Does MIRI actually has a basement?

It's behind the hidden door. Full of boxes which say "AI inside -- DO NOT TALK TO IT".

The ghosts there are not really dangerous. Usually.

It's curious to see the frequency of posts that start with "I am not a neoreactionary, but...". (This includes my own). If I'm not mistaken, they seem to outnumber the actual neoreactionary posts by a fair margin.

I think a call for patriarchal racially-stratified monarchy is catnip around here. Independently of its native virtues, I mean. It's a debate that couldn't even happen in most communities, so it's reinforcing our sense of LW's peculiar set of community mores. It's a radical but also unexpected vision of a technological future, so it has new ideas to wrestle with, and enough in the way of historical roots to reward study and give all participants the chance to learn. And it is political without being ossified in to tired and nationally televised debates, with new insights available to a clever thinker and plenty of room to pull sideways.

For that reason, I'm a little worried that it will receive disproportionate attention. I know my System 1 loves to read the stuff. But System 2... Enthusiastic engagement with political monarchy- pro or con- is not something I would like to see become a major feature of Less Wrong, so I think I'm going to publicly commit to posting no more than one NRx comment per month, pending major changes in community dynamics.

The fact that this is "catnip" for LW-ers is a bad thing. We ought to be giving neoreaction about as much credence as we give Creationism: it's founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning, and should be dismissed, not discussed to death.

I note (and others have noted) that SSC, although hosting the definitive NRx takedown, still puts NRx ideas in the sphere of things to be discussed calmly with steelmanning; whereas it reacts with actual disgust and lack of philosophical charity to feminism, social justice, Tumblr, etc. And that Yvain was literally surprised to find himself becoming more right-wing after hanging around neoreactionaries, i.e. that he was picking up his ideas from his friends.

Nobody actually buys Minesweeper, so I don't think it counts as a bestselling game.

Having said this, the claims about the bestselling game of all time upthread sound wrong to me. The first game that came to mind, Wikipedia says this about it:

Va Wnahnel 2010, vg jnf naabhaprq gung gur Grgevf senapuvfr unq fbyq zber guna 170 zvyyvba pbcvrf, nccebkvzngryl 70 zvyyvba culfvpny pbcvrf naq bire 100 zvyyvba pbcvrf sbe pryy cubarf,[9][10] znxvat vg gur uvturfg cnvq-qbjaybnqrq tnzr bs nyy gvzr.

which handily beats Minecraft.

Survey completed. Account created to get starting karma and increase likelihood/amount of future participation.

I'd like to note that the current formulation of sex/gender/sexual orientation questions forced me to misrepresent myself because the technically correct answers seemed to cause an even greater misrepresentation. I would like extra options to the "sex assigned at birth" question, perhaps "male, now transitioned to female/other" and vice versa, to account for other-gendered transitioners; but I'll be the first to admit that this probably isn't a major issue.

Finished it. I can't wait to read the post that talks about how bad people are at following directions.

Something that just occurred to me (separate from my took-it comment): Scott, do you take your own survey?

Should effective altruists donate to fighting Ebola?

Argument against: usually very famous things that make the news are terrible effective altruist causes and you should stick to well-studied things like malaria.

Argument for: Ebola is very underfunded compared to sexier disasters. And it is a disease in the Third World, a category which has brought us most of the best-known effective altruism interventions.

Thoughts: The CDC estimates a best-case scenario of 20,000 cases by January and a worst-case scenario of about 1.5 million cases by January. They do not estimate risks past January. There are also black swan risks in which Ebola spreads to the entire Third World (eg India) and kills tens of millions of people there. However, on the margin individual donations are unlikely to shift the virus from one of these scenarios to another, so it's probably more worth considering how much good the marginal donation does.

Doctors Without Borders is a very well known, GiveWell-approved charity. They are running clinics in the country, but it's hard to tell how much more clinic they can run per dollar. On the other hand, they are also giving out home infection prevention kits by the tens of thousands. Other charities price these at about ten dollars per kit, although I've seen estimates that differ by an order of magnitude. I don't think anybody knows how effective the kits are going to be, although everyone agrees they are a vastly inferior option to sufficient space in hospitals, which at the moment does not exist.

If we estimate likelihood of 100,000 Liberians (geometric mean of estimates) eventually infected = 2% of the population, then $1000 buys 100 kits buys 2 kits for people likely to be infected..

$1000 for malaria bed nets supposedly gives something like 20 to 100 DALYs, depending on whose estimate you trust.

Ebola death rate is about 50%. Suppose the average infected person has 30 DALYs left to lose. So each case of Ebola costs 15 DALYs directly. But it probably ends up costing more like 30, because I think on average each case infects one other person (I don't think this is meant to be iterate, or else the estimate quickly goes to infinity). So if every Ebola kit was 100% effective, we would expect distributing the kits to save 60 DALYs.

That means in order for kits to be as good as the bottom range of estimates for bed nets, they would have to be at least 33% effective in preventing Ebola among people who get them, which they probably aren't.

On the other hand, every number in this estimate is a total wild guess, and I don't trust that I'm within two orders of magnitude of anything approaching reality. Kits likely cost more when including distribution (I expect charities to underreport costs to make people feel good about giving them), there's no guarantee that there's room for more kits, and my rate of how many subsequent cases are caused by each case is from a half-remembered news article. Does anyone have better ideas for how to figure this out?

Formatting issues:

• The title "Part Eight: Slightly More Complicated Questions" appears twice.

Question requests:

• Ability to solve the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom.
• OCEAN personality test results
• Split "no" option in meetups into "no, because there are no meetups near where I live" and "no, there may be meetups near where I live but I don't want to go to them"

Other comments:

• I like the multiple calibration questions

I feel like using Scandanavia as an example of "socialism" is not really accurate - they're capitalist welfare states with slightly higher taxes than other capitalist welfare states.