I'm happy to know that more people are trying out lifelogging.

Should I show him that other people do this and try to convince him that I'm not mentally ill?

While you could try showing him that others engage in this hobby, I'm not sure it would be effective in changing his perspective. I think a stronger argument is that lifelogging is harmless, as long as you're not recording people without their consent. The only real considerations are the convenience and storage costs, which you can independently manage without independent support. Data storage is cheap these days, and easily affordable to someone with a part-time job.

But if the message that people received was "medicine doesn't work" (and it appears that many people did), then Scott's writings should be an useful update, independent of whether Hanson's-writings-as-intended was actually trying to deliver that message.

The statement I was replying to was: "I’d bet at upwards of 9 to 1 odds that Hanson is wrong about it."

If one is incorrect about what Hanson believes about medicine, then that fact is relevant to whether you should make such a bet (or more generally whether you should have such a strong belief about him being "wrong"). This is independent of whatever message people received from reading Hanson.

non-consensually killing vast amounts of people and their children for some chance of improving one's own longevity.

I think this misrepresents the scenario since AGI presumably won't just improve my own longevity: it will presumably improve most people's longevity (assuming it does that at all), in addition to all the other benefits that AGI would provide the world. Also, both potential decisions are "unilateral": if some group forcibly stops AGI development, they're causing everyone else to non-consensually die from old age, by assumption.

I understand you have the intuition that there's an important asymmetry here. However, even if that's true, I think it's important to strive to be accurate when describing the moral choice here.

And quantitatively I think it would improve overall chances of AGI going well by double-digit percentage points at least.

Makes sense. By comparison, my own unconditional estimate of p(doom) is not much higher than 10%, and so it's hard on my view for any intervention to have a double-digit percentage point effect.

The crude mortality rate before the pandemic was about 0.7%. If we use that number to estimate the direct cost of a 1-year pause, then this is the bar that we'd need to clear for a pause to be justified. I find it plausible that this bar could be met, but at the same time, I am also pretty skeptical of the mechanisms various people have given for how a pause will help with AI safety.

I don't think staging a civil war is generally a good way of saving lives. Moreover, ordinary aging has about a 100% chance of "killing literally everyone" prematurely, so it's unclear to me what moral distinction you're trying to make in your comment. It's possible you think that:

1. Death from aging is not as bad as death from AI because aging is natural whereas AI is artificial
2. Death from aging is not as bad as death from AI because human civilization would continue if everyone dies from aging, whereas it would not continue if AI kills everyone

In the case of (1) I'm not sure I share the intuition. Being forced to die from old age seems, if anything, worse than being forced to die from AI, since it is long and drawn-out, and presumably more painful than death from AI. You might also think about this dilemma in terms of act vs. omission, but I am not convinced there's a clear asymmetry here.

In the case of (2), whether AI takeover is worse depends on how bad you think an "AI civilization" would be in the absence of humans. I recently wrote a post about some reasons to think that it wouldn't be much worse than a human civilization.

In any case, I think this is simply a comparison between "everyone literally dies" vs. "everyone might literally die but in a different way". So I don't think it's clear that pushing for one over the other makes someone a "Dark Lord", in the morally relevant sense, compared to the alternative.

So, it sounds like you'd be in favor of a 1-year pause or slowdown then, but not a 10-year?

That depends on the benefits that we get from a 1-year pause. I'd be open to the policy, but I'm not currently convinced that the benefits would be large enough to justify the costs.

Also, I object to your side-swipe at longtermism

I didn't side-swipe at longtermism, or try to dunk on it. I think longtermism is a decent philosophy, and I consider myself a longtermist in the dictionary sense as you quoted. I was simply talking about people who aren't "fully committed" to the (strong) version of the philosophy.

The next part of the sentence you quote says, "but it got eaten by a substack glitch". I'm guessing he's referring to a different piece from Sam Atis that is apparently no longer available?

Similarly, now that I’ve read through Scott’s response to Hanson on medicine, I’d bet at upwards of 9 to 1 odds that Hanson is wrong about it.

I'm broadly sympathetic to this post. I think a lot of people adjacent to the LessWrong cluster tend to believe contrarian claims on the basis of flimsy evidence. That said, I am fairly confident that Scott Alexander misrepresented Robin Hanson's position on medicine in that post, as I pointed out in my comment here. So, I'd urge you not to update too far on this particular question, at least until Hanson has responded to the post. (However, I do think Robin Hanson has stated his views on this topic in a confusing way that reliably leads to misinterpretation.)

Do you think it's worth slowing down other technologies to ensure that we push for care in how we use them over the benefit of speed? It's true that the stakes are lower for other technologies, but that mostly just means that both the upside potential and the downside risks are lower compared to AI, which doesn't by itself imply that we should go quickly.