Will MacAskill does, and I think many other CEA employees. I think Jeff Kaufman and Julia Wise do an ad-hoc thing but similar in that they mostly don't treat the percentage donated as relevant--they set their personal allowance based on making their best effort without taking into account how much they're currently earning. (I'm not 100% sure this is accurate though.) I don't know the giving habits of many other EtGers but I wouldn't be surprised if they used a broadly similar method to Jeff and Julia.

My comment was very (perhaps overly) vehement. That said, the two main problems arising from increased maternal age that are most typically cited are:

• Infertility and
• Increased rate of birth disorders,

both of which become very significant after age 35.

By saving youthful genetic material, egg freezing solves these problems. However, in almost all online and in-person discussions I've participated in on the subject of maternal age, egg freezing isn't even brought up as an option and (this is more common in-person) people are either unaware that it exists or unaware that it is an established and reliable medical procedure rather than a fringe experimental one.

Of course, the processes of retrieving the eggs and implanting them can be unpleasant and stressful, but I really do think that this is on a different order of significance than "if you don't get pregnant before a certain age your body may become unable to conceive a healthy baby." There are also a host of other lifestyle concerns, such as the desire to have children early when one is more youthful and energetic. However, those tend to apply to men as well as women, and again are more a matter of preference rather than a universal and insurmountable thing on the level of infertility after a certain age. Egg freezing isn't a solution for everyone, sure, but when I see women planning their whole lives around having children before 30 I do get frustrated when they haven't even considered egg freezing.

It's kind of like mini-cryonics!

Do the higher tuition numbers for the "$300k parental savings" case imply parents shouldn't save for their children's college education?

Open threads should be their own subreddit.

No matter how often you post open threads, people will not post in them right before a new one is posted, because others wont view it as much. The way to solve this is to add an entire open subreddit.

So you might be able turn a population of conscious creatures into a population of p-zombies or Elizas just by compressing them.

Suppose you mean lossless compression. The compressed program has ALL the same outputs to the same inputs as the original program.

Then if the uncompressed program running had consciousness and the compressed program running did not, you have either proved or defined consciousness as something which is not an output. If it is possible to do what you are suggesting then consciousness has no effect on behavior, which is the presumption one must make in order to conclude that p-zombies are possible.

From an evolutionary point of view, can a feature with no output, absolutely zero effect on the interaction of the creature with its environment ever evolve? There would be no mechanism for it to evolve, there is no basis on which to select for it. It seems to me that to believe in the possibility of p-zombies is to believe in the supernatural, a world of phenomena such as consciousness that for some reason is not allowed to be listed as a phenomenon of the natural world.

At the moment, I can't really distinguish how a belief that p-zombies are possible is any different from a belief in the supernatural.

Also this scenario reopens the question of whether uploads are conscious in the first place!

Years ago I thought an interesting experiment to do in terms of artificial consciousness would be to build an increasingly complex verbal simulation of a human, to the point where you could have conversations involving reflection with the simulation. At that point you could ask it if it was conscious and see what it had to say. Would it say "not so far as I can tell?"

The p-zombie assumption is that it would say "yeah I'm conscious duhh what kind of question is that?" But the way a simulation actually gets built is you have the list of requirements and you keep accreting code until all the requirements are met. If your requirements included a vast array of features but NOT the feature that it answer this question one way or another, conceivably you could elicit an "honest" answer from your sim. If all such sims answers "yes," you might conclude that somehow in the collection of features you HAD required, consciousness emerged, and you could do other experiments where you removed features from the sim and kept statistics on how those sims answered that question. You might see the sim saying "no, don't think so." and conclude that whatever it is in us that makes us function as conscious we hadn't found that thing yet and put it in our list of requirements.

1. Live in a place with lots of demand. Silicon Valley and Boston are both good choices; there may be others but I'm less familiar with them.
2. Have a github account. Fill it with stuff.
3. Have a personal site. Fill it with stuff.
4. Don't worry about the degree requirements; everybody means "Bachelor's of CS or equivalent".
5. Don't worry about experience requirements. Unlike the degree requirement this does sometimes matter, but you won't be able to tell by reading the advert so just go ahead and apply.
6. Prefer smaller companies. The bigger the company, the more likely it is that your resume will be screened out by some automated process before it can reach someone like me. I read peoples' githubs; HR necessarily does not.

Does anyone have advice for getting an entry level software-development job? I'm finding a lot seem to want several years of experience, or a degree, while I'm self taught.

The NIA rhesus monkey study found:

Calorie restriction (CR), a reduction of 10–40% in intake of a nutritious diet, is often reported as the most robust non-genetic mechanism to extend lifespan and healthspan. CR is frequently used as a tool to understand mechanisms behind ageing and age-associated diseases. In addition to and independently of increasing lifespan, CR has been reported to delay or prevent the occurrence of many chronic diseases in a variety of animals. Beneficial effects of CR on outcomes such as immune function, motor coordination and resistance to sarcopenia in rhesus monkeys have recently been reported. We report here that a CR regimen implemented in young and older age rhesus monkeys at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) has not improved survival outcomes. -- Impact of caloric restriction on health and survival in rhesus monkeys: the NIA study

The NIA study ran for 20 years on two groups of monkeys, "early onset" monkeys who started CR (or being in the control) at a young age and "late onset" who were older. As you'd expect, there were more age-related deaths in the "late onset" group (80 out of 90 monkeys) than the "early onset" (19 out of 90).

By contrast the WNPRC study found that CR did have a positive effect on lifespan:

Caloric restriction (CR) without malnutrition delays aging and extends lifespan in diverse species; however, its effect on resistance to illness and mortality in primates is not clearly established. We report findings of a 20-year longitudinal adult-onset CR study in rhesus monkeys aimed at filling this critical gap in aging research. In a population of rhesus macaques maintained at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, moderate CR lowered the incidence of aging-related deaths. At the time point reported 50% of control fed animals survived compared with 80% survival of CR animals. -- Caloric restriction delays disease onset and mortality in rhesus monkeys

The WNPRC study had 76 monkeys, 19 of which died from age-related causes.

There's a long discussion section at the end of the NIA article talking about differences between the two studies.

Be aware that giving an animal back to a shelter is often a very good way to kill it. Generally, they assume that there's something wrong with it, and it doesn't get much of a second chance before it's put down to give space to others that don't have a black mark.