Some have been curious about what the politics of this community would look like if broken down further; here's a shot at figuring it out. I've also included a few other questions that folks expressed curiosity about. Aside from one sensitive question, there's no option to keep your answers private,...
I'm woefully underinformed on this topic, but this doesn't seem good at all: > ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS—Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set...
Thiel enjoys the spotlight, he's his own boss and could spend all day rolling around in giant piles of money if he wanted to, he's said plenty of things publicly that are way more NRx-y than the monopoly thing and he's obviously fine.
I give more to charity and use spaced repetition systems heavily.
If the demons understand harm and are very clever in figuring out what will lead to it, what happens when we ask them minimize harm, or maximize utility, or do the opposite of what it would want to do otherwise, or {rigidly specified version of something like this}?
Can we force demons to tell us (for instance) how they'd rank various policy packages in government, what personal choices they'd prefer I make, &c., so we can back-engineer what not to do? They're not infinitely clever, but how clever are they?
The issue isn't whether looks are objective (clearly they aren't,) but whether judgments of looks are more correlated among the userbase than those of personality.
(Actually, the degree to which personality is correlated is probably the more interesting question here (granting that interestingness isn't particularly objective either.) Robin Hanson has pointed to some studies that suggest that "compatibility" isn't really a thing and some people are just easier to get along with than others - the study in question IIRC didn't take selection effects into account, but it remains an interesting hypothesis.)
It was a garbled version of Angkorism, sorry.
If your point is that Openness is probably not a thing-in-the-world, I would be inclined to agree, actually.
Big Five Openness correlates with political liberalism, so cet par it would be weak Bayesian evidence for open-mindedness, even if it is not an example of it.
I am completely uninformed on the technical particulars here, so this is idle speculation. But it isn't totally implausible that ideological factors were at play here. By this I don't mean that there were arguments being deployed as soldiers - nothing political, as far as I'm aware, rides upon the two theories - but that worldviews may have primed scientists (acting in entirely good faith) to think of, and see as more reasonable, certain hypotheses. Dialectical materialism, for instance, tends to emphasize (or, by default, think in terms of) qualitative transformations that arise from historically specific tensions between different forces that eventually gets resolved (in said qualitative transformations.) If I understand you... (read more)
And that willingness to invest such time might correlate with certain factors.
Some have been curious about what the politics of this community would look like if broken down further; here's a shot at figuring it out. I've also included a few other questions that folks expressed curiosity about. Aside from one sensitive question, there's no option to keep your answers private, since in my opinion that would defeat the point - just don't answer if you have concerns - but there's also no overlap with the old survey, aside from asking you how you answered the original politics question. (This should help with interpreting those results even if the n for this is much lower than and somehow biased relative to the big survey.)
For... (read more)
I'm woefully underinformed on this topic, but this doesn't seem good at all:
... (read 273 more words →)ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS—Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set free.
The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Scientists believe it's likely that the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths.
In a 17th floor office in the
If it's digitally embedded, even if the "base" module was bad at math in the same way we are, it would be trivial to cybernetically link it to a calculator program, just as us physical humans are cyborgs when we use physical calculators (albeit with a greater delay than a digital being would have to deal with.)