The day to day life bit is irrelevant. The volitional aspect is not at all. Take the exact sacrifice you described but make it non-volitional. "torturing yourself working at a startup" becomes slavery when non-volitional. Presumably you find that trade-off less acceptable.

The volitional aspect is the key difference. The fact that your life is rich with examples of volitional sacrifice and poor in examples of forced sacrifice of this type is not some magic result that has something to do with how we treat "real" examples in day to day life. It is entirely because "we" (humans) have tried to minimize the non-volitional sacrifices because they are what we find immoral!

Was there any reason to think I didn't understand exactly what you said the first time? You agree with me and then restate. Fine, but pointless. Additionally, unimaginative re: potential value of torture. Defending lack of imagination in that statement by claiming torture defined in part by primary intent would be inconsistent.

Manipulative phrasing. Of course, it will always seem worth torturing yourself, yadda yadda, when framed as a volitional sacrifice. Does your intuition equally answer yes when asked if it is worth killing somebody to do etc etc? Doubt it (and not a deontological phrasing issue)

Do you really have that preference?

For example, if every but one of trillions of humans was being tortured and had dust specks, would you feel like trading the torture-free human's freedom from torture for the removal of specks from the tortured. If that were so, then you just are showing a fairly usual preference (inequality is bad!) which is probably fine as an approximation of stuff you could formalize consequentially.

But that's just an example. Often there's some context in which your moral intuition is reversed, which is a useful probe.

(usual caveat: haven't read the sequences)

Topic for discussion: Less Wrongians are frequentists to a greater extent than most folk who are intuitively Bayesian. The phrase "I must update on" is half code for (p<0.05) and half signalling, since presumably you're "updating" a lot, just like regular humanssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

Thanks. That's very interesting to me, even as an anecdote. I've heard the opposite here too; that's why I made it a normative statement ("everyone already should know"). Between the missing money and the publication record, I can't imagine what would make SI look worth investing in to me. Yes, that would sometimes lead you astray. But even posts like, oh: http://lesswrong.com/lw/43m/optimal_employment/?sort=top

are pretty much the norm around here (I picked that since Luke helped write it). Basically, an insufficient attempt to engage with the conventional wisdom.

How much should you like this place just because they're hardliners on issues you believe in? (generic you). There are lots of compatibilists, materialists, consequentialists, MWIers, or whatever in the world. Less Wrong seems unusual in being rather hardline on these issues, but that's usually more a sign that people have turned it into a social issue than a matter of intellectual conviction (or better, competence). Anyway, probably I've become inappropriately off topic for this page; I'm just rambling. To say at least something on topic: A few months back there was an issue of Nature talking about philanthropy in science (cover article and a few other pieces as I recall); easily searchable I'm sure, and may have some relevance (both as SI tries to get money or "commission" pieces).

Sorry, I'm not quite understanding your first paragraph. The subsequent piece, I agree completely with and think applies to a lot SI activities in principle (even if not looking for small donors). The same idea could roughly guide their outlook to "academic outreach", except it's a donation of time rather than money. For example, gaining credibility from a few big names is probably a bad idea, as is trying to play the game of seeking credibility.

On the first paragaph, apologies for repeating, but just clarifying: I'm assuming that everyone already should know that even if you're sympathetic to SI goals, it's a bad idea to donate to them. Maybe it was a useful article for the SI to better understand why people might feel that way. I'm just saying I don't think it was strictly speaking "persuasive" to anyone. Except, I was initially somewhat persuaded that Karnofsky is worth listening to in evaluating SI. I'm just claiming, I guess, that I was way more persuaded that it was worth listening to Karnofsky on this topic than I should have been since I think everything he says is too obvious to imply shared values with me. So, in a few years, if he changes his mind on SI, I've now decided that I won't weight that as very important in my own evaluation. I don't mean that as a criticism of Karnofsky (his write-up was obviously fantastic). I'm just explicating my own thought process.

That was my half my initial reaction as well,the other half:

The critique mostly consists of points that are pretty persistently bubbling beneath the surface around here, and get brought up quite a bit. Don't most people regard this as a great summary of their current views, rather than persuasive in any way? In fact, the only effect I suspect this had on most people's thinking was to increase their willingness to listen to Karnofsky in the future if he should change his mind. Since the post is basically directed at LessWrongians as an audience, I find all of that a bit suspicious (not in the sense that he's doing this deliberately).

Also, the only part of the post that interested me was this one (about the SI as an organization); the other stuff seemed kinda minor - praising with faint damns, relative to true outsiders, and so perhaps slightly misleading to LessWrongians.

Reading this (at least a year old, I believe) makes me devalue current protestations:

http://www.givewell.org/files/MiscCharities/SIAI/siai%202011%2002%20III.doc

I just assume people are pretty good at manipulating my opinion, and honestly, that often seems more the focus in the "academic outreach". People who think about signalling (outside of economics, evolution, etc) are usually signalling bad stuff. Paying 20K or whatever to have someone write a review of your theory is also really really interesting, as apparently SI is doing (it's on the balance sheet somewhere for that "commissioned" review; forget the exact amount). Working on a dozen papers on which you might only have 5% involvement (again: or whatever) is also really really interesting. I can't evaluate SI, but they smell totally unlike scientists and quite like philosophers. Which is probably true and only problematic inasmuch as EY thinks other philosophy is mostly bunk. The closest thing to actually performed science on LW I've seen was that bit about rates of evolution, which was rather scatterbrained. If anyone can point me to some science, I'd be grateful. The old joke about Comp Sci (neither about Comp nor Sci) need not apply.

I'm not sure I agree. I think my behavior, even if treated favorably by the community, will likely not weaken the norm against multi-voting. Karma seem a much less useful signal here than in communities where the prohibitions against "near" behavior are less strict. That's just from observation, although I think an argument could be made that if a signal really is easy to counterfeit, it's probably less counterfeited when that fact is generally known (no easy opinion arbitrage). But certainly not worth arguing.

It's funny to refer to something as a "power" when its an extra 10 seconds work which anybody could have already engaged in without advertising as blatantly as I have. My advertising has also been false.