LESSWRONG
LW

All of farbeyond's Comments + Replies

I have just donated $10,000 to the Immortality Bus, which was the most rational decision of my life
farbeyond00

This comment is followed by my previous one. I can't make a chain comment due to multiple downvotes. I am not trying to be disrespectful. I was raising a genuine question. I thought Effective Altruism was all about humanity saving people from diseases and famine. I am still trying to understand what Transhumanism is for. If you seek immortality while others try to save miserable lives from poverty, diseases, lack of water, and so on, are you assuming that the resources we have on our earth is limitless? They are not. We don't even have to go to poverty-st... (read more)

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0Yosarian2
Effective altruism is trying to find the most efficient help people who are suffering in general. Yes, helping poor people pull themselves out of poverty is a part of that. So is funding medical research that will help people suffering from the terrible diseases of aging; Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, Parkinson's , and so on. In fact, those diseases probably cause even more suffering in the world today then famine and poverty. As far as "what transhumanism is for", most people would say that it's for making human live better in general, all over the world. In general, improving technology should create more wealth for everyone; we should be able to improve our lives and improve the lives of people in the third world at the same time. Improving technology is the big reason that many people in the world are better off these days, and that will continue to happen. No one thinks that the resources on Earth are limitless. And, yes, overpopulation could in the long run be an issue that affects that, although that actually has more to do with the birth rate then with the death rate. You can have a rapidly growing population even with a short lifespan, and you can have a pretty stable population where the average lifespan is 1000 years, it just depends on the birth rate.
4turchin
I think that aging (and death) now the is the main reason of human suffering, not poverty or hunger. It affects all human population. EA must fight aging. The second one in my opinion is depression. EA must fight suffering. And of cause Friendly AI and global catastrophic risks prevention is important goals for any EA.
5ChristianKl
Given low birth rates it's not clear that somebody has to die for there to be enough resources.
Crazy Ideas Thread
farbeyond00

Dogs are incredibly good at perceiving through their nose. They smell almost everything around them including other species' old feces. Some dogs even eat their own. A lot of smells must be something unbearable with human nose but they take them well. If their physical mechanism enables them to embrace all kinds of disgusting smells with less rejection, I think the same mechanism also makes the nature of dogs more tolerant and altruistic than that of human being who are easily disgusted. Dogs are overall just nice : )

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2RedErin
Dogs were domesticated in such a way so that their very existence depends on them being nice to humans.
Finance as a career option
farbeyond-20

The correlation between income and social value

Your explanation on the above conflicts the experience I've had with the finance sectors who have caused the 2008 Financial Crisis and bankers' fiesta with bailouts unless I'm misunderstanding the definition of 'social value'. I believe the career still is a good option for those earning to give because of the exceptional amount of money people can make, which more than sets off against the socially widespread negative view for financiers if the use of earnings aims at saving the world.

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4gjm
The claim in the article is not "finance people earn a lot, therefore their work is socially valuable". It is "finance people earn a lot; earnings generally correlate with social value to some extent; so we should at least consider the possibility that what they do is valuable, even if at first glance it doesn't look like it". The argument that follows merely observes that some of what happens in the finance sector is socially valuable, which I don't think is controversial. No one is claiming that everything or even most is socially valuable, though it might turn out that way despite the obvious big examples where it hasn't. (One could argue, though I'm not sure I would, that the fact that financial crises can have such severe consequences is evidence that a properly-working financial sector is very valuable: if it weren't, it wouldn't matter much if it underwent a crisis. The weak point in this argument is that something not very valuable in itself can work its way into a position where its failure can cause disaster; a ruptured appendix can be a medical emergency even though we don't need our appendixes much these days.)
True numbers and fake numbers
farbeyond20

I believe the best example of 'fake numbers' may be the measurement of IQ. The problem of this sort of fake numbers is that it is not certain to tell whether IQ really represents our true intellectual being but people still use it to be judgmental or even to justify their study not knowing when to stop to regard it as a simple reference.

Fake numbers seem to prevail in our professional life as companies do quantify people's labor thanks to technology. They might be good estimates but that kind of numerical fixation affects people's mind tremendously so that the moment the numbers are revealed it now controls the people. It won't stay as a mere measurement reflecting the phenomena it gathered.

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1VAuroch
By the standard of reproducibility using different methods, IQ is assuredly real; there are many varieties of IQ test, and their results mostly agree.