Then where is he getting all the karma? Is it possible there is a rogue mod mole feeding under-the-table karma to Eugine's sock puppets using some clever hack?

Even then, the system is opt-out. Anyone can become a renunciate who are beyond caste.

Can you give me a source for this? I've never heard of anyone renouncing their caste, and I have heard about many instances of lower-caste people lying about their caste, and I can't reconcile the two.

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

Instead, I will elaborate on my interpretation of it and the meaning that I attribute to it:

Seligman briefly mentions that 'PERMA' can be the foundation for a new value-model in politics in a video by the channel: 'happy and well'. This suggests that comparisons of wellbeing above '1', on say a QALY scale are useful. By convention, people are '1' when well, and less than 1 depending on the degree of disease (mental or physical) as it affects their quality of life. The reddit point highlights for me that we may find it effective to improve the happiness of a banker who's stressing himself out making money and blowing it on hookers than someone in ill health in the developing world.

Seligman also describes research that shows people who have experienced all 3 of the 'worst' traumatic experiences tend to experience 'post traumatic growth', more so than those with 2 or one of these experiences: rape, torture and capture. With a bit of Googling I can't find the literature. This makes me less confident in his position but none-the-less hopeful that I've stumbled upon an important line of research for EA's to pursue. Discussing positive things is probably good for the EA diaspora anyway, since doom and gloom talk is rather unpleasant IMO.

A clever point on the EA reddit. Guessing the Open Philanthropy Project will sniff this out if its the case.

similar to the history of Las Vegas. What parts of it can be replicated?

By traditional mythology, the reason Las Vegas exists is because the mob (mafia) wanted to have a playground far far away from the Feds :-)

Why does my Karma score keep increasing when I don't do anything? It's a disincentive to post. . .?

Aren't the big banks publically traded and expected to grow by stock market analysts? How does that work when they get negative interest rates?

under the Khmer Rouge, you really didn't want to be ethnic Chinese

Did Khmer Rouge really care about ethnicity, or that was just a convenient marker for a particular social class?

I don't know. Seems to me possible that people like Paul Graham (or Eliezer Yudkowsky) may overestimate the impact of technical change on wealth distribution because of the selection bias -- they associate with people who mostly make wealth using the "fair" methods.

If instead they would be spending most of their time among African warlords, or Russian oligarchs, or whatever is their more civilized equivalent in USA, maybe they would have very different models of how wealth works.

The technological progress explains why the pie is growing, not how the larger pie is divided.

There are probably more people who got rich selling homeopathics, than who got rich founding startups. Yet in our social sphere it is a custom to pretend that the former option does not exist, and focus on the latter.