Still, they seem to command a huge legion of dupes, who I hope can be awakened to the fact that this causation exists and do something to stop it.

Downvoted for needless inflammatory language, even though I would have upvoted this for the content otherwise.

Did that.

Re. relationships: The only people I've heard use "polyamorous" are referring to committed, marriage-like relationships involving more than two adults. There ought to be a category for those of us who don't want exclusivity with any number.

I've left most of the probability questions blank, because I don't think it is meaningfully possible to assign numbers to events I have little or no quantitative information about. For instance, I'll try P(Aliens) when we've looked at several thousand planets closely enough to be reasonably sure of answers about them.

In addition, I don't think some of the questions can have meaningful answers. For example, the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, if true, would have no testable (falsifiable) effect on the observable universe, and therefore I consider the question to be objectively meaningless. The same goes for P(Simulation), and probably P(God).

P(religion) also suffers from vagueness: what conditions would satisfy it? Not only are some religions vaguely defined, but there are many belief systems that are arguably relgions or not religions. Buddhism? Communism? Atheism?

The singularity is vague, too. (And as I usually hear it described, I would see it as a catastrophe if it happened. The SF story "With Folded Hands" explains why.)

Extra credit items:

Great Stagnation -- I believe that the rich world's economy IS in a great stagnation that has lasted for most of a century, but NOT for the reasons Cowen and Thiel suggest. The stagnation is because of "progressive" politics, especially both the welfare state and overregulation/nanny-statism, which destroy most people's opportunities to innovate and profit by it. This is not a trivial matter, but a problem quite comparable to those listed in the "catastrophe" section, and one which may very well prevent a solution to a real catastrophe if we become headed for one. (Both parties' constant practice of campaigning-by-inventing-a-new-phony-emergency-every-month makes the problem worse, too: most rational people now dismiss any cry of alarm as the boy who cried wolf. Certainly the environmental movement, including its best known "scientists", have discredited themselves this way.) This is why the struggle for liberty is so critical.

I agree there's been some inconsistency in usage over the years. In fact, I think What Do We Mean By Rationality? and Rationality are simply wrong, which is surprising since they're two of the most popular and widely-relied-on pages on LessWrong.

Rationality doesn't ensure that you'll win, or have true beliefs; and having true beliefs doesn't ensure that you're rational; and winning doesn't ensure that you're rational. Yes, winning and having true beliefs is the point of rationality; and rational agents should win (and avoid falsehood) on average, in the long haul. But I don't think it's pedantic, if you're going to write whole articles explaining these terms, to do a bit more to firewall the optimal from the rational and recognize that rationality must be systematic and agent-internal.

Instrumental and epistemic rationality were always kind of handwavey, IMO. For example, if you want to achieve your goals, it often helps to have money. So if I deposit $10,000 [≈ Average community college tuition, four years, 2010] in your bank account, does that make you more instrumentally rational?

Instrumental rationality isn't the same thing as winning. It's not even the same thing as 'instantiating cognitive algorithms that make you win'. Rather, it's, 'instantiating cognitive algorithms that tend to make one win'. So being unlucky doesn't mean you were irrational.

Luke's way of putting this is to say that 'the rational decision isn't always the right decision'. Though that depends on whether by 'right' you mean 'defensible' or 'useful'. So I'd rather just say that rationalists can get unlucky.

You could define instrumental rationality as "mental skills that help people better achieve their goals". Then I could argue that learning graphic design makes you more instrumentally rational, because it's a mental skill and if you learn it, you'll be able to make money from anywhere using your computer, which is often useful for achieving your goals.

I'm happy to say that being good at graphic design is instrumentally rational, for people who are likely to use that skill and have the storage space to fit more abilities. The main reason we wouldn't speak of it that way is that it's not one of the abilities that's instrumentally rational for every human, and it's awkward to have to index instrumentality to specific goals or groups.

Becoming good at graphic design is another story. That can require an investment large enough to make it instrumentally irrational, again depending on the agent and its environment.

You could define epistemic rationality as "mental skills that help you know what's true". Then I could argue that learning about chess makes you more epistemically rational, because you can better know the truth of statements about who's going to win chess games that are in progress.

I don't see any reason not to bite that bullet. This is why epistemic rationality can become trivial when it's divorced from instrumental rationality.

Many labor market regulations transfer wealth or job security to the already-employed at the expense of the unemployed, and these have been increasing over time.

One example: raising the minimum wage makes lower-productivity workers permanently unemployable, because their work is not worth the price, so no one can afford to hire them any more.

When the government raises minimum wage, it effectively funds the development of automation, as businesses seek replacements for low-end labor. (Like Amazon buying that robotics company to build warehouse management robots.)

Heck, you could almost say that AI doesn't cause unemployment; the need for unemployment causes AI. When labor cost increases without a productivity gain, there has to be a productivity gain to make up for it, and the pain of the increase motivates businesses to actually look for alternatives to their current ways of doing something.

So every time the minimum wage goes up, companies will replace more and more of their former minimum wage workers with automation. Somehow, the politicians never catch on to this, or they know and don't care. It makes me want to scream every time I get a promotional email from some organization talking about how evil low wages are and how the minimum wage needs to be raised. Don't they know they are going to make jobs go away, basically forever?

This seems like another "angels dancing on the head of a pin" question. I am not willing to assign numerical probabilities to any statement whose truth value is unknown, unless there is a compelling reason to choose that specific number (such as, the question is about a predictable process such as the result of a die roll). It seems to me that people who do so assign, are much more likely to get basic problems of probability theory (such as the Monty Hall problem) wrong than those who resist the urge.

I believe it is silly to even try to assign a numerical probability to any event unless you can rigorously derive that number from antecedent circumstances or events (for instance, it can make sense if you are talking about scenarios involving the results of dice rolls). Thus I find the questions in LW's annual survey which demand such numbers annoying and pointless.

As for the errors in predictions of the time or money it will take to build some promised project, there's no mystery; the individuals making those predictions stand to gain substantial money or prestige if the predictions are believed, so they lie (or at least make the rosiest predictions they expect to get away with making). This especially goes for politicians, who have all the more incentive to lie because the law gives them absolute immunity (from, for example, being sued for fraud) for anything they say during legislative debate.

The way to get reliable data about these things is to create incentives that make it in someone's best interest to gather and share that reliable data. For most projects, the simplest and easiest way to do this is to have those who want the project built commission it using their own money, rather than do it through the political system.

It really seems you need to taboo "real" here, and instead ask some related questions such as:

which types of universes could observe which other types of universe (an universe which can observe you you can also, obviously, "travel" to)? Which universes could trade, in the broadest senses of the word, with which other universe? What types of creatures in which types of universes are capable of consistently caring about things in what types of universes?

Specifically it seems likely that your usage of "real" in this case refers to "things that humans could possibly, directly or indirectly, in principle care about at all.", which is the class of universes we must make sure to include in our priors for where we are.

journals to only accept experiments that were registered in a public database

I know this is stating the obvious, but the next stage after this is for people to regard "science" as what's in the database rather than what's in the journals. Otherwise there's still publication bias (unless people like writing up boring results and journals like publishing them)

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you stock it with such furnature as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

-Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

There's 2 varieties of subjectivism:

• Hayekian subjectivism of limited knowledge, and limited reason, and error, resulting in Bayesian probabilities in the .8 range and below, with required updating, and impact on making +EV decisions...

• Hippie subjectivism of you believe what you want to believe, and I believe what I want to believe.

Aretae