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However, the impact is likely to be limited due to the cost of these methods which will prevent them from having population-wide influence
Why do you think so?
In response to
Smarter humans, not artificial intellegence
Look at the cost of IVF: According to http://www.momjunction.com/articles/much-ivf-treatment-cost-india_0074672/ it is $450,000 Rs, which is $6,000 dollars. IVF is a prerequisite for the sort of genetic tampering we are talking about, unless you want to use rabies as a carrier. IVF is widely practiced and has few barriers to entry, making me think it won't get much cheaper. That is a lot of money for many parts of the world. To think this cost will come down in the next 10-20 years significantly requires believing that significant advances in automation of the process are possible: that might be true.
Financial incentives to have smarter children are likely to work better in those regions where $6,000 is a lot of money. It's possible that combining both strategies works even better.
In response to
Kant's Multiplication
I don't agree with this line of argument. Suppose there are five employes, and they all press the button. Each receives 100 utils, and loses 4, leading to a net gain of 96 each. Why is this not the ethically correct outcome, even for a deontologist?
In response to
Beware technological wonderland, or, why text will dominate the future of communication and the Internet
I think roughly a month ago I had an discussion about using Anki to learn biology data on LW. The person complained about the perceived inability of Anki to be text only. He rather wants to learn using things like Venn diagrams because they are better at displaying information then pure text.
The problem is that it's not straightforward to simple create a Venn diagram while creating Anki card or while discussing on LessWrong. It takes extra time. With a bit of smart UI design we might have an UI that makes it easy to make points via diagrams. Of course that means we need to think about how to create good diagrams for a bunch of other semantic constructs.
Especially if your default medium of data entry isn't a keyboard but a multitouch device having a bunch of diagrams might be better than text. Text developed in an environment where space was expensive. Today keyboards are simply amazing technology that make text into very easy.
I could imagine that the necessary technology won't be developed in customer applications like facebook but in a field like biology where it's very important to express complex ideas in an easy to understand manner. A series of big diagrams might just perform better than a bunch of long and convoluted sentences.
It's easier to upload and store. Text takes less space. Uploading it to a network or sending it to a friend takes less bandwidth.
Today that might be a concern. I don't think it will be in 20 years. I think a large part of why Google Wave failed was because it was just too slow.
Text is easier to search (this refers both to searching within a given piece of text and to locating a text based on some part of it or some attributes of it).
Speech to text to technology should make this easier in the future.
You can't play background music while consuming audio-based content, but you can do it while consuming text.
I think you can play low volume music in the background of a podcast.
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comment
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Beware technological wonderland, or, why text will dominate the future of communication and the Internet
I can consume text at a rate sometimes as high as 26 words a second. I cannot do that with audio. If we had text-to-speech, I would use it for turning audio into text, and consuming the text. Or the author could use it and produce text, which they could then edit. Frequently when talking we do all sorts of things we don't do when writing: repeat ourselves, use funny turns of phrase, search for words, etc. The bandwidth advantage to the consumer of a small amount of work for the producer makes text continue to be valuable.
As far as diagrams go in technical areas, there are some famous pictures in mathematics. These pictures inevitably mean nothing without text. Transmitting abstract ideas, and in particular transmitting subtle variations in how solid something is, doesn't seem compatible with diagrams. Diagrams are good for some concepts, but it's still an art to get good ones. Creating them is expensive, and sometimes they don't work. On the other hand it's hard to beat a good graph for communicating numerical data easily and letting the viewer draw appropriate inferences.
In response to
Pro-Con-lists of arguments and onesidedness points
What if some policies correlate with kinds of arguments people find appealing? An argument from natural law against the legality of homosexuality is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn't love St. Thomas Aquinas, while the liberty principle won't convince a single Dominican. Then again this is more a problem of ethical foundations than factual arguments, so perhaps by separating values from beliefs you can finesse this difficulty.
In response to
Robert Aumann on Judaism
If you believe http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/oliver-sacks-sabbath.html it was an emotional/aesthetic decision:
“The observance of the Sabbath is extremely beautiful,” he said, “and is impossible without being religious. It is not even a question of improving society — it is about improving one’s own quality of life.”
Seems quite rational to not deprive oneself of beauty.
Mordecai Kaplan would be unhappy to hear that commitment to ritual and tradition requires belief . Committing oneself to a hard line to avoid backsliding is justifiable without divine command theory.
It's a waste of government money to keep a raisin reserve.
Plus, it increases the price of food. The net effect is a transfer of wealth from poor people to agribusiness that grow and process raisins..
In response to
Politics: an undervalued opportunity to change the world?
80,000 Hours has investigated the expected effects of changing the world through party politics.
Summary:
This is a very high-potential, though very competitive and high-risk path that can enable you to make a big difference through improving the operation of government and promoting important ideas. If you’re highly able, could tolerate being in the public eye and think you could develop a strong interest in politics, then we recommend learning more about this career to test your suitability.
However, they seem not to have examined the impact of starting a new political movement or political philosophy in the same way. Even higher variance, potentially even bigger rewards. Institutional change in particular can be extremely difficult to do without a clear mandate, which alliances in existing parties might not give.
In response to
Top 9+2 myths about AI risk
I'm not sure I agree with 9. There is a lot of SF out there, and some of it (Roadside Picnic, Stanislaw Lem's works) presents the idea that the universe is inherently uncaring in a very real way. Anthropomorphization is not an inherent feature of the genre, and fiction might enable directly understanding these ideas in a way that argument doesn't make real for some people.
In response to
Rationality Quotes Thread June 2015
Donald Rumsfeld, from http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636 "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
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Computing power per dollar has doubled every ~2 years for the past 40 years, per Moore's Law.
Can biology keep up? The next generation of humans would reach adulthood in 20 years, at which time computers would have ~1024x today's processing power. That's a pretty high bar for selective breeding or genetic modification to keep up.
Humans share our values and can generally be overwhelmed with sheer numbers should they not. Making them is unlikely to be dangerous. The same cannot be said for unfriendly AIs. We still have no idea how to make a friendly AI, and it could easily be a century before we begin to have an idea. Even if biology cannot keep up, improving intelligence in the short run will have positive effects on human productivity in the short run, which will get the goal of making a friendly AI closer.
I'm not saying that biological modification will ultimately bring about singularity or even extremely dramatic changes in human capabilities. Rather I think it will address many talent shortages simultaneously, for not that much money. I'm proposing it as an idea we can implement now.