Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.
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I just skimmed your downvoted post and linked doc. (I agree that there was no way I would have clicked through to the doc outside the context of this question.)
The post read like a big series of platitudes, or applause lights. The claims were too generic to be interesting to me. I agree with some, I don't agree with others, but either way it wasn't giving me anything I couldn't generate myself.
The linked doc actually started out strong. You say that you have personally experienced how your own behavior and thinking change when you are materially deprived, and that you actually tested different kinds of deprivations and rewards on yourself over time, and observed patterns. That's very interesting! I don't know anything about that. I want to hear what you experienced and think about whether it has anything to do with my life and what I can see. I would upvote a post about that.
I think you're writing these things to try to pitch your project, but people on LW mostly aren't sitting around wanting to get pitched on projects. They want to read intellectually stimulating new ideas. And it's not a convincing pitch either unless you show people you have the goods.
There's another blogger, Nathan Tankus, who is also reporting accounts directly from his sources within the BFS. He wears his bias on his sleeve and goes wild with the hyperbole, but he is a prolific public intellectual of some sort so he may be accurately reporting the basic facts. He also did an interview on Odd Lots but it didn't really have anything new.
I would be surprised if it were ethically important for you to donate that much. LW has made a pretty big difference to my life (e.g. my career, marriage, and a big chunk of my bank account are causally downstream of LW existing) and I estimated that there are probably something like $100m dollars worth of people for whom it was similarly impactful as me, and then a long tail of more people for whom it was somewhat less impactful, so I owed on the order of 1% of my net worth, such that if everyone like me who saw this fundraiser did the same then it would have enough money to thrive.
So unless LW was really important to you or unless you are sure that you will be a millionaire in the future and you are just donating in advance, I don't think you owe $1000. But if you want to donate it, then do.
Thanks for this elaboration. One reason I would be more hopeful than in the case of private airplanes (less so potable water) is that it seems like, while providing me a private airplane may mostly only benefit me and my family by making my life more leisurely, providing me or my children genetic enhancement may be very socially productive, at least improving our productivity and making us consume less healthcare resources. So it would seem possible to end up with an arrangement where it's socially financed and the surplus is shared.
It's interesting that you describe humans as remaining "equal in the biological lottery". Of course, to the humans, when the lottery is decided before they are born, and they are given only one life to live, it doesn't feel very equal when some of them win it and others lose. It's not obvious to me that inequality based on who spends money to enhance themselves or their family's biology is worse than inequality based on random chance. It seems like effects on social cohesion or group conflict may result either way regardless of the source of the inequality.
Do you have any suggestions for how genetic enhancement technology could hypothetically be developed in a better way so that the majority is not left behind? Or in your view would it be best for it to never be developed at all?
Can you elaborate on why you think that genetic modification is more prone to creating inequality than other kinds of technology? You mentioned religious reasons in your original comment. Are there other reasons? On priors, I might expect it to follow a typical cost curve where it gets cheaper and more accessible over time, and where the most valuable modifications are subsidized for some people who can't afford them.
To me, since LessWrong has a smart community that attracts people with high standards and integrity, by default if you (a median LW commenter) write your considered opinion about something, I take that very seriously and assume that it's much, much more likely to be useful than an LLM's opinion.
So if you post a comment that looks like an LLM wrote it, and you don't explain which parts were the LLM's opinion and which parts were your opinion, then that makes it difficult to use it. And if there's a norm of posting comments that are partly unmarked LLM opinions, that means that I have to adopt the very large burden of evaluating every comment to try to figure out whether it's an LLM, in order to figure out if I should take it seriously.
Why is it cheaper for individuals to install some amount of cheap solar power for themselves than for the grid to install it and then deliver it to them, with economies of scale in the construction and maintenance? Transmission cost?