As well as thinking about the need for the place in terms of providing a space for research, it is probably worth thinking about the need for a place in terms of what it provides the world.  What subjects are currently under-represented in the world and need strong representation to guide us to a positive future? That will guide who you want to lead the organisation.

I admit that it is extreme circumstances that would make slavery consensual and justified. My thinking was if existential risk was involved, you might consent to slavery to avert it. It would have to be a larger entity than a single human doing the enslaving, because I think I agree that individuals shouldn't do consequentialism. Like being a slave to the will of the people, in general. Assuming you can get that in some way.

I don't follow the reasoning here

So let's say the person has given up autonomy to avert existential risk, they should perhaps get something in return. Maybe they get influence, but they can't use influence for their own benefit (as one of the deontological rules stipulates that is disallowed). So they are stuck trying to avert existential risk with no pay off. If you unenslave them you remove the will of the people's voice and maybe increase existential risk or s risks.

Hmm, sorry went off on a bit of tangent here. All very unlikely agreed.

Tangential but is there ever justified unconscious slavery. For example if you asked whether you consent to slavery and then your mind wiped, might you get into a situation where the slave doesn't know they consented to it, but the slave master is justified in treating them like a slave.

You would probably need a justification for the master slave relationship. Perhaps it is because it needs to be hidden for a good reason? Or to create a barrier against interacting with the ethical. In order to dissolve such slavery, understanding the justifications for why the slavery started would be important.

Proposal for new social norm - explicit modelling

Something that I think would make rationalists more effective at convincing people is if we had explicit models of the things we care about.

Currently we are at the stage of physicists arguing that the atom bomb might ignite the atmosphere without concrete math and models of how that might happen.

If we do this for lots of issues and have a norm of making models composable this would have further benefits.
 

• People would use the models to make real world decisions with more accuracy
• We would create frameworks for modelling that would be easily composable, that other people would use

Both would raise the status and knowledge of the rationalist community.

Does it make sense to plan for one possible world or do you think that the other possible worlds are being adequately planned for and it is only the fast unilateral take off that is neglected currently?

Limiting AI to operating in space makes sense. You might want to pay off or compensate all space launch capability in some way as there would likely be less need.

Some recompense for the people who paused working on AI or were otherwise hurt in the build up to AI makes sense.

Also trying to communicate ahead of time what a utopic vision of AI and humans might look like, so the cognitive stress isn't too major is probably a good idea to commit to.

Committing to support multilateral acts if unilateral acts fail is probably a good idea too. Perhaps even partnering with a multilateral effort so that effort on shared goals can be spread around?

Relatedly I am thinking about improving the wikipedia page on recursive self-improvement. Does anyone have any good papers I should include? Ideally with models.

I'm starting a new blog here. It is on modelling self-modifying systems, starting with AI. Criticisms welcome 

I'm wary about that one, because that isn't a known "general" intelligence architecture, so we can expect AIs to make better learning algorithms for deep neural networks, but not necessarily themselves.

I'd like to see more discussion of this, I read some of the FOOM debate but I'm assuming that there has been more discussion of this important issue since?

I suppose the key question is for recursive self-improvement. We can give hardware improvement (improved hardware allows design of more complex and better hardware) because we are on the treadmill already.  But how likely is algorithmic self-improvement.  For an intelligence to be able to improve itself algorithmically the following seem to need to hold.

1. The system needs to understand itself
2. There has to be some capacity that can be improved without detriment to some other capacity (else you are doing some self-optimization and not necessarily improvement)
    

If it is the memeplex that gives us our generality (as is suggested by our flowering of discovery over the past 250 years compared to the past 300,000 years of homo sapiens), it might not be understandable. It would be in the weights or equivalents in whatever the AI uses. No human would understand it either.

Fiddling about with weights without knowledge would likely lead to trade offs and so you might not have the second consideration holding.

I'm not saying AI won't change history, but we need an accurate view of how it will change things.

Found "The Future of Man" by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in a bookshop. Tempted to wite a book review. It discusses some interesting topics, like the planetisation of Mankind. However it treats them as inevitable, rather as something contingent on us getting our act together. Anyone interested in a longer review?

Edit: I think his faith in the super natural plays a part in the assumption of inevitability.