doctors talking about cancer? They just worry that if people are no longer afraid of diseases, no one will treat the doctors as high-status anymore. Etc.
Not good enough for a post, good enough for front page, apparently. :D
2Good if Friendly, bad otherwise.
Yeah, the amount of change feels overwhelming to me, too. During my career as a software developer I have programmed in Basic, C++, Clojure, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and XSLT. In Java alone, I wrote front ends in AWT, Java Server Faces, Java Server Pages, PrimeFaces, Struts, Stripes, Swing. As a database, I used Datomic, DynamoDB, H2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL. Probably forgot some.
I don't mind learning new things, but it is annoying to spend a year or more learning something, only to throw it away and learn something different that accomplishes more or less the same thing, and then do it again, and again. Especially when there are so many genuinely useful things that I do not have the capacity to learn anymore.
Before I had kids, I learned new things in my free time; now I have less free time than I used to have, and I want to spend some of it doing things that are not related to my job.
...end of rant.
That said, I don't understand your question. Do you think that in future, AI will write the code, and the job of the developer will be to persuade the employer to use technology X instead of technology Y? Why not ask AI instead?
sometimes the comments or buttons stop working if I haven’t refreshed the page in a while
That's bad, and if the bug is reproducible, I'm sure the developers would want to fix that.
However, making an app sounds like a ton of extra work that most users would not appreciate, so the developers are not motivated to do that. Corporations typically make app versions of their websites in order to spy on you and sell your private information to a third party (for example, if you install the app, you need to allow it to read your contacts or the contents of your storage); Less Wrong does not do that.
It could be interesting to make a survey about how many people read Less Wrong on their phones.
let's say they're like IQ is higher on average
Yes. I think this is obvious.
it's not like a textbook or even a non-fiction book. It's more personal. It's also written in a way in plain natural English where it's able to reach a wider audience.
Kinda yes, but it's like a smart person's natural English. The audience may not have a problem with style, but it could still have a problem with the content.
Genius arrives at simple conclusions to complex problems. But genius is to see things as simple if not self-evident.
I'd say the genius sees the things as simple as they are... or as complex as they are. Like, 2 + 2 is 4, but 789458 + 373879 is 1163337 -- you can't put it more simply than that. Einstein found the equation "E=mc²", which is short, but still contains multiplication and exponentiation; he couldn't have reduced it to mere addition.
People often explain things in unnecessarily complicated ways, which is bad. But some complexity is necessary.
Yeah, you can make yourself sound smart if you want to, you can always make yourself sound smarter, everyone can. But why would you?
People typically do that in order to impress (deceive) others. Maybe even themselves.
If something has a stable equilibrium that would be reached one day anyway, pointing it out should make the process faster in general. (I am not claiming that communism is this, just speaking in general.) Analogically, in capitalism the prices are supposed to converge to some market equilibrium sooner or later, but if you had a reliable prediction machine which would announce publicly to all market participants what the equilibrium price is going to be, the process would only happen faster.
This is not absolutely reliable, for example if you have human adversaries, then pointing out how exactly things will happen could help them prepare a better defense. The possibility of defense seems to contradict the idea that the new equilibrium is inevitable, but in theory we could imagine a game for two players where the second player always has to lose in long term, and if both players keep moving randomly it will happen in 10 turns on average, but if you publish the entire decision tree, the second player can keep dragging the game for 100 turns.
As I see it, the problem with Marx was that he underestimated the adversary. Beating the capitalists is the easy part, beating Moloch is the hard part (Ephesians 6:12), and it's definitely not going to happen automatically once the capitalists are defeated, as Marx seemed to assume. Capitalists are actually quite suicidal, for example these days they are competing to build a machine that will most likely kill them all. A sufficiently large and organized group of workers could in theory create a similar incentive trap for them. The problem is organizing the workers into something that is more than a destructive mob; it's how to build a Friendly AI from the mass of billion apes. Lenin realized the impossibility of the task, so he tried to align a political party instead, and failed at that, too.
Good decision is relative to your capabilities. If you have no financial education, and you live in a country where 99% of financial advice is scam, buying an investment property is easy to understand and relatively less likely to go wrong.
That basically describes me before I started reading Less Wrong. The property I bought 20 years ago is still mine and generates some passive income. With other investments, where I tried to do smarter things, the money evaporated. Only recently I learned enough (and the situation in my country changed enough) that my investments actually make money. So, considering the situation I was in back then, buying the property was the right choice.
Another thing to consider is if you have children and you know that one day they will need some place to live, and no one knows how expensive houses will be. So you buy something today, rent it for a decade or two, but the idea is that it will be for your children one day.
Yeah, that's basically "people in big cities".
But if you care about some special trait that only a few people have, those people become precious again.