The doctors' cartel which enriches its members at the expense of patient welfare is backed by the force of the state, and I expect few to support its abolition. The teachers' unions are similarly popular.  In what sense do you believe "democratic consensus" has answered these question the way you think they have?

What do we privilege, the preference of doctors or the welfare of patients?

What is more important, educators preferences or quality of children education?

I understand you intended these questions to be rhetorical, but the answers you think are obvious: did you arrive at them through "pure reason," or by looking at what "democratic consensus" actually ended up with?

I got a question (maybe more than one? The email left that ambiguous) accepted to the "Humanity's Last Exam" AI Benchmark! 

The double-bind structure is maintained,

It's almost always only single-blind: the reviewers usually know who the authors are.

Given so many shared premises, it's puzzling to me why Egan seems to bear so much antipathy towards "us"

This is a fairly well-documented phenomenon: the narcissism of small differences. 

Also:

the OpenPhil people and the MIRI people and the Vassarites and ... &c. are all totally different and in fact hate each other's guts

is clearly an instance of the same phenomenon.

they prefer deepseek for erotic RPs? [T]hat seems kind of disturbing to me.

I've not been following these people, and only know Pliny for his jailbreaking prompts, so I don't have context for this remark. Why would this be disturbing? Is it worry about China overtaking the US, open models competing favorably with closed ones, or that LLMs are being used for such unsafe^[1] activities at all?

1. ^{^}

   Due to copyright infringement, terms-of-service violation, existential risk, nonconsensual/underage sexual activity, catastrophic harms, or some such bullshit.

Assuming I've understood your toy model correctly, if you add that due the solar competition during the day, the nuclear plant only sells half of what it used to during the day, it'd need to raise the night price to 195% to keep revenue fixed, and now the average price is up.

To answer what might be a natural question, yes, L-glucose does taste sweet: link.

I think this would be missing the point. If it were "smart" like you describe, I definitely wouldn't buy it, and I wouldn't use it even if got it for free: I'd just get an app on my phone. What I want from such an object is infallibility, and the dumber it is, the closer it's likely to get to that ideal.

Are you describing a stopwatch?

If you can get it to run off of ambient light with some built-in solar panels (like a calculator), yes, I would buy such a thing  for ~$20.