There is also a more detailed paper by Lattimore and Hutter (2011) on discounting and time consistency that is interesting in that context.

As someone who has not yet read through all the sequences and found it difficult on a few occasions where I attempted to follow the Hanson-Yudkowsky FOOM debate, I find this summary very helpful.

...it all makes sense now.

The bleak grey world turns lucid at once!

Slightly off topic, but I'm very interested in the "policy impact" that FHI has had - I had heard nothing about it before and assumed that it wasn't having very much. Do you have more information on that? If it were significant, it would increase the odds that giving to FHI was a great option.

I saw a post the other year about artists who asked Michael Vassar what they could do to ensure friendliness. "Modify the status of friendliness research" seems like it could be a good answer to that. Art can definitely impact cultural memes (e.g. Stranger in a Strange Land), so a reasonable proceduralization of "modify the status of activity X" might be to get some artist to do it. (Though, even if artists can create and spread powerful memes, figuring out exactly how to construct those memes in order to modify status could be a pain point.)

I think you're reading too much speculative detail into this. Is it any different from persuading people to buy your drugs by showing men in white coats and saying "studies have shown"?

If Reagan or FDR or Washington ever caught themselves thinking "I'm the smartest guy in this room" their immediate reaction would have been: "Uh-oh, I'd better get some smarter guys in here, pronto!"

Steve Sailer

The traditional definition of philosophy (in Greek) implied that philosophy's purpose was not to convey information, but to produce a transformation in the individual who practices it. In that sense, it is not supposed to be "useless", but it may appear so to someone who is looking to it for "information" about reality. By this standard, very little of what goes on in academic Philosophy departments today would qualify.

This is my viewpoint as a philosophical laymen. I've liked a lot of the philosophy I've read, but I'm thinking about what the counter-proposal to what your post might be, and I don't know that it wouldn't result in a better state of affairs. I don't believe we'd have to stop reading writers from prior eras, or keep reinventing the wheel for "philosophical" questions. But why not just say, from here on out, the useful bits of philosophy can be categorized into other disciplines, and the general catch all term is no longer warranted? Philosophy covered just too wide a swath of topics: political science/economics, physics/cosmology, and psychology, just to name a few. I don't really know how to categorize everything Leibnitz and Newton were interested in. Now that these topics have more empirical data, there's less room for general speculation like there was in the old days. When you reclassify the useful stuff of philosophers' work as science, math, or logic I think it's very clarifying. All that remains afterwards (in my opinion) is more cultural commentaries and criticisms, and general speculations about life. I wouldn't call them useless; I found Rawls and Nozick to be interesting. But there would be big picture thinkers, cross-disciplinary studiers, and other types of thinkers even without a formal academic discipline called philosophy.

This happens frequently, and we don't see these questions resolved because the scientific method is far from bulletproof. Doubtless many of our modern ideas will be proven incorrect by the next generation; others will learn to make more accurate predictions using more advanced analysis; some paradigms will seem ludicrous in rhetrospect (as some models which were accepted only decades ago seem today). Just how frequently such an obvious problem happens, for the same reasons this case went unnoticed, it is very difficult to estimate.