So that's epistemic status: drunken bullshit session.

Your analysis of early action + no disaster overlooks the fact that early action can prevent the disaster. But you never see the things that were prevented... because they were prevented. Early action only seems useful when it merely mitigates a disaster — that is, when it is not all that successful. Valiant failure is valorised over competent success.

Y2K is a case in point. There actually was a problem, and it was fixed.

Here's something that may be of interest here. It's more EA than rationality, but I'm not on the EA forum. The Reith Lectures 2025, given by Rutger Bregman. Currently being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, and available on BBC Sounds.

"Titled Moral Revolution, the lectures will delve into the current 'age of immorality', explore a growing trend for unseriousness among elites, and ask how we can follow history’s example and assemble small, committed groups to spark positive change."

In Rubber Souls, Bjartus Tomas argues that we can have cruely-free status games by creating underpeople without moral worth, perhaps because they are non-conscious, worth to serve as our permanent underclass.

We have these already. Factories, farms, construction sites, mines, IT departments: the sites of industry are full of them. We call them "machines".

Any chance of an RSS feed?

Presenting it as if they first came up with general principles which were then validated by the experience for the sake of readers comprehension, even though the casual process that led to her discovery of the theory is different.

I'm not sure what this was supposed to be. It's a noun phrase, not a sentence.

Do fruit and dairy products play any role in your recommended diet?

Isn’t everything dominated by post-ASI futures?

I have two opposing beliefs about the title: it means "Don't believe two opposing things at once — you will fool yourself", or "Believe two opposing things at once — you will avoid fooling yourself."

How deep is your skepticism?

At the moment, "valence" seems to me, in the material I've read, no more than a name reifying a noun phrase of the form "the thing that..." It is like saying that salt tastes salty due to its saltiness, or to use a well-known example, that opium produces sleep through its dormitive principle.

Uttering a noun phrase does not conjure into existence a thing that it refers to. It can conjure an idea of such a thing into your head, and then you can look at various phenomena and "see" it there, just like you can "see" the phlogiston coming out of a burning log, or "see" the demon possessing an epileptic. That is what the whole Valence sequence looks like to me, and the valence literature that I cited.

In the context of consciousness, valence basically means the qualia of value.

My scepticism then extends to the word "value", as applied in this context. Also, I had not got the impression from the material that valences were defined to be conscious experiences, but rather, that they pervade all decision-making in the brain, that comparison of valence is "the thing that" makes decisions. For example, the fourth reference I cited is a purely speculative article asserting the existence of "micro-valences" in low-importance rapid choices like which coffee mug to select from a cupboard. But perhaps the authors would say that these micro-valences are micro-consciously perceived.