The strategy of conflict is condensed instrumental rationality. Much of the content is covered elsewhere, but I don't know of a superior qualatative presentation.
Talking about qualatative presentations, thinking physics is a set of hundreds of physics problems, designed to show how important conservation laws and infinitesimals are. The problems are all solvable with some careful thought, and cover quite a deal of ground. I wish more books were written in this way.
Here's a visualisation that goes along with Euclid's elements
This was one of many from an article on "The Empirical MetaMathematics of Euclid and Beyond". It is a long essay on the overarching structure of Euclid's elements and verifies some claims made about Euclid's Elements e.g. the proofs were ordered in nearly the most parsimonious way possible. It also finds the most difficult theorems in each book, the greatest possible reductions in proof length, and hints that the network of theorem dependancy has a local 2-d structure. Highly recommend the article.
Definetely not a subject, but I'd say that the visualisation of Wolfram's theory of everything is excellent. Of course there are problems with his theory of everything, like the fact that he hasn't actually proved his claims that it generates GR field equations or replicates QM. Or shown that his theory evades the critical objection Scott Aaronson raised. but as a visualisation:
So I'd still recommend it.
I am glad you put the quotation marks around "morality as taxes" since what my mind jumped to upon verbalising the title was what you described in the last part of your post: something you'd be glad to evade where possible. In retrospect, its clear that the quotation marks were meant to point to another approach and not the one your thought experiment is meant to represent. Still, I think "Wholehearted choices vs morality as taxes" would be a little clearer as a title.
Go short on Uber?
My personal reasons:
You should alter questions to make it clear "we" is meant to be humans or whatever we makes that succeeds us.
Also, perhaps a queston on whether "first contact" will be us detecting them without their being aware of it.
Minor quibble which I hope isn't breaking a norm: BetFair did seem to pay out last week, or at least some of the bets on who would win the presidency were settled on 07/11/20.
Do you expect we'll be n the midst of a third wave before the vaccine begins to be doled out? Or just beginning to enter one?
Thanks for the post.
MIRI's reading list on corrigbility seems out dated, and I can't find a centralised list Does anyone have, or know of, one?
As a side note, has MIRI stopped updating their reading list? It seems like that's the case.
EDIT:
Links given in the comment section to do with corrigibility. I'll try and update this with some summaries as I read them.
https://arbital.com/p/corrigibility/
I am kind of suprised you didn't reference causal inference here to just gesture at the task in which we "figure out which variables are directly relevant - i.e. which variables mediate the influence of everything else". Are you pointing to a different sort of idea/do you not feel causal inference is adequate for describing this task?
Also, scenario 1 and 2 seem fairly close to the "linear" and "non-linear" models of innovation Jason Crawford described in his talk "The Non-Linear Model of Innovation." To be honest, I prefered his description of the models. Though he didn't cover how miraculous it is that somehow the model can work. That, to a good approximation, the universe is simple and local.