I refer you to Said Achmiz's comment.

What is the purpose of declaring some organism the "winner" of evolution? This is like looking at a vast river delta and declaring one of its many streams to be the "most successful" at finding the sea. Any such judgement is epiphenomenal to the thing itself, which does not care about the stories anyone makes up about it.

350F

35°F, surely?

Personally, I don’t care about the shrimp. At all. The anthropomorphising is absurd, and saying “but even if the suffering were much less it would still be huge” is either a basic error of thinking or dark arts. Anchor the reader by picking a huge number, then back off and point out that it’s still huge. How about epsilon? Is that still huge? How about zero? Anyone can pluck figures out of the air, dictated by whatever will support their bottom line.

I see that already one person has let this article mug his brain for $1000. His loss, though he think it gain.

What if keeping humanity alive and flourishing actually risks spreading suffering further and faster—through advanced technologies, colonization of space, or systems we can’t yet foresee? And what if our very efforts to safeguard the future have unintended consequences that exacerbate suffering in ways we can't predict?

It's up to those future people to solve their own problems. It is enough that we make a future for them to use as they please. Parents must let their children go, or what was the point of creating them?

The blind have seeing-eye dogs. Terry Pratchett gave Foul Ole Ron a thinking-brain dog. At last, a serious use-case for LLMs! Thinking-brain dogs for the hard of thinking!

I cannot stress enough how much
what Neurotypical people call
"overthinking,"

Is just what Neurodivergent folks call
"thinking."

Actual thinking looks like overthinking to the hard of thinking.

For most human beings, this is probably right, because their values have a function that grows slower than logarithmic, which leads to bounds on the utility even assuming infinite consumption.

Growing slower than logarithmic does not help. Only being bounded in the limit gives you, well, a bound in the limit.

You are however pointing to something very real here, and that's the fact that utility theory loses a lot of it's niceness in the infinite realm, and while there might be something like a utility theory that can handle infinity, it will have to lose a lot of very nice properties that it had in the finite case.

"Bounded utility solves none of the problems of unbounded utility." Thus the title of something I'm working on, on and off.

It's not ready yet. For a foretaste, some of the points it will make can be found in an earlier unpublished paper "Unbounded Utility and Axiomatic Foundations", section 3.

The reason that bounded utility does not help is that any problem that arises at infinity will already practically arise at a sufficiently large finite stage. Repeated plays of the finite games discussed in that paper will eventually give you a payoff that has a high probability of being close (in relative terms) to the expected value. But the time it takes for this to happen grows exponentially with the lengths of the individual games. You are unlikely to ever see your theoretically expected value, however long you play. The infinite game is non-ergodic; the game truncated to finitely many steps and finite payoffs is ergodic only on impractical timescales.

Infinitude in problems like these is better understood as an approximation to the finite, rather than the other way round. (There's a blog post by Terry Tao on this theme, but I've lost the reference to it.) The problems at infinity point to problems with the finite.

Is anyone from LW going to the Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention) in Seattle next year?

ETA: I will be, I forgot to say. I also notice that Burning Man 2025 begins about a week after the Worldcon ends. I have never been to BM, I don't personally know anyone who has been, and it seems totally impractical for me, but the idea has been in the back of my mind ever since I discovered its existence, which was a very long time ago.

surplus physical energy is a wonderful thing.

It is indeed. I imagine the causal connections differently. Strenuous movement cultivates the energy; the body demands food as necessary to refuel. I don't get high energy simply from eating.