It is important to be rational about charity for the same reason it is important to be rational about Arctic exploration: it requires the same awareness of opportunity costs and the same hard-headed commitment to investigating efficient use of resources

In his Mars Direct talks, Robert Zubrin cited the shoestring budget Amundsen expedition through the Northwest Passage in comparison to around 30 contemporary government funded expeditions with state of the art steam frigates and huge logistics trains. The Amundsen expedition traveled in a cheap little sealing boat and fed themselves largely through rifles and ammunition they brought with them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Mm34Muv6Lsg#t=102s

Also, don't forget that humans will be improving just as rapidly as the machines.

My own studies (Cognitive Science and Cybernetics at UCLA) tend to support the conclusion that machine intelligence will never be a threat to humanity. Humanity will have become something else by the time that machines could become an existential threat to current humans.

I think space travel has a special escapist appeal to it. There are massive intractable problems with human society on earth at the moment which lack easy solutions (poverty, aids, overpopulation, climate change, social order). Space allowed the last generation to write stories where those didn't have to be dealt with because the protagonists could leave earth behind, but now we've realised we're stuck here and have to fix things.

Phrase the question another way, why should we care about space?*

For our current space capability: There is nothing there we need. It is incredibly expensive to do anything there. The scientific experiments we can do there are of marginal interest.

For the longer term, it is hugely beyond our technological abilities, and the projected ones of the next hundred years assuming no singularity). Colonisation is a far off dream, whatever determines our survival as a species for the nex millennium will be decided on earth. And we are struggling with that right now.

*[Theres a phrase for this as a technique to reverse status quo bias isn't there?]

Space travel turned out not to be very fun. The rollicking exploration of pulp stories where you see new worlds and new creatures every week or every book was replaced by a reality of cold, dead, empty planets/moons. You need to travel weeks or months or years to get anywhere, and spaceships, instead of being comfortably elegant or adorably ramshackle with smuggling compartments are cramped, crowded, and require you to shit in a tube.

If/when space travel becomes a place for the very rich to vacation, such as on spacious air-filled moon-bases or on large space stations with artificial gravity, I think it might become exciting again.

I can't think of better arguments agains souls than the one on offer. It is among the most observation-based arguments we have and observation-based arguments are usually much stronger than a priori reasoning.

Soul --> Pineal Gland --> Broca's Area --> Grammatical Language Production

The problem with this (and related theories) is that the soul believers believe that the soul itself can live and think without the body. Much of thinking is mediated by language. I don't think a believer in soul would accept that their soul after death will be incapable of thought until God provides it a substitute pineal gland.

As I see it, the likelihood of the evidence being considered here (local brain damage causes specific behavioral deficits) on either of these theories is as high as it is on physicalism.

Yes, enough complicated theories postulating brain-dependent souls can survive the argument without harm. But these theories are standing pretty low a priori - as I have said above, ordinary believers believe in a brain independent soul, rather than in complex non-beliefs specifically constructed to make existence of soul untestable.

So, a little background- I've just come out as an atheist to my dad, a Christian pastor, who's convinced he can "fix" my thinking and is bombarding me with a number of flimsy arguments that I'm having trouble articulating a response to

Being articulate has nothing to do with the truth. If your dad isn't willing to explore where he's wrong, then you shouldn't be talking about your world views with him. If you can't establish your world view without him, then you're not ready to establish it at all.

I'd advise not worrying about "the big questions" so much as what kind of person you are in the relationships that mean the most to you. I suggest creating value in the world. What kind of person you are "in the small" is actually more complex and more rewarding to explore.

Regarding lasers: I could list things the attackers might do to succeed. But I don't want to discuss it because we'd be speculating on practically zero evidence. I'll merely say that I would rather that my hopes for the future do not depend on a failure of imagination on part of an enemy superintelligent AI.

It's more fun to me to think about pleasant extremely improbable futures than unpleasant ones. To each their own.

The approx 2% figure is interesting to me. This seems to be about the right frequency to be related to the small minority of jerks who will haze strangers for sexist and/or racist motivations.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3736037

This might be related to the differences in the perception of the prevalence of racism between minorities and mainstream members of society. If one stands out in a crowd, then one can be more easily "marked" by individuals seeking to victimize someone vulnerable. This is something that I seem to have observed over the years, though I have not taken the time to gather hard data.

Basically, if one has a noticeable and salient difference, one will tend to attract more than one's share of attention from "jerks." Though such events are uncommon, they will happen often enough that the possibility always lurks in the back of one's mind. This results in a noticeable cognitive difference between minorities and mainstream persons.