I also wouldn’t want people to be peer-pressured into making statements that are more extreme than their actual views, but I think we’re pretty far from that world.

That's because there isn't a norm for safety researchters to take the public stance described here. Once such a thing became a norm, peer pressure into making extreme statements, and generally threats to force them to make extreme statements, would be common.

Look at what we have now with all sorts of social justice statements.

Old post but...

In a recent intelligence explosion discussion, someone mentioned that Vinge didn’t seem to think that brain-computer interfaces would increase intelligence much, and cited Marooned in Realtime and Tunç Blumenthal, who was the most advanced traveller but didn’t seem all that powerful. I replied indignantly, “But Tunç lost most of his hardware! He was crippled!” And then I did a mental double-take and thought to myself: What the hell am I saying.

If the question is about what Vinge seems to think then this reasoning is perfectly appropriate. Tunc doesn't really exist, but if you want to know what Vinge thinks, the details of the scenario that Vinge wrote are relevant--if Vinge wrote Tunc as not having much increased intelligence because he was crippled, this doesn't show what Vinge thinks about increased intelligence in general.

Betting against your professed beliefs is valid as an example of diversification.

High status is something you can only control to a limited degree, especially when you are trying to do things that have an immediate effect rather than doing thigns that gain status in the long run. Acting confident certainly helps, but it won't help by so much that you can get away with wearing a clown suit because you're acting confident. What will happen is that instead of confidence making the clown suit work, the clown suit will make the confidence fail.

Fedoras aren't quite clown suits, but still, you can see how they worked, which is "not well".

None of the ideas you're saying are completely wrong, but you're wrong about how they balance against each other.

1 in 10000 allows me to be Pascal mugged, so it must be much smaller. Also, scenarios where shrimp suffering exists and matters are generally scenarios where my ability to reason about the world is compromised, so any number I could produce would be useless for calculations.

The question is ambiguous. Is an "accusation" "this mage has illegally healed" or "this mage has done this specific illegal healing"?

practicing empathy

Nobody says "I'm going to spare some video game characters, because I like to think that someone would spare me". There has to be some relevant similarity between the worm and me which would distinguish it from cases like that. It needn't be causal, but it has to be something. What is it?

(And if you reply "video game characters don't have feelings", I would of course say that worms don't either.)

making the world the type of place you'd like it to be.

"Type of place" is a vague term. Do you mean "the type of place where nobody steps on worms" or "the type of place where nobody steps on worms or people"? In the former case, I don't care about making the world such a place. In the latter, I'd again ask what's so similar about worms and people that putting them together forms a natural category.

It seems like the whole thing is based around the unsaid premise "worms are like people, so empathy for one has some connection to empathy for the other". It's unsaid because if you said it, you'd have to defend it, and I don't think there is a good defense for it.

That doesn't make sense unless you rescuing the worm has some connection to someone rescuing you. What connection are you claiming?

Crimes that are harder to catch should be more harshly punished

Please, don't do this.

Your reasoning amounts to "we need to increase the punishment to compensate for all the false negatives".

If the only kind of error that existed was false negatives, you might have a point. But it isn't. False positives exist too. And crimes that are harder to catch are probably going to have more false positives. Harsher punishments also create bigger incentives for either false positives, or for standards that make everyone guilty of serious crimes all the time, thus letting anyone be punished at the whim of the moderators while pretending that they are not.

Why does "Amish society" not then count as a greater power?