OH MY GOD. THAT WAS IT. THAT WAS VOLDEMORT'S PLAN. RATIONAL!VOLDEMORT DIDN'T TRY TO KILL HARRY IN GODRIC'S HOLLOW. HE WAITED ELEVEN YEARS TO GIVE HARRY A GRADE IN SCHOOL SO THAT ANY ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT WOULD BE IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY.
Agreed. I actually looked up tax & spending for UK vs. Scandinavian countries, and they aren't that different. It may not be a good distinction.
I thought of this last year after I completed the survey, and rated anti-agathics less probable than cryonics. This year I decided cryonics counted, and rated anti-agathics 5% higher than cryonics. But it would be nice for the question to be clearer.
Liberal here, I think my major heresy is being pro-free trade.
Also, I'm not sure if there's actually a standard liberal view of zoning policy, but it often feels like the standard view is that we need to keep restrictive zoning laws in place to keep out those evil gentrifiers, in which case my support for loser zoning regulations is another major heresy.
You could argue I should call myself a libertarian, because I agree the main thrust of Milton Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom. However, I suspect a politician running on Friedman's platform today would be branded a socialist if a Democrat, and a RINO if a Republican.
(Friedman, among other things, supported a version of guaranteed basic income. To which today's GOP mainstream would probably say, "but if we do that, it will just make poor people even lazier!")
Political labels are weird.
and anyone smart has already left the business since it's not a good way of making money.
Can you elaborate? The impression I've gotten from multiple converging lines of evidence is that there are basically two kinds of VC firms: (1) a minority that actually know what they're doing, make money, and don't need any more investors and (2) the majority that exist because lots of rich people and institutions want to be invested in venture capital, can't get in on investing with the first group, and can't tell the two groups apart.
A similar pattern appears to occur in the hedge fund industry. In both cases, if you just look at the industry-wide stats, they look terrible, but that doesn't mean that Peter Thiel or George Soros aren't smart because they're still in the game.
Hi! Welcome to LessWrong! A lot of people on LessWrong are worried about the problem you describe, which is why the Machine Intelligence Research Institute exists. In practice, the problem of getting an AI to share human values looks very hard. But, given that human values are implemented in human brains, it looks like it should be possible in principle to implement them in computer code as well.
On philosophy, I think it's important to realize that most university philosophy classes don't assign textbooks in the traditional sense. They assign anthologies. So rather than read Russell's History of Western Philosophy or The Great Conversation (both of which I've read), I'd recommend something like The Norton Introduction to Philosophy.