The case for being pro-choice is so strong even neoreactionaries and fascists are pro-choice. Interestingly, on this specific issue, conservatives are to the right of fascists!

Rather, the standard conservative argument against abortion, based on the fetus's right to life, isn't going to convince neo-reactionaries or fascists who don't believe in human rights. On the other hand, they might well be convinced by Margret Sanger-style arguments about aborting undesirables.

Unfortunately it might also be an area where epistemic and instrumental rationality clash. In fact, most of the world does not have freedom of speech in the same way the US does - if one advocated HBD in, say, Germany, could one be thrown in prison in the same way people are imprisoned for saying 'seig heil'?

There is a difference between advocating something and merely believing it. But I'm mostly skeptical of the people that put "strongly disagree" on that question. As opposed to "disagree" or "neutral". The fact that it's so correlated with political ideology is more evidence that it's just political bias.

If I lived 200 years ago, I wouldn't go around advocating atheism. But I might have believed it privately, and I would be more skeptical of the openmindedness of people that say they "strongly oppose the evils of atheism".

The study I am thinking of did account for this.

I really don't know. When I researched this it seems like the effects are pretty hard to estimate. Different models give very different results. A recentish study using more modern climate models shows that the effects would be catastrophic and last for multiple years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#2007_study_on_global_nuclear_war

the products of a nuclear explosion have very short half-lives - the worst would be over within an hour. Not only do we not have enough bombs to contaminate the world, but ground zero would be habitable again after a few months.

Those first few months are the problem though. The crops and livestock die or absorb the radioactive isotopes. The people too if they don't happen to have a fallout shelter handy.

Also the nuclear bombs themselves aren't the only concern. You would have to deal with all the waste left in the cities they destroy. Nuclear power plants would melt down with no one to contain them. Vast amounts of chemical waste would leak from abandoned chemical plants and waste storage. Oil would leak and pollute the oceans with no cleanup.

I don't know how to estimate the damage of this. But it should be at least a bad or worse than major industrial accidents of the past, like Bhopal, deepwater horizon, or Chernobyl. But all happening at once and with no one left to organize any kind of response.

while I think a nuclear war between allmost all countries is unlikly, its still a lot more likly then 90% of humanity killed by environmental or political collapse.

I think you are underestimating the secondary effects. I imagine a complete destruction of the global economy. There isn't enough food to go around and lots of countries are starving. This would lead to more war and chaos.

A few thousand years ago the civilizations of the mediterranean all collapsed almost at once. It's now speculated to be the result of a serious drought and bad weather. The states that couldn't feed their population got overthrown, and their hungry populations went to war with neighboring countries for food, until nothing of the old orders remained. It was a serious setback for humanity.

If that happened in the modern world, technological civilization might end and never be restarted. The modern world depends on hugely complex infrastructure and tons of different industries and inputs. If we lose that, it would be very difficult to rebuild. We've already extracted most of the easy to get to minerals and fossil fuels. Much farmland has been degraded from overuse and depends on inputs of fertilizer, irrigation systems, and of course modern machinery which would be difficult to replace.

If the world does collapse access to wikipedia could be enormously useful.

What makes you think you'll have electricity in a TEOTWAWKI scenario? I'll still take beans & ammo (and maybe a paper survivalist book).

On a more general level, if you desire to prepare for the civilization collapse, downloading Wikipedia to your local hard drive is probably not the right place to start.

Being around here has made me think that I know everything interesting about the world and suppressed my excitement and joy from many minor things I could do. I also feel like my sense of wonder diminished. As I write this, I am a little unhappy, and in a period of depression, but I had similar feelings, if less intense, even before this period.

I was wondering whether you have any advice on how to restore this; or even better, how to "forget" as much rationality and transhumanism as possible (if not actually forgetting, then at least "to think and feel as I did before I read the Sequences")?

The case for being pro-choice is so strong even neoreactionaries and fascists are pro-choice. Interestingly, on this specific issue, conservatives are to the right of fascists!

Probably more a case of demographics than the ideology itself. Total speculation, but I imagine someone who identifies as fascist is in the "liberal" demographic but happens to be into weird political beliefs in general, while someone who identifies as conservative might have just inherited that view from their family and upbringing. In general, I think old "conservative social issues" are becoming less popular among the younger generation. As our culture changes and gays and abortion become normal, the objections to them will decrease.

On political opinions, HBD is about an objective, falsifiable, scientifically mesureable characteristic of the world, whereas the other opinions are opinions. Opinions on HBD also correlates strongly with other views, and so I am interested as to how poeple's opinions would change if it was proved to them that the truth about HBD is the opposite of what they currently believe it to be. Would their other views change?

I think HBD is a fantastic test for true rationality. It's a rare case where a scientific fact conflicts with deeply ingrained political and cultural values.

The worst case scenario for nuclear war at the hight of the cold war was about 40% of humanity dies. I suppose that its possible that vast numbers of new bombs could be built, without similar investment in bomb shelters, but this does seem a little implausible.

The people directly killed by bombs are only a tiny fraction of the casualties. Afterwards you have the possibility of nuclear winter, which could radically change the climate for the worse. You have contamination of vast amounts of farmland and food supplies, and the destruction of the global economy. Even countries that weren't hit directly would be have tons of issues and would probably collapse.

In the 'Cretaceous hothouse' period CO2 levels were 8x higher, and there was still enough vegetation to support giant dinosaurs far bigger than the largest animal today. The worst-case scenarios are a decrease in economic growth and a migrant crisis, not 90% of humanity dies.

Sudden changes to the climate are bad. In the past the climate changed very very slowly, so that life had a chance to adapt. CO2 is acidifying the oceans and could destroy most of the oceans ecosystems. I tend to agree that humanity would probably survive though.

A quick and dirty inspiration: that value alignment is very hard is showed by very intelligent people going neoreactionary or convert to a religion from atheism. They usually base their 'move' on a coherent epistemology, with just some tiny components that zag instead of zigging.

Comment at will, I'll expand with more thoughts.

Frankly, I wouldn't use the word "sensible" anywhere near these approaches :-/

Have you considered adding the geometric mean for certain questions? It should help a bit to deal with extreamly large answers.

Some things I found interesting:

1) The case for being pro-choice is so strong even neoreactionaries and fascists are pro-choice. Interestingly, on this specific issue, conservatives are to the right of fascists!

2) On political opinions, HBD is about an objective, falsifiable, scientifically mesureable characteristic of the world, whereas the other opinions are opinions. Opinions on HBD also correlates strongly with other views, and so I am interested as to how poeple's opinions would change if it was proved to them that the truth about HBD is the opposite of what they currently believe it to be. Would their other views change?

3) Some of the '90% of humanity die' risks seem extremely low probability to me, and I am perplexed by why so many people chose them:

Nuclear war: +4.800% 326 (20.6%)

The worst case scenario for nuclear war at the hight of the cold war was about 40% of humanity dies. I suppose that its possible that vast numbers of new bombs could be built, without similar investment in bomb shelters, but this does seem a little implausible.

Environmental collapse (including global warming): +1.500% 252 (16.0%)

In the 'Cretaceous hothouse' period CO2 levels were 8x higher, and there was still enough vegetation to support giant dinosaurs far bigger than the largest animal today. The worst-case scenarios are a decrease in economic growth and a migrant crisis, not 90% of humanity dies.

Economic / political collapse: -1.400% 136 (8.6%)

Its difficult enough to imagine political collapse killing 90% of the population in one country. The Syrian civil war has killed 3% of the population. The Japanese invasion of China killed 4%. I'm aware of some wars that killed 50% - parts of the thirty years war, the Mongol invasion of China - but I think these were combined with famines or disease outbreaks. In the 1870 Japanese civil war, the samurai combatants took over 99% casualties, but the non-combatants survived. 90% deaths of one country would be mind-boggling. But 90% deaths of the whole of humanity? A political collapse that affects the entire world, including countries of every culture? Including China and other countries that are not democracies?

This might make some sense if DNNs were being used to further our understanding of theoretical physics, but afaik they're not. They're being used to classify cat pics. SInce when do you use polynomial Hamiltonians to recognise cats?

These properties mean that neural networks do not need to approximate an infinitude of possible mathematical functions but only a tiny subset of the simplest ones

No finite DNN can approximate sin(x) over the entire real numbers, unless you cheat by having a sin(x) activation function.

I mostly don't have any.

I think people are in charge of their own destiny; which is kinda capitalist-libertarian leaning. I know that not everyone is dealt the same hand in life, but I am not personally motivated to change that. I think success is hard but can be worked on.

I have strong pro- voluntary euthenasia choice views, and it's the only thing I have ever been active about (which I am being active about now, but not on LW).

I am certainly not part of any clear and obvious party group that could be identified. On top of that I am not even in america, so trying to fight me on the internet is relatively irrelevant to an american.

(not sure if this answers your question/reason for asking - can you be more specific?)