Seems like recent evidence disfavours less Neil's model than the classical one: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in_psychology_may_have_just_been_debunked.html

Cambridge's total colleges endowments is 2.8 and Oxford's 2.9. But the figures above already include this.

Violence might not be the exact opposite of peace. Intuitively, peace seem to mean a state where people are intentionally not committing violence and not just accidentally. A prison might have lower violence than an certain neighbourhood but it might still not be considered a more peaceful place exactly because the individual proclivity to violence is higher despite the fact violence itself isn't. Proclivity matters.

I am generally sceptic of Pinker. I have read a ton of papers and Handbooks of Evolutionary Psychology, and it is clear that while he was one of the top researchers in this area in the 90's this has dramatically changed. The area has shifted towards more empirical precision and fined-grained theories while some of his theories seems to warrant the "just-so story" criticism.

I made my above comment because I knew of at least one clear instance where the reason I had to do the workaround was due to someone who found Alex's stuff. But things haven't improved that much as I anticipated in my field (Applied Ethics). These things would take time, even if this had Alex's stuff as the only main cause. Looking back, I also think part of the workarounds were more due to having to relate the discussion to someone in my field who wrote about the same issue (Nick Agar) than due to having to avoid mentioning Eliezer too much.

I see a big difference in the AI community. For instance, I was able to convince a very intelligent, previously long-time superintelligence sceptic, CS grad student of superintelligence's feasibility. But I am not that much involved with AI directly. What is very clear to me - and I am not sure how obvious this already is to everyone - is that Nick's book had an enormous impact. Superintelligence scepticism is gradually becoming clearly a minority position. This is huge and awesome.

I don't think simply publishing Eliezer's ideas as your own would work; there would need to be a lot of refining to turn it into a publishable philosophy paper. I did this refining of the complexity thesis during my thesis' second chapter. Refining his ideas made them a lot different, and I applied them to a completely different case (moral enhancement). Note that publishing someone else's idea as your own is not a good plan, even if the person explicitly grants you permission. But if you are refining them and adding a lot of new stuff you can just briefly mention him and move along - and hopefully that won't do too much reputation-damage. I am still pondering how and which parts of this chapter to publish. In case you are interested, you can find a presentation summarizing its main arguments here: https://prezi.com/tsxslr_5_36z/deep-moral-enhancement-is-risky/

What about this one?

Once Braumoeller took into account both the number of countries and their political relevance to one another, the results showed essentially no change to the trend of the use of force over the last 200 years. While researchers such as Pinker have suggested that countries are actually less inclined to fight than they once were, Braumoeller said these results suggest a different reason for the recent decline in war. “With countries being smaller, weaker and more distant from each other, they certainly have less ability to fight. But we as humans shouldn't get credit for being more peaceful just because we’re not as able to fight as we once were,” he said. “There is no indication that we actually have less proclivity to wage war.”

Article: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/wardecline.htm Paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2317269&download=yes

I think there is more evidence it crosses (two studies with spinal measures) than it does not (0 studies). For (almost) direct measures check out Neumann, Inga D., et al., 2013 and Born, 2002. There are great many studies showing effects that could only be caused by encephalic neuromodulation. If it does not cross it, then it should cause increased encephalic levels of some neurochemical with the exact same profile, but that would be really weird.

Regardless of attachment style, oxytocin increases in-group favouritism, proclivity to group conflict, envy and schadenfreude. It increases cooperation, trust and so on inside one's group but it often decreases cooperation with out-groups.

I may not be recalling correctly, but although there is some small studies on that, I do not think there is a lot of evidence that oxytocin always leads anxiety, etc. in people with insecure attachment style. I would suspect that it might be the case it initially increases insecurity because it makes those persons attend to their relationship issues. However, in the long-run it might lead them to solve those issues. I say this because there are many studies showing insecure attachment style is associated with lower oxytocin receptor density. If your hypothesis were correct the density should be (on average) the same. There are also a lot of studies showing a correlation between oxytocin levels and relationship satisfaction, duration and so on. Additionally, intranasal oxytocin increases conflict solution in couples. Again, these would not be the case if your hypothesis were true. Overall there is a lot more evidence that oxytocin does increase secure attachment, although there is a small amount of evidence that, in the short-term, it increases measures associated with insecure attachment.

Perhaps you have already read it, (and it might be a bit outdated by now) but Oxytocin and social affiliation in humans (Feldman, 2012) offers a pretty comprehensive review of oxytocin's social effects. It will also point you to all the references to what I said above (it's pretty easy to find).

EDIT: Note: I, and the English dictionary, believe hormetic is the property of having opposing effects at different dosages. Which does not seem to fit what you intended.

Elephants kill hundreds, if not thousands, of human beings per year. Considering there are no more than 30,000 elephants alive, that's an amazing feat of evilness. I believe the average elephant kills orders of magnitudes more than the average human, and probably kill more violently as well.

Worth mentioning that some parts of Superintelligence are already a less contrarian version of many arguments made here in the past.

Also note that although some people do believe that FHI is some sense "contrarian", when you look at the actual hard data on this the fact is FHI has been able to publish in mainstream journals (within philosophy at least) and reach important mainstream researchers (within AI at least) at rates comparable, if not higher, to excellent "non-contrarian" institutes.

I didn't see the post in those lights at all. I think it gave a short, interesting and relevant example about the dynamics of intellectual innovation in "intelligence research" (Jeff) and how this could help predict and explain the impact of current research(MIRI/FHI). I do agree the post is about "tribalism" and not about the truth, however, it seems that this was OP explicit intention and a worthwhile topic. It would be naive and unwise to overlook these sorts of societal considerations if your goal is to make AI development safer.