My response to the smoking lesion question is:
If the lesion doesn't affect your ability to reason, then deciding to smoke as the result of a reasoning process isn't correlated with cancer, even though deciding to smoke in general is, so you should smoke.
If the lesion does affect your ability to reason, the question is ill defined because it may not be possible for you to execute some strategies, or only possible to execute them with some probability.
Of course "as the result of a reasoning process" needs to be phrased more precisely (every decision can be said to be the result of some reasoning process). Maybe "when you make some particular deduction, compared to a counterfactual world where you did not make that deduction".
You're thinking of a p-Vulcan as a slight variation on a human. But the context includes:
Remember, it’s highly likely that shrimps have some form of phenomenal consciousness and experience some form of suffering. Shrimp suffering is bad. Even though we lack the capability to accurately predict its intensity, the shrimp certainly suffers more than the Vulcan would. Vulcans totally lack the capacity to suffer.
A p-Vulcan doesn't have to be very humanlike. It only needs to be shrimplike, but without the ability to suffer. I do think that many existing video game characters would qualify, by that standard, as similar to a p-Vulcan. Is it wrong to kill those video game characters?
Repeat the robots question, except ask the question about video game characters instead. Now, there are some game characters that have very simple patterns of behavior, but there are some that are a lot more complex, even if still describable by a set of algorithms. I'm sure there are characters that can and will beg you not to kill them. Is it wrong to play the video game and sacrifice the video game characters?
Suppose we want to make an event seem likely. If we use the above method but slightly over-estimated the sub-event probabilities and use a large number of sub-events, then the resulting final probability will inevitably be very large. Because people tend to find moderate-range probabilities reasonable, this would be a superficially compelling argument even if it results in a massive over-estimation of the final probability. I propose this is a kind of reverse multiple-stage fallacy.
I suggest that this post is an instance of this fallacy. I gestured at the issue in my response but didn't have a name for it. A nonexhaustive list with at least 12 listed subevents of "is humanity evil", each of which is "there's some chance that this specific thing is humanity being evil".
a third-party entrepeneur can offer to back promising reporters.
Libertarians like to suggest this sort of thing a lot, and it usually doesn't work. If you're dealing with thousands of dollars, the third party enterpeneur has overhead for such things as lawyers and advertising. It would suck to do it and be arrested for money laundering, or be stuck with bad contracts, or be told that your rejected bugs violate a disparate impact rule. He'd have to make a profit after taxes, and he would have to make a profit compared to other uses of the money, not just compared to doing nothing. And OpenSSL could end the program,... (read more)
That would mean that most human bug reporters wouldn't report anything because of risk aversion. Also, remember the aphorism about it being difficult to get someone to understand something if their salary depends on them not understanding it--the curl maintainers or their bosses would be highly motivated to reject bugs.
The best I can think of is some kind of escalating fee where you get to report X number of invalid bugs for free and only after that do you have to pay to get the maintainers to look at your bugs.
I suggest looking at, not articles about scientific topics, but articles that are about something else but where the author invokes scientific topics.
It's true that a lot of places aren't very scientific, but as long as your results were anti-Trump (and given the problems with this idea they pretty much will be), you'll be able to post them even in places that aren't very scientific, since they'll care more about the result than the method.
Anti-Obama sentiment was not partisan?
It is literally partisan, but it was nowhere near the same degree of being partisan that's involved here.
I wonder if you’ve thought about the bad incentives this behavior produces?
The incentives that being able to respond to political rants create are that such rants become less useful (since they don't go unopposed) and people would be less likely to make them. I find these incentives acceptable.
Like, if Satan himself were president of the United States and was killing a million people per day, eliciting celebration from his supporters, would you still think discussion was not justified on the grounds that it’s political?
Thousands of people are being killed in Sudan--certainly more than Trump has killed--and we've managed to go without LW being full of discussion about it. So yes.
Good luck not getting a disparate impact suit if you try this. You have to prove that the test that you're using is necessary for the job. College is basically always considered necessary. The coding interviews you mention are obviously necessary. Trying to use an IQ-like test or even the SAT (unless you're a college) will get you in court.