As long as we're speculating, my two cents: I do think that reference class forecasting is a valid way to predict the magnitude of change if not the direction, but I don't think that using reference class forecasting necessarily implies "business as usual".

1) In my view, the intelligence explosion already happened, with the invention of writing. It will continue to happen, faster and faster as exponential growth does. There's no reason to posit that there will be a qualitative change in this trend. Any developments in AI, etc... can all be taken together as part of this explosive trend and not as a singular exceptional event.

2) Reference class forecasting says that the business-as-usual future is very unlikely. Hunter-gatherers would not consider our current lives to be "business as usual" at all...I can't imagine they would have any idea why we do the things we do. Primitive agriculturalists with writing would find us slightly more familiar (our concepts of property, marriage, the notion of formal schooling, formal warfare, wages and labor, heirarchy, etc) but our more futuristic edges (the notion of science, the sheer scope of technology) are probably still pretty hard for them to understand. I think there are lots of qualitative divides between early-return hunter-gatherer, late-return hunter gatherer agricultural, industrial, and information age societies which make it hard for them to understand each other.

I'd say that reference class forecasting might also predict that the more privileged, tech savvy among us shouldn't expect to be completely shocked within our natural life-spans. Historically, this is probably only true for a privileged subset of people. I imagine a lot of the more isolated hunter-gatherers and subsistence agriculturalist groups were, are, and continue to be rather abruptly shocked as they come into contact with modernity.

Link to the story: Friendship is Optimal. Though I wouldn’t call the story as a whole a horror story; rather, it has some fridge horror. And it is particularly horrifying to those interested in the singularity, rather than to rationalists in general.

Man, I hate false awakenings. I would not infrequently have them in middle school and high school: I would dream about waking up ridiculously early, going to school, doing all the tests, suffering through the classes I didn't like, spending literally hours on the bus going to and from, and then I would wake up shortly before the bus came at 6:30AM and think to myself oh come onnnn...

BadBIOS: sounds awfully spooky. Worse than Cylons. I estimate the odds of an indestructible multi-platform virus that can jump air gaps being a real thing at less than 1%, but I wasn't overly Bayesian in my estimate. See also the relevant discussion on Reddit. What would be your estimate of such a spooky thing being real?

I believe the main distinction was primarily historical when nobles and aristocracy commanded peasants. I had always thought that commissions (from the Queen/King or head of state) used to be put on sale by the state, similar to how France at one point used to sell public offices.

In today's more modern times, one can become an officer by dint of having a post-secondary education. At least in Canada, you are typically an officer when you enlist provided you have a bachelor degree and pass certain intelligence tests.

Everybody else (NCOs or enlisted) typically become technical SMEs due to lack of upward mobility.

Doctors are SMEs, but they also have extensive post-secondary education. Average grunts and NCOs don't start out as SMEs, but given enough time (provided they survived) become an expert would have made perfect sense.

all police departments that I am aware of in the U.S. are single hierarchy. The dual hierarchy is a military thing.

In the U.S. when there has been a draft (involuntary conscription) one is only ever drafted in to the lower hierarchy. The officer hierarchy was always strictly volunteers.

People are a lot more willing to criticize the morality of the story if they didn't find the story itself to be competently written. Notice the amount of social criticism that's been leveled at Twilight.

Seems to work the other way if the story's written to convince people of a moral point, though.

One controversial or taboo possibility is that an intellectually elite Less Wrong poster may have much more of an impact on technological/economic progress by investing in a child than an equivalent investment in the third-world poor. One could argue that the majority of technological progress is driven by the top few % of people (measured either through intellect or economic resources), and that people in third-world countries (i.e. those who would benefit from bed nets) aren't really in a position to cause much impact.

On this principle, it would be wrong for the cable guy to come to my house, because if billions of people came to my house, then there would be no place for anyone to park.

There are many problems with this analogy -- for example, Rachels asks people NOT to do something so the proper parallel would be for billions of people not to come to her house which seems perfectly fine to me.

But to make clear the major flaw of this comparison let me ask you a question: What percentage of human population would you like to follow the advice of not having kids? And if it's less than 100% what would you consider to be the best way of dividing people into those who should have kids and those who should not?

This question solves the silly problem of "but what if everyone did that" -- please tell me how many people do you want to do that.

Susskind's Rule of Thumb seems worthwhile here. The actionable question doesn't seem to be so much "Does Bostrom publicly say he thinks cryonics could work?" as "Is Bostrom signed up for cryonics?" (Hanson, for example, is signed up, despite concerns that it most likely won't work.)