This happens to me sometimes, and I sort of bring myself back to normality by reminding myself of the fact that the things my meat-brain chooses to bring to my attention are out of my control (for a short time) when I'm in panic mode. Other facts I recall: I have a reflectively-inconsistent meat brain, I was raised in a Christian home (I'm atheist now), and just about everything relevant that I can remember from Kahneman (correspondence bias etc.) and other psychology texts. Also, the Sequences.

Annoying aliefs are annoying.

A thing to do would be to condense all that gratitude into the word "awesome". Best said with a wide grin.

Hm. It seems like a couple of your examples may involve value drift due to behavioral reinforcement. The behavior of buying expensive stuff gets reinforced when friends act impressed, or the behavior of being a jerk gets reinforced when it gets you laid. If it's entirely behavioral phenomenon, it seems possible that the "value drift" is only a drift in revealed preferences, not reflective ones.

Schelling fences or similar come to mind as a way to prevent this sort of behavior change in oneself ("be a decent person always", "donate 30% of my income").

I've had a fair amount of success detailing policies like these for myself to follow. Typically my policies have associated lag times before policy changes take effect, which I've found to be key for experimenting to see what's convenient, workable, and makes reasonable compromises while not ditching the entire policy whenever I encounter problems. I don't think the effectiveness of these policies is best explained in terms game theory, however. The way it feels from the inside is, if I draw up a policy when I'm in a relatively high-willpower state, it's as though I can "lock in" a bunch of future decisions related to the policy that I'll later make using minimal willpower.

If people are interested in the details of what I've learned makes for effective policy administration, I could probably write a discussion post about it.

I realize (and I'm probably not alone in this) that I've been implicitly using this {meta-work, strategy-work, direct-work} process to try and figure out where/how to contribute. Thanks for this guide/analysis.

Since we still don't have a lectures/talks thread I put it here:

http://fora.tv/conference/the_singularity_summit_2012/buy_programs

The Singularity Summit 2012

Content:

• Singularity Summit: Opening Remarks with Nathan Labenz
• Temple Grandin: How Different People Think Differently
• Singularity Summit: Olah, Deming & Other Thiel Fellows
• Julia Galef: Rationality and the Future
• Luke Muehlhauser: The Singularity, Promise and Peril
• Linda Avey: Personal Genomics
• Steven Pinker: A History of Vio
• Ray Kurzweil: How to Create a Mind
• Q&A: Economist Daniel Kahneman, the Pioneer of Heuristics
• Melanie Mitchell: AI and the Barrier of Meaning
• Author Carl Zimmer: Our Viral Future
• Robin Hanson: Extraordinary Society of Emulated Minds
• Jaan Tallinn: Why Now? A Quest in Metaphysics
• John Wilbanks: Your Health, Your Data, Your Choices
• Stuart Armstrong: How We're Predicting AI
• Vernor Vinge: Who's Afraid of First Movers?
• Peter Norvig: Channeling the Flood of Data

"AI Will Be Maleficent By Default"

seems like an a priori predetermined conclusion (bad science, of the "I want this to be true" kind), rather than a research result (good problem statement for AGI risk research). A better title would be rephrased as a research question:

"Will AI Be Maleficent By Default?"

famous dinner parties at which the Illuminati congregate.

Upvoted. Your sense of humor is just awesome. Unless this is one humongous Fnord.

Just so everyone knows, the talks will be going online at Fora.tv over the next week or so.

Fiction Books Thread

Music Thread

This reminds me of something i read in Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" about the "Zeitgeist" of the particular age you find yourself born into...however, i think the "sane" thing to do here would be to conform, since non-conformism doesn't even carry with it the benefit of having the technology -- or even the knowledge -- to save your wife which, in this century, certainly is the case. I see what evand below says about:

[the behaviour] is also done to gain the societal safe harbor protection

but this is only valid in a world where you absolutely can not get any better. i certainly get the sense of "existential despair" this brings.