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There seems to be one class of a political topic that seems to lead inevitably to this (and to which I'm guilty of). Any political stance that affects the means of creative production(for example, copyright/free culture). If you get to the point where you cannot stand the people who are making art for political reasons, you are forced to create your own. The result is going to be usually awful. Warning people against creating awful art in that case goes too far -- awful art probably needs to be created in order for masterpieces to emerge from in relation to. But a reminder that it is awful and that it's likely unsubjected to the scrutiny of a billion eyes for the period of time more mainstream art is(thus weeding out most crap in many iterative processes of crap removal), and can lead to affective death spirals, is a Good Thing.
According to http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/?utm_content=bufferc6744&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381
This rate is increasing with time, or the earth is younger than life.
There is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackpot_index
A cultometer is surely not too far off:
http://www.tariqnelson.com/2007/02/signs-you-might-be-in-a-cult/
Your second link is broken. In addition to the Internet archive I have posted a blog post inspired by some of my experiences with a cult, containing the article in its entirety for posterity.
Is there a safe way to wish for an unsafe genie to behave like a safe genie? That seems like a wish TOSWP should work on.
A sufficiently powerful genie might make safe genies by definition more unsafe. Then your wish could be granted.
edit (2015) caution: I think this particular comment is harmless in retrospect... but I wouldn't give it much weight
Some new info re: evolution you might want to consider before taking the gene view of evolution to its logical conclusions:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/qh67113u60887314/ "Although we agree that evolutionary theory is not undergoing a Kuhnian revolution, the incorporation of new data and ideas about hereditary variation, and about the role of development in generating it, is leading to a version of Darwinism that is very different from the gene-centred one that dominated evolutionary thinking in the second half of the twentieth century."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/09/030929054959.htm how new thinking applies to societies
Is not your second link dealt with by http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/ or am I misreading one of the two? It seems to leave the main causal mechanism abstract enough to prove anything.
does not compromise me as a (wannabe) rational person (ie I use the situation to update previous beliefs)
Your stated preferences aren't consistent with the VNM axioms.
It appears I'm less rational than I thought. I suppose another way to rephrase that would be that to draw the outline of VNM-rational decisions only up to preferences that are meaningfully resolvable(and TORTURE vs SPECK does not appear to be to me at least) with a heuristic of how to resolve them clearer given intereaction with unresolveable areas. I would still be making a choice, albeit one with the goal of expanding rational decisionmaking to the utmost possible(it would be rational to be as rational as permissable). That seems pretty cheap though, reeking of 'explaining everything'. Worse, one interpretation of this dilemma would be that you have to resolve your preferences and that 'middle' is excluded, in which case it is a hard problem to which case I can likely offer no further suggestion.
I don't really care what happens if you take the dust speck literally; the point is to exemplify an extremely small disutility.
I suppose you could view the utility as a meaninful object in this frame and abstract away the dust, too, but in the end the dust-utility system is going to encompaps both anyway so solving the problem on either level is going to solve it on both.
I chose RANDOM* and feel that this
Satisfies the suggestion of making sure that you choose/'state a preference' (the result of RANDOM is acceptable to me and I would be willing to work past it and not dwelling on it).
Satisfies the suggestion of making sure you state assumptions to the extent you're able to resolve them (RANDOM implies a structure upon which RANDOM acts and I was already thinking about implications of either choice, though perhaps I could have thought more clearly about the consequences of RANDOM specifically)
does not compromise me as a (wannabe) rational person (ie I use the situation to update previous beliefs)
Not to allow the alternatives to distract afterwards (as once the choice RANDOM is made, it cannot be unmade -- future choices can be made RANDOM, TORTURE, SPECKS or otherwise)
Does not compromise future escape routes (RANDOM, SPECK, RANDOM, TORTURE is just as an acceptable sequence of choices to me as SPECK, TORTURE, SPECK, TORTURE -- it just depends what evidence and to what extent evidence has been entangled)
but has the additional benefit of
not biasing me towards my choice very much. If SPECKS or TORTURE is chosen, it is tempting to 'join team SPECKS'. I suppose I'll be tempted to join team RANDOM, but since RANDOM is a team that COOPERATEs with teams SPECKS and TORTURE something GOOD will come of that anyway.
Reserving my agency, and the perception of my agency for other decisions(though they may perhaps be less important(3^^^3 dust specks is a potentially VERY IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! decision), they will be mine), such as meta-decisions on future cases involving and not involving RANDOM)
in fact let's see if I can rephrase this post
META-TORTURE and META-SPECKS stances exist that disposition us away from TORTURE and SPECKS that are harder to express when making a decision or discussing decisions with people and that to avoid holding these stances that cannot be held to rational scrutiny by ourselves and others so well that we should avoid making them. That it is possible to get into a situation where we fail to resolve a Third Alternative where we must choose and that making the correct choice, as an altruist/rationalist/etc is important even in these cases. SPECKS or TORTURE seem to be the only choices, pick one.
I maintain however that RANDOM or DEFAULT will always be by the nature of what a choice is, always, logically, available.
*actually I chose DEFAULT/RANDOM but the more I think about it the more I think RANDOM is justified
I'm not sure I follow your argument.
I'm going to assume that for a single person, 3^^3 dust specks = 50 years of torture. (My earlier figure seems wrong, but 3^^3 dust specks over 50 years is a little under 5,000 dust specks per second.) I'm going to ignore the +1 because these are big numbers already.
If this were iterated 3^^^3 times, then we have the choice between:
TORTURE: 3^^^3 people are each tortured for 50 years, once.
DUST SPECKS: 3^^^3 people are tortured for 50 years, repeated (3^^^3)/(3^^3)=3^(3^^3-3^3) times.
The probability I'm the only person person selected out of 3^^^3 for such a decision p(i) is less than any reasonable estimate of how many people could be selected, imho. Let's say well below 700dB against. The chances are much greater that some probability fo those about to be dust specked or tortured also gets this choice (p(k)). p(k)*3^^^3 > p(i) => 3^^^3 > p(i)/p(k) => true for any reasonable p(i)/p(k)
So this means that the effective number of dust particles given to each of us is going to be roughly (1-p(i))p(k)3^^^3.
I'm going to assume any amount of dust larger in mass than a few orders of magnitude above the Chandrasekhar limit (1e33 kg) is going to result in a black hole. I can even assume a significant error margin in my understanding of how black holes work, and the reuslts do not change.
The smallest dust particle is probably a single hydrogen atom(really everything resoles to hydrogen at small enough quantities, right?). 1 mol of hydrogen weighs about 1 gram. So (1-p(i))(p(k)3^^^3 * (1 gram/mol)*(6e-23 'specks'/mol) * (1e-3 kg/g) * (1e-33 kg/black hole) = roughly ( 3^^^3 ) (~1e-730) = roughly 3^^^3 black holes.
ie 3^(31^32^33^...^37e13 -730) = roughly 3^(31^32^33^...^37e13)
ie 31^32^33^...^37e13 - 730 = roughly 31^32^33^...^37e13.
In conclusion, I think at this level, I would choose 'cancel' / 'default' / 'roll a dice and determine the choice randomly/not choose' BUT would woefully update my concept of the sizee of the universe to contain enough mass to even support a reasonably infentessimal probability of some proportion of 3^^^3 specks of dust, and 3^^^3 people or at least some reasonable proportion thereof.
The question I have now is how is our model of the universe to update given this moral dillema? What is the new radius of the universe given this situation? It can't be big enough for 3^^^3 dust specks piled on the edge of our universe outside of our light cone somewhere. Either way I think the new radius ought to be termed the "Yudkowsky Radius".
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This strikes me as an unfortunately place and time-sensitive OvercomingBias/LessWrong post. As the moral character and fashions change with the change of generations, it's going to lose its edge. While the reader is going to vaguely understand the general idea...they may not really 'get' why or that cryonics was that far outside the overton window to begin with. It might warrant relooking at or retelling this particular set of stories in a more recent context later on. I wonder if the retelling of the Sequences later on end up doing just this.