What must a sane person1 think regarding religion? The naive first approximation is "religion is crap". But let's consider the following: Humans are imperfectly rational creatures. Our faults include not being psychologically able to maximally operate according to our values. We can e.g. suffer from burn-out if we try to...
Online gaming in immersive MMOs such as World of Warcraft or EVE Online is a common way of having fun. As technology progresses, MMO gaming will likely become ever more popular, until MMOs are fully immersive virtual realities, leading many to consider them as the primary venue of their lives,...
I believe this comment thread is not the proper place to discuss the details of my proposal.
(Also I believe the page linked earlier answers those specific questions.)
As a Brit, you already have a king/queen in your country.
Details are important as well as examples, and I'm not in the business of simply bringing back empowered kings. In the system I discussed the role mostly is about being a cool figurehead, not so terribly different from what you have now (though the king would be elected from among the re-invented Aristocracy in a meritocratic way, and therefore be better at the role than what you have now -- and it is of course true that the discussed system would be about bringing back the nobility in a genuinely empowered way).
Thank you. I can relate to much of what you said, as isn't terribly rare here.
And the most enjoyable of the feelings evoked in me (as has happened on several occasions already), is seeing a young one being better and more promising than me.
(Though my enjoyment at being superseded is dangerous in the sense that such may be associated with laziness, so you are very welcome to not enjoy yours -- or enjoy, however you wish.)
The actual reason why I started to comment at all, however, is that it's amusing to note how I'm in a sense in the reverse of your situation. I found MIRI/SIAI over 10 years ago (and am... (read more)
In response to your final questions:
Liberals (myself included) tend to very much like the idea of using regulation to transfer some wealth from the strongest players to the weakest in society. We like to try to set up the rules of the game so that nobody would be economically very poor, and so that things in general were fair and equitable.
In the case of sex and relationships, the argument could also be made for regulation that would transfer "sexual wealth" and "relationship wealth" from the strongest players to those who are not so well off. In fact, it seems to me that very many traditional conservative societies have tried to do just... (read more)
I have offered in the past to volunteer some time to this sort of thing, but I get that coordinating volunteers is harder than hiring people.
Sounds like something that happened during earlier years, when the SI people that one ran into when volunteering were different than currently.
Actually, I feel that I have sufficient experience of being reported on (including in an unpleasant way), and it is precisely that which (along with my independent knowledge of many of the people getting reported on here) gave me the confidence to suspect that I would have managed to separate from the distortions an amount of information that described reality.
That said, there is a bit of fail with regard to whether I managed to communicate what precisely impacted me. Much of it is subtle, necessarily, since it had to be picked up through the distortion field, and I do allow for the possibility that I misread, but I continue to think that... (read more)
As someone who had read Eliezer's OkCupid profile sometime not very recently, I was actually gonna reply to this with something like "well, scientism goes maybe a bit too far, but he does actually have a point"
...but then I just went and reread the OkCupid profile, and no, actually it's wonderfully funny and I have no worries similar to scientism's, unlike earlier when the profile didn't explicitly mention sadism.
Obviously Eliezer is a very unusual and "weird" person, but the openness about it that we observe here is a winning move, unlike the case where one might sense that he might be hiding something. Dishonesty and secrecy is what the evil phyg leaders would go for, whereas Eliezer's openness invites scrutiny and allows him to emerge from it without the scrutinizers having found incriminating evidence.
Also, where are you seeing evangelical polyamory? I'm very much not polyamorous myself, and haven't ever felt that anyone around here would be pushing polyamory to me.
That position is "antisingularity" only in the Kurzweilian sense of the word. I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. essentially everyone at the Singularity Institute were "antisingularity" in this sense.
The starting point for my attitude was people doing things like intervening in front of a reporter to stop discussion of a topic that looks scandalous, or talking about Singularity/AI topics in a way that doesn't communicate much wisdom at all.
Being silly with regard to physical intimacy and in general having a wild party is all well and good by itself, if you're into that sort of thing, but I react negatively when that silliness seems to spill over into affecting the way serious things are handled.
(I'll partly excuse being light on the constructiveness by having seen some copy-pastes that seem to indicate that what I'm concerned about is already being tackled in a constructive way on the NYC mailing list. The folks over there are much better positioned to do the contructive things that should be done, and I wasn't into trying to duplicate their efforts.)
What must a sane person1 think regarding religion? The naive first approximation is "religion is crap". But let's consider the following:
Humans are imperfectly rational creatures. Our faults include not being psychologically able to maximally operate according to our values. We can e.g. suffer from burn-out if we try to push ourselves too hard.
It is thus important for us to consider, what psychological habits and choices contribute to our being able to work as diligently for our values as we want to (while being mentally healthy). It is a theoretical possibility, a hypothesis that could be experimentally studied, that the optimal2 psychological choices include embracing some form of Faith, i.e. beliefs not resting... (read more)
Online gaming in immersive MMOs such as World of Warcraft or EVE Online is a common way of having fun. As technology progresses, MMO gaming will likely become ever more popular, until MMOs are fully immersive virtual realities, leading many to consider them as the primary venue of their lives, instead of "the old(/real) world" (without such thinking being pathological anymore).
Currently, however, many people such as myself mostly find MMO gaming a threat to their productivity. MMOs can be very fun, druglike even, without providing any utility to valued real-world pursuits such as reducing existential risk and having money to buy food.
The default recommendation regarding MMOs for most rationalists should probably be... (read 487 more words →)
Regardless, I wish to not take over (a part of) this comment thread by discussing this thing in detail.
If further comments from me on the matter are in demand, contacting me through some other means is a better option.