Clearly.  But whatever they are, they should still be represented, and there may be similarly wild things in the outlying areas of their worldview - and if I can help them reach it I will.  In my experience it's the ideas in the hinterlands that are the way out of the problems of our time, regardless what our time is - merely seeing that our worldview has outliers, and the overton window is limiting us in one area is usually enough to see that we're limited elsewhere, too.

Pretty sure this is the question underlying https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/01/disagree_with_s.html 

Similarly, an even more defensible position might be Buddhist one, or that happiness is transitory and mostly a construction of the mind, and virtually always attached to suffering, but suffering is real and worth minimizing.

This post is generalizable, even if you don't think that it's wrong to kill people as a general rule there's probably some other moral act #G_30429 that you probably don't think that it would be appropriate and the point still holds: Rowhammering the bit that says "Don't do #G_30429" is probably not as impossible as it seems in the long run.

(Meta: when thinking about this I found it difficult to recall all of the arguments I've learned in moral philosophy over the past 16 years of trying that would have been applicable. I knew where you were going, roughly, but it was like traveling through a city I haven't been to in years in terms of whether or not I recognized the territory. This gave me an extra impression of 'this bit could be easily flipped')

This assumes that the people around you generally do the right thing. If you operate under the alternative assumption (which is much more reasonable) you would likely still be alive.

Modernized version as of 2017, of the first part of this post : http://82.221.128.217/trolley-lw.png

More serious reply: depending when you encountered me, I'd be more boring in some ways, since a lot of what I spend my time doing is towards a moral end. All the things I've learned in life I learned from trying to live in a moral universe. I would never have gotten a degree, I did that virtually entirely for what I perceived to be reasons of altruism. Since I'm assuming here that everyone else will continue to live under the illusion that they are in such a universe, and that only I leave it...even it were merely 2008 when I encountered this revelation, I would have not donated so much to charity, I would have not gone into teaching children science...my whole of my thereafter short life would have been hedonism, torture, probably serial rape/murder and hard drugs. I wouldn't have lived with decent, hardworking people -- I'd probably have been kidnapped by gangsters or something and OD'd on heroin by now. I sure wouldn't care about the state of my country, my family, or mathematics or anything like that.

This brings up the Sapir Worf hypothesis, or the newspeak for it, "Linguistic Relativity". After all, memes must be expressible, musn't they? If they are then if it were true, then the memes that you have bound the memes that you can espouse -- linguistic relativity in a nutshell.

Many memes these days come in picture form, but for that you need a medium capable of showing pictures, and the culture that places value in making such media universally available. Without that culture, and without the apparatus to share picture-memes those memes would quickly die out, though some abstract notion of some of them, perhaps carried along the linguistic pathway in the same way that even though we don't use floppy disks for anything everyone uses them to 'save'. So in a sense not only is it the media and its memes that has to be prior to memes expressed via it, but also the language memes have to be there in order for them to be used. Language might as well just be thought as the structure and set of of meme universals.

Looks like there's been activity on Wikipedia since I've dug up this issue last suggesting that at least since the 1980's there's been recent research on how language, and memes influence thought/future use of memes/language. Reddit in particular has some really good data on this that they last I heard were not sharing with the world.

The big question is if memes are different, which evidence suggests, why is this so?

Here's what you actually wanted to link to for "looking back"

My concern isn't with the interview per se(everything I would add would best be put in another thread). It's with the reaction here in the comments here.

That 90% wasn't a waste anymore than overcomingbias as a blog is a waste. Horgan is hardly alone in remembering the Fifth Generation Project and it was worth it to get Yudkowsky to hammer out, once more, to a new audience why what happened in the 80's was not representative of what is to come in the 10ky timeframe. Those of you who are hard on Horgan he is not one of you. You cannot hold him to LW standards. Yudkowsky has spent a lot of time and effort trying to get other people to not make mistakes, for example mislabeling broad singulitarian thought on him as if he's kurzweil, vinge, the entirety of MIRI and whatnot personified and so it's understandable why he might be annoyed, but at the same time...the average person is not going to bother with the finer details. He probably put in about as much or more journalistic work as the average topic requires. This just goes to really drive home how different intelligence is from other fields, how hard science journalism in a world with AI research can be.

It's frustrating because it's hard. It's hard for many reasons, but one reason is because the layman's priors are very wrong. This it shares in common(for good reason) with economics and psychology more generally that people who are not in the field bring to the table a lot of preconceptions that have to be dismantled. Dismantling them all is a lot of work for a 1 hour podcast. Like those who answer Yahoo Answers! questions, Horgan is a critical point needed to convince on his own terms between Yudkowsky & a substantial chunk of a billion+ people who lived in the 80's who are not following where Science is being taken here.

The parent made 3 claims(the 3rd one was snuck into the conclusion). I only addressed 2 and 3. 1 is a credible point that stands on its own merit. Without points 2 and 3 however with 1 it's no longer a sound argument.