However, it does proof that not caring much about $ and status is not an insurmountable barrier to acquiring a lot of money. By reversing it (i.e. instead of working harder/smarter and earn more, just spend less) you can still get enough to make a difference (but indeed not to the levels like Bill Gates did).

You can make a difference, yes. The relevant equation is:

Difference you make = (Earnings-Spend) x Altruism x 10^(charity rationality)

Since you are considering giving money to some highly efficient charity like SIAI, you will in the future make more of a difference than almost anyone else in the world, if you do so.

However, if you fix charity rationality or you've already found the most efficient charity in the world, then it seems to me than Increasing earnings is probably more effective than decreasing spend. You can earn $10^6 .year (I know of a major SIAI donor who has achieved this) , but if your current spend is $10k, you can't increase -spend by more than a few k.

This epitomizes the problem with Less Wrongers' instrumental rationality:

I do find them convincing. Unfortunately, I don't find them motivating.

My lifestyle tends to be rather minimalistic so that even an average to low income is more the enough to sustain it. I also find it a lot easier to just forgo some comfort or gadget instead of working more to pay for it

We're a bunch of linux-hacking post-hippies who don't care enough about the socially accepted measures of influence ($ and status) to motivate ourselves to make a difference. Hence, we are sidelined by dumb cave-men who at least have enough fire in their bellies to win.

Roko, do you think you could lay out, in some detail, the argument for why rational people should busy themselves with getting rich? I'm familiar with some of the obvious arguments at a basic level (entrepreneurship is usually win-win, money can be used to help fund or attract attention for just about any other project or argument you care to have succeed, getting rich should be relatively easy in a world full of both arbitrage opportunities and irrational people), but still don't quite find them convincing.

I donated blood just yesterday. Unfortunately, I'm AB+ which means my blood is only suitable to other AB+ people. About 5% of the population according to Wikipedia. On the plus side, I can receive blood from anyone :). I have to admit that I'm having trouble keeping a regular schedule of blood donation.

On the topic of diet, LessWrong helped me losing about 17 pounds through implementing some short term motivation methods. Counted in the probability of more years at life that's a huge win.

You're assuming that because someone has made mistakes themselves they will judge others less harshly.

Actually, I don't think that's the only or most important factor. People who learn about the skeletons in your closet will compare you, not only to themselves, but to other people. If everyone has skeletons in their closet and everyone knows about them, then your prospective employer Bob (say) will be comparing the skeletons in your closet not only to the skeletons in his own closet, but more importantly to the skeletons in the closets of the other people who are competing with you for the same job.

As for people not making equal mistakes, to put it in simple binary terms merely for the purpose of making the point, divide people into "major offenders" and "minor offenders" and suppose major offenders are all equally major and minor all equally minor. If major offenders outnumber minor offenders, then being a major offender is not such a big deal since you're part of the majority. But if minor offenders outnumber major offenders, then only a minority of people will be major offenders and therefore only a minority will have to worry about a transparent society. So either way, the transparent society is not that big a thing to fear for the average person. It's a self-limiting danger. The more probable it is that the average person will be revealed to have Pervert Type A, the greater the fraction of people who will be revealed to be Pervert Type A, and therefore the harder it will be for other people to ostracize them, since to do so would reduce the size of their own social network.

Even with the most non-intrusive and fair government imaginable, if lots of information about your life is easily available online, it means that a single stupid mistake in life that would earlier have only mild consequences can ruin your reputation forever and render you permanently unemployable and shunned socially.

I've heard this opinion expressed frequently, but it always seems to kind of contradict itself. If there's lots of information available about everyone, and all kinds of stupid mistakes will easily become permanently recorded...

...then wouldn't that lead to just about everyone's reputation being ruined in the eyes of everyone? But that doesn't make any sense - if almost everyone's going to have some stupid mistakes of theirs caught permanently on file, then all that will happen is that you'll find out you're not the only one who has made stupid mistakes. Big deal.

In fact, this to me seems potentially preferrable than our current society. Right now, people's past mistakes get lost in the past. As a result, we construct an unrealistic image where most people seem far more perfect than they actually are. Some past mistake coming out might ruin someone's reputation, and people who have made perfectly normal and reasonable mistakes will feel a lot more guilty about it than would be warranted. If the mistakes everyone had made were available, then we wouldn't have these unrealistic unconscious conceptions of how perfect people must be. Society might be far healthier as a result.

Well, I don't count as a lurker anymore but I only started posting about two weeks ago and lurked about 2 years before that so I think I qualify to comment about it. The only 2 forums where I post(ed) at all are LessWrong and INTPCentral.

INTPCentral was more of an experiment to see if I could sustain posting for an extended period of time. It didn't work and after 2 weeks I lost interest. LessWrong has less chance going the same way because of the high level of most top posts. That's my first barrier to post. The online community has to be interesting enough to make me come back.

The second is a certain reluctance to comment at all. I think that has to do with my aversion to attention (although this doesn't fly when I'm with friends. Then I have no problem with it). The only reason to call attention to myself is when I can significantly add to the conversation or to correct someone. That also makes it difficult for me to comment on a top level post that already has been thoroughly analyzed in the comments. Adding a comment that doesn't add anything does look too much like yelling 'me too, me too'.

Did you mean to say you don't understand why people are in favor of marriage contracts? I don't see how the marriage contract helps in the bus example.

I predict, with probability ~95%, that if Joe becomes unhappy in the marriage, he and Kate will get divorced, even though Joe and Kate, who is not as powerful a predictor as Omega, currently believe otherwise. Joe is, after all, running this "timeless decision theory" on hostile hardware.

(But I hope that they remain happy, and this prediction remains hypothetical.)

If understand you correctly, you are saying that most people are not knowledgeable enough about the different domains in question to make any (or judge any) cross-domain connections. This seems plausible.

I can think however of another argument that confirms this but also clarifies why on Less Wrong we think that people actively compartmentalize instead of failing to make the connection and that is selection bias. Most people on this site are scientists, programmers or other technical professions. It seems that most are also consequentialists. Not surprisingly, both these facts points to people who enjoy following a chain of logic all way to the end.

So, we tend to learn a field until we know it's basic principles. For example, if you learn about gravity, you can learn just enough so you can calculate the falling speed of an object in gravitational field or you can learn about the bending of space-time by mass. It seems rather obvious to me that the second method encourages cross-domain connections. If you don't know the basic underlying principles of the domains you can't make connections.

I also see this all the time when I teach someone how to use computers. Some people build an internal model of how a computer & programs conceptually work and are then able to use most basic programs. Others learn by memorizing each step and are looking at each program as a domain on it's own instead of generalizing across all programs.