He’d walk on over to nearby industry labs with candy and a sales pitch for why they should use his services. He primarily targeted top, Nobel-prize-winning research groups

and

Plasmidsaurus has historically done very little ‘traditional’ marketing — no brochures, few cold reach-outs

seem to be a bit contradictory?

If people followed Brennan’s advice, those ignorant of their lack of knowledge would keep voting, while well-educated people might think they’re not competent enough and abstain.

I'd add that people ignorant enough not to know or not to understand Brennan's argument would also keep voting.

Was this post significantly edited? Because this seems to be exactly the take in the post from the start:

because he thought it wasn't bad enough to be considered torture. Then he had it tried on himself, and changed his mind, coming to believe it is torture and should not be performed.

to the end

This is supported by Malcom's claim that Hitchens was "a proponent of torture", which is clearly false going by Christopher's public articles on the subject. The question is only over whether Hitchens considered waterboarding to be a form of torture, and therefore permissible or not, which Malcolm seems to have not understood.

It’s absurd to end up with a framework that believes a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is just as good as life for a woman in some other country with similarly high per capita income.

You could similarly argue a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is worse than for a man, but it seems absurd to conclude from that that saving lives of SA men is better than saving lives of SA women.

Whether you save a life in Congo, Sri Lanka or Australia, I can’t think of strong reasons for why #2 would vary all that much.

It seems to me there are obvious differences: 1. family size (in the limit, the saved person may have no family at all); 2. how expected the person's death is otherwise.

But you aren't asked about $E\left(P\right(e\left)\right)$ (your current estimate of your prior). If you want to put it in this way, it would be $E_{t_1}\left(E_{t_0}\right(P\left(e\right)\left)\right)$, your current estimate of your previous estimate. And you do have exact knowledge what that estimate was.

Here is a counter-argument against Rovelli I found reasonable: Aristotle and Falling Objects | Diagonal Argument

so the maximum "downside" would be the sum of the differences between that reference populations lives and those without the variant for all variants you edit (plus any effects from off-targets)

I don't think that's true? It has to assume the variants don't interact with each other. Your reference population would only have 0.01% people with (the rarest) 2 variants at once, 0.0001% with 3 variants, and so on.

Yes, but this exact case is when you say "This would be useful for trying out different variations on a phrase to see what those small variations change about the implied meaning" and when it can be particularly misleading because the LLM is contrasting with the previous version which the humans reading/hearing the final version don't know about.

So it would be more useful for that purpose to use a new chat.

But the screenshot says "if i instead say the words...". This seems like it has to be in the same chat with the "matters" version.

but speak only the truth to other Parselmouths and (by implication) speak only truth to Quakers.

I would merely like to note that the implication seems contrary to the source of the name: I expect Quirrell and most historical Parselmouths in HPMOR would very much lie to Quakers (Quirrell would maybe derive some entertainment from not saying factually false things while misleading them).