Some people would be practically taxed for existing.

We could leverage the externality god to figure out answers to difficult questions. Often the problem is to figure out what are the second-order effects of something, and here we would get an exact number.

My problem with reducing internet usage is that I stop reading the less interesting websites first, but then what remains is the more interesting websites and that makes it even more difficult to turn off the web browser. These days it is mostly just LW and ACX, but even that is a ton of text.

That said, the corporations can make it all much worse. On LW, it is my choice whether to read something or not, but in theory if I resisted the temptation to read everything useful, the tools are there. As opposed to e.g. Facebook, which keeps my contacts hostage and pushes tons of unwanted content on me.

I wonder if I could design a tool to help me overcome the human weakness without missing out some important things, what would it be. For example, to overcome the fear of missing out, a tool could regularly download content to a local database, and only show it to me when I want. Group articles by topic. Make summaries of discussions. Make summaries of individual articles, or maybe even one long summary for the entire topic. Everything with the possibility to show the original content, but not unless I actively click it.

A sufficiently smart AI can find a way to kill humans faster than they reproduce. Humans depend on food production and distribution; if AI (which doesn't need them) disrupts those, the population will drop.

Not sure if this is the place that can provide the help you need.

what if you don't sleep and your future self is misaligned anyway?

my continued existence is basically at the whim of this insensible incomprehensible alien entity that cannot actually be predicted or reasoned with and is capable of dismembering me.

Sounds like a good description of democracy, where a mob of people with average IQ about 100 decides your future.

Human perception of society has some paradoxes. Consider freedom of speech: In countries that generally have freedom of speech, many people complain about all kinds of injustice, censorship, etc. In countries that have no freedom of speech, everyone is quiet, and when asked explicitly, says: everything is great. Therefore, naive observers often conclude that the former countries have less freedom of speech than the latter, judging by the number of complaints about censorship.

I believe there is a similar effect with meritocracy/equality/etc. Imagine a perfectly unfair feudal society where unless you are born as a member of aristocracy, you are screwed; your talents and hard work will make absolutely no difference. Ironically, many people will believe that this society is fair, that the aristocrats are chosen by God for being better. If the poor kids are never given an opportunity to learn, everyone may believe, based on what they observe, that the poor kids are completely unable to learn. This is what all their priests would teach.

Then comes a revolution, and people find out that the aristocrats are often stupid, and that if you give free education to the poor kids, many of them turn out to be talented. So a meritocratic society is established, everyone gets the chance, the smart and hard-working people can raise, and the stupid and lazy can fall. After a few decades the society is rearranged and made much more fair than before. Ironically, people living in this society believe that it is most unfair, and that you only need to keep giving more and more resources to those at the bottom so that their geniality can manifest. Existence of IQ is denied, because to most people it seems similar to the arbitrary aristocracy of the past.

I still maintain my fundamental belief that all human beings (and, increasingly I would argue, all life) are worthy of a deep and sincerely-held respect, regardless of any intellectual or physical discrepancies between them.

I think the problem is that a part of "respecting" people is letting them choose things for themselves, and in a democratic society also letting them choose things for others.

I admit I do have a problem respecting many people in this specific way. Not sure what to do about it though.

My simple model how humans work is like this:

• about 90% of humans just follow their instincts -- they copy what people around them do, they are nice towards people who are attractive or could be useful allies, they single out someone unattractive or weird for bullying
• about 5% actively try to make the world a better place
• about 5% actively try to make the world a worse place

If those 90% were left alone, the society would probably converge to isolated tribes who fight each other when they meet but usually avoid each other, and each tribe is like a high school.

Civilized society happens when the good 5% succeed to push their ideas on others, because they spend a lot of effort on giving speeches, writing books, etc., and sometimes they succeed to convert a high-status person, and then the 90% will copy the high-status person. Meanwhile the bad 5% do some petty crime that does not disrupt the civilization in general. It can be nice while it lasts; the neutral 90% can be good citizens and good neighbors when they are reminded to be so.

For the bad 5% the best strategy is often to do their own thing, avoid attention, and be hypocritical when in spotlight. They usually do not cooperate with each other. But sometimes "let's all do a bad thing" becomes a popular banner, and many of the 90% join -- I don't have a coherent theory when precisely this happens, but sometimes it does. Media seem to be often involved.

So, on one hand there is the natural tendency of humans to revert to the brutish state, but there is also an equilibrium where the actively good people try to improve the society while the actively bad people mind their own business, so in result the society is better than we might predict based on average person.

We should distinguish between two things: humanity naturally reverting to its brutish mean, and some people spending extra effort to make this happen faster. The former does not disprove the latter.