I'm surprised it wasn't obvious. Has your mouse never hovered over one of them before? What's different about our user experiences that you're only learning this now, where I discovered is (I assume) in the first few days that LW reacts were a thing?

The receptor was the first one I checked, and sure enough I have a single-nucleotide deletion 42 amino acids in to the open reading frame (ORF) of the 389 amino acid protein. That will induce a frameshift error, completely fucking up the rest of protein.

I'm kind of astonished that this kind of advance prediction panned out!

A hunger strike is a symmetrical tool, equally effective in worlds AI will destroy and in worlds AI will not destroy. This is in contrast to arguing for/against AI Safety, which is an asymmetric tool since arguments are easier to make and are more persuasive if they reflect the truth.

This is true, but a hunger strike is a technique that effectively signals conviction in one's message. It distinguishes people who really believe that AI will soon kill everyone from grifters etc. who are exaggerating, outright lying, or just using claims like that as non-semantic flavor text.

A well executed hunger strike might cause some people to think "huh, wait, those guys seem to think this is very serious for some reason." That alone isn't enough, because people can have conviction, but also be delusional. You have to follow it up with arguments that people can understand for why the problem is real. But the hunger strike itself is providing important relatively hard to fake, and therefore asymmetric, evidence that something might be worth paying attention to.

I'm not sure how this is a response to the OP. It sounds basically right to me (and I imagine that Richard would agree with it as well, though he can speak for himself), but it seems like almost entirely a non sequitur to the claims made?

the author's "solutions" of ethnic segregation and socially-enforced virtue ethics enforced by inter-group mutual distrust

This text doesn't even mention ethnic segregation as a solution? It does promote virtue ethics as an alternative moral frame to utilitarianism, but it says nothing about "enforced[ing] by inter-group mutual distrust".

I don't doubt that you're pushing back against a real cultural force, but it doesn't look to me to actually be represented in this short-form, except (at best) as an implication.

The black hole of western state debt that will never be repaid creates distortions across the economy

Can you give some examples? 

Big government debts seem like the kind of thing that can fail catastrophically at some point, so they represent an important civilizational risk. But how are they distorting the economy? Do you just mean that governments spend much more than they raise in taxes?

...if the west (and the US in particular) had maintained impartial rule of law and constitutional freedoms.

The US did not have impartial rule of law in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Notably, black Americans in the south were regularly impressed into forced labor, often for the rest of their lives, on the basis of flimsy or even non-existent legal pretext. 

(A representative but concocted example: the local sheirf arrests a black man who's walking through town on charges of "vagrancy". The man is found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. The sheriff sells the "contact" for hard labor to a local industrialist who owns a mine. (The sherif and the industrialist are buddies, and have done versions of this deal many times before). The man is set to work the mine for the period of his sentence. When he's near the end of his sentence, he's accused of some minor infraction as a pretext to add more years to his sentence (if anyone bothers to keep track of when his sentence is served at all.)

What makes you think that impartial rule of law decayed since WWII instead of generally (though not evenly) improving?

If this current becomes normalised (and it has, frankly, always been present in the rationalist sphere), it makes TESCREAL-style categorisations of the rationalist/EA/AI safety intellectual sphere bascially correct.

What? It seems like TESCREAL is clearly a natural cluster (modulo I don't know any examples of the "C"), and whether takes like this are pervasive amongst rationalists doesn't bare on whether it's a good categorization?

 

I averaged 19 minutes of review a day (although I really think review tended to take longer)

Oh yeah, I track my time with toggl and use anki. Anki's time numbers are always undercounting my own measurements. 

I think this is because anki is only counting how long you spend looking at the front of the card. Time spent looking at the back of a card is presumably after you've already answerd the question, and so doesn't count.

A tangent:

Is the reason we don't wirehead because evolution instilled us with an aversion to manipulating our reward function, which then zero-shot generalized to wireheading, despite wireheading being so wildly dissimilar to the contents of the ancestral environment?

I don't think so? My guess is that this is mostly about culture and cultural conditioning. Most neuroscientists don't wirehead themselves because that's so far from the kind of normal thing that's normally done. They just don't see wireheading as "winning the game." 

But I can totally believe that many of them would if they were part of a culture, even a small subculture, that does think of it that way.