Posts meeting our frontpage guidelines:
• interesting, insightful, useful
• aim to explain, not to persuade
• avoid meta discussion
• relevant to people whether or not they
are involved with the LessWrong community.
That's what the congenital deafness discussion was about.
You have preferences over pain and pleasure intensities that you haven't experienced, or new durations of experiences you know. Otherwise you wouldn't have anything to worry about re torture, since you haven't experienced it.
"My point was comparing pains and pleasures that could be generated with similar amount of resources. Do you think they balance out for human decision making?"
I think with current tech it's cheaper and easier to wirehead to increase pain (i.e. torture) than to increase pleasure or reduce pain. Thi...(read more)
"one filled with pleasure and the other filled with pain, feels strongly negative rather than symmetric to us"
Comparing pains and pleasures of similar magnitude? People have a tendency not to do this, see the [linked thread](https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/11175499583...(read more)
I meant GWP without introducing the term. Edited for clarity.
>If you have a constant population, and GDP increases, productivity per person has increased. But if you have a border on a map enclosing some people, and you move it so it encloses more people, productivity hasn't increased.
Can you give examples of people confirmed to be actually making the mist...(read more)
I came up with the idea and basic method, then asked Paul if he would provide a donor lottery facility. He did so, and has been taking in entrants and solving logistical issues as they come up.
I agree that thinking/researching/discussing more dominates the gains in the $1-100k range.
A different possibility is identifying vectors in Facebook-behavior space, and letting users alter their feeds accordingly, e.g. I might want to see my feed shifted in the direction of more intelligent users, people outside the US, other political views, etc. At the individual level, I might be able...(read more)
That advantage only goes so far:
* Plenty of nonviral bacteria-eating entities exist, and would become more numerous
* Plant and antibacterial defenses aren't viral-based
* For the bacteria to compete in the same niche as unmodified versions it has to fulfill a similar ecological role: photosynthet...(read more)
Primates and eukaryotes would be good.
Your example has 3 states: vanilla, chocolate, and neither.
But you only explicitly assigned utilities to 2 of them, although you implicitly assigned the state of 'neither' a utility of 0 initially. Then when you applied the transformation to vanilla and chocolate you didn't apply it to the 'neithe...(read more)
That's what the congenital deafness discussion was about.
You have preferences over pain and pleasure intensities that you haven't experienced, or new durations of experiences you know. Otherwise you wouldn't have anything to worry about re torture, since you haven't experienced it.
Consider peopl...(read more)
"My point was comparing pains and pleasures that could be generated with similar amount of resources. Do you think they balance out for human decision making?"
I think with current tech it's cheaper and easier to wirehead to increase pain (i.e. torture) than to increase pleasure or reduce pain. Thi...(read more)
"one filled with pleasure and the other filled with pain, feels strongly negative rather than symmetric to us"
Comparing pains and pleasures of similar magnitude? People have a tendency not to do this, see the [linked thread](https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/11175499583...(read more)
I meant GWP without introducing the term. Edited for clarity.
>If you have a constant population, and GDP increases, productivity per person has increased. But if you have a border on a map enclosing some people, and you move it so it encloses more people, productivity hasn't increased.
Can you give examples of people confirmed to be actually making the mist...(read more)
I came up with the idea and basic method, then asked Paul if he would provide a donor lottery facility. He did so, and has been taking in entrants and solving logistical issues as they come up.
I agree that thinking/researching/discussing more dominates the gains in the $1-100k range.
A different possibility is identifying vectors in Facebook-behavior space, and letting users alter their feeds accordingly, e.g. I might want to see my feed shifted in the direction of more intelligent users, people outside the US, other political views, etc. At the individual level, I might be able...(read more)
That advantage only goes so far:
* Plenty of nonviral bacteria-eating entities exist, and would become more numerous * Plant and antibacterial defenses aren't viral-based * For the bacteria to compete in the same niche as unmodified versions it has to fulfill a similar ecological role: photosynthet...(read more)
Primates and eukaryotes would be good.
Your example has 3 states: vanilla, chocolate, and neither.
But you only explicitly assigned utilities to 2 of them, although you implicitly assigned the state of 'neither' a utility of 0 initially. Then when you applied the transformation to vanilla and chocolate you didn't apply it to the 'neithe...(read more)