Hi Peter! I am Vadim, we met in a LW meetup in CFAR's office last May.

You might be right that SPARC is important but I really want to hear from the horse's mouth what is their strategy in this regard. I'm inclined to disagree with you regarding younger people, what makes you think so? Regardless of age I would guess establishing a continuous education programme would have much more impact than a two-week summer workshop. It's not obvious what is the optimal distribution of resources (many two week workshops for many people or one long program for fewer people) but I haven't seen such an analysis by CFAR.

It feels like there is an implicit assumption in CFAR's agenda that most of the important things are going to happen in one or two decades from now. Otherwise it would make sense to place more emphasis on creating educational programs for children where the long term impact can be larger (I think). Do you agree with this assessment? If so, how do you justify the short term assumption?

Good question. I'm not sure. Given diminishing marginal returns if MIRI and OpenAI are doing the same things then the value of giving to MIRI goes way down. In contrast, if OpenAI is going to speed up the development of AI without putting too much thought into friendly AI, then MIRI and OpenAI are complements and it's more important than ever to give lots of money quickly to MIRI.

Using statistics to evaluate lawyer performance

Hello I remember reading an article somewhere about lawyer performance based on statistics of past successes. Does anyone know where it is? I googled but didn't get anywhere.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm looking for a lawyer right now, it involves international law.

I've lost my curiosity. I have noticed that over the course of the last year, I have become significantly less curious. I no longer feel the need to know anything unless I need it, I don't understand how it is possible to desire knowledge for the sake of knowledge (even though the past me definitely did), I generally find myself unable to empathize with knowledge-seekers and the virtue of curiosity. That worries me a lot, because if you asked me two years earlier, I would have named curiosity as my main characteristic and the desire for knowledge my main driving force. Thinking over the last year, I can't remember any life-changing experiences that would have warranted the change. May it have been the foods I ate, or some neurological damage? I would have attributed it to brain aging, if I weren't twenty. What happened? How to reverse it? I find it crippling.

For Omnivores:

• Do you think the level of meat consumption in America is healthy for individuals? Do you think it's healthy for the planet?

The level is healthy for individuals. But that includes way to much meat that has been processed dangerously (bacon, sausage), and not enough minimally processed seafood.

It's not good for the planet. I want to deal with that by uploading my mind. Some large changes of that nature will make current meat production problems irrelevant in a few decades.

• How do you feel about factory farming? Would you pay twice as much money for meat raised in a less efficient (but "more natural") way?

Most factory farming (other than for bivalves) produces less healthy meat. I often pay twice as much for pasture-raised chicken/beef. With seafood there's little need to pay extra to get properly raised food.

• Are there any animals you would (without significantly changing your mind) never say it was okay to hunt/farm and eat? If so, what distinguishes these animals from the animals which are currently being hunted/farmed?

I'm confused about what rules I should use for primates, octopus, and dolphin. But since I haven't had a convenient opportunity to eat any of those for years, I've procrastinated about deciding.

• If all your friends were vegetarians, and you had to go out of your way to find meat in a similar way to how vegans must go out of their way right now, do you think you'd still be an omnivore?

I would definitely go out of my way for seafood. I don't trust nutrition science enough to tell me how to safely go vegan. Seafood is a good source of B12, high zinc/copper ratios, iodine, and omega-3. I probably wouldn't go much out of my way for chicken, beef, etc.

For Vegetarians:

• If there was a way to grow meat in a lab that was indistinguishable from normal meat, and the lab-meat had never been connected to a brain, do you expect you would eat it? Why/why not?

"never connected to a brain" doesn't seem like quite the right criterion. I expect there's some technology that would satisfy my ethical criteria (Drexlerian nanotech?), in which case I would eat moderate amounts of meat (if it's not too expensive).

• Indigenous hunter gatherers across the world get around 30 percent of their annual calories from meat. Chimpanzees, our closest non-human relatives, eat meat. There are arguments that humans evolved to eat meat and that it's natural to do so. Would you disagree? Elaborate.

Evolution creates enormous amounts of suffering. Natural should in most contexts be interpreted as amoral or immoral.

Maybe we've evolved to be healthier if we eat some animals, but most of the evidence I've seen suggests that bivalves are a much more effective way of getting the relevant nutrition than cruelly farmed vertebrates.

• Do you think it's any of your business what other people eat? Have you ever tried (more than just suggesting it or leading by example) to get someone to become a vegetarian or vegan?

Yes, it's my business whether you are cruel to innocent beings who can't defend themselves.

A culture of cruelty can have widespread effects beyond current nonhuman animals. We're on the verge of creating many new forms of digital life. I want to set good precedents for how they are treated.

I haven't yet actively tried to persuade anyone yet. I feel a little guilty about that, but it seems like a lower priority than x-risks. Also, I've only been vegetarian for seven months. I expect that eventually I'll find a context in which I feel comfortable enough to actively argue for vegetarianism.

• What do you think is the primary health risk of eating meat (if any)?

Too much of that meat has been processed in ways that create or add new chemicals that we're poorly evolved to handle. E.g. smoking (bacon), and nitrates (sausage).

A less drastic health risk that's harder to avoid comes from mycotoxins on poorly stored grain that factory farmed animals eat.

If the Efficient Market Hypothesis is true, shouldn't it be almost as hard to lose money on the market as it is to gain money? Let's say you had a strategy S that reliably loses money. Shouldn't you be able to define an inverse strategy S', that buys when S sells and sells when S buys, that reliably earns money? For the sake of argument rule out obvious errors like offering to buy a stock for $1 more than its current price.

I have heard (from the book Global Catastrophic Risks) that life extension could increase existential risk by giving oppressive regimes increased stability by decreasing how frequently they would need to select successors. However, I think it may also decrease existential risk by giving people a greater incentive to care about the far future (because they could be in it). What are your thoughts on the net effect of life extension?

There's been far less writings on improving rationality here on LW during the last few years. Has everything important been said about the subject, or have you just given up on trying to improve your rationality? Are there diminishing returns on improving rationality? Is it related to the fact that it's very hard to get rid off most of cognitive bias, no matter how hard you try to focus on them? Or have people moved talking about these on different forums, or in real life?

Or like Yvain said on 2014 Survey results.

It looks to me like everyone was horrendously underconfident on all the easy questions, and horrendously overconfident on all the hard questions. To give an example of how horrendous, people who were 50% sure of their answers to question 10 got it right only 13% of the time; people who were 100% sure only got it right 44% of the time. Obviously those numbers should be 50% and 100% respectively.

This builds upon results from previous surveys in which your calibration was also horrible. This is not a human universal - people who put even a small amount of training into calibration can become very well calibrated very quickly. This is a sign that most Less Wrongers continue to neglect the very basics of rationality and are incapable of judging how much evidence they have on a given issue. Veterans of the site do no better than newbies on this measure.

Signing up didn't bring me peace of mind, except for brief relief at not having the paperwork on my to-do list.

I've heard other cryonicists report feeling something like peace of mind as a result of signing up, but they appear to be a minority.