7 only explicitly refers to 3, but it also requires 6 and 5 in order to actually refer to Zombie World. 1 and 2 are setting up definitions for 3. If you roll that in as understood already, then the short version is fine because the entire argument against Zombies really boils down to one point: the causal structure of P-braaains requires them to include consciousness.

That doesn't mean that lines 1, 2, and 4-6 are pointless. It also doesn't match what Phil is saying unless line 3 is both reaching outside of the realm of expertise and not emphasized. Line 3 is definitely not reaching outside the realm of expertise, and is emphasized.

If you want to raise a problem, it would be that line 4 is carrying all the weight, not 3 - except, he goes on to further talk about it for multiple paragraphs immediately afterwards.

This happens in the zombie sequence where the crux of the argument is largely 2 lines in http://lesswrong.com/lw/p8/zombie_responses/

"3. Intuitively, it sure seems like my inward awareness is causing my internal narrative to say certain things, and that my internal narrative can cause my lips to say certain things. [...] 7. (3) seems to me to have a rather high probability of being empirically true. Therefore I evaluate a high empirical probability that the zombie world is logically impossible."

Even after determining your wealth, your utility function has to take whether-you-are-currently-holding-stocks as an input, because it affects the probability that you incur a transaction cost in future time steps. I think this piece cannot be evaluated without supposing some pdf of future pdfs. I think this is why people are saying the problem is "underspecified".

Even after determining your wealth, your utility function has to take whether-you-are-currently-holding-stocks as an input, because it affects the probability that you incur a transaction cost in future time steps. I think this piece cannot be evaluated without supposing some pdf of future pdfs. I think this is why people are saying the problem is "underspecified".

I think you're quite miscalibrated... only 4x worse to get the flu than the shot ? The shot pain lasts a few seconds, while the flu means headache, nose pain and muscle pain for at least a day, usually more. It usually knocks you out for a day or two, where you can't do much.

Or maybe you're confusing the flu with the common cold ? Flu is similar, but usually much stronger than common cold.

It's easier to reason with a single cause of destruction: see http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw8/caught_in_the_glare_of_two_anthropic_shadows/

Should the first blurb begin "Imagine that civilization would definitely be destroyed by" instead of "Imagine that the only way that civilization could be destroyed was by"? That's what it seems like to me based on the second blurb.

On one hand, unpopular ideas are disproportionately likely to be advocated by disagreeable people. On the other hand, those who hold unpopular positions often have to defend their views and be familiar with the opinions of their opponents, while the proponents of popular views may not be familiar with the arguments for unpopular views. For example, outspoken atheists are likely to be more disagreeable, but they're also more likely to be familiar with religious people's arguments than the typical religious person is familiar with arguments for atheism.

But how you imagine that would work? How will a longer timespan help?

Let's picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts. So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven't got hands. They can write very large letters with immense energy expenditure per letter. They can barely store any knowledge. They also got short lifespan and sharks to worry about.

And on the tools side, you need tools that are good enough so you can use them to make better tools. That generally requires ability to harden things - make something while it's soft, let it harden, use something softer to crack apart something harder. And to get that started, you need hands, because without hands you can only make the kind of tools that doesn't help you make better tools.

If you can't make an improvement in any single generation, you can't make any improvement in a thousand generations either.

Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies - hell, dog bodies, cat bodies, elephant bodies - would've had it all sorted out in no time. They'd have steel, electricity, running water, radio, and so on, in less than a generation - hell even 10 people can do that.

(assuming they all cooperate).

The gap due to the body shape and environment appears utterly immense. The only hope would be that dophins would evolve much greater than human intelligence and come up with something that we can't come up with (e.g. mind controlling some animal with hands).

edit: That is not to say a small number of top scientists and engineers would single handedly create industrial manufacturing, but that is to say they would re-create pre-industrial village level technology and then hand-make many important bits of 20th century technology. You can take a 16th century blacksmith's forge and make an electric generator in there, a spark gap transmitter, a coherer receiver, a carbon arc lamp, and the like, using most basic materials and hand manufacturing techniques. Indeed that's how the early instances of all those things were made - by a small number of top engineers, often in their spare time, without advance knowledge.