Seems like a lot of the low-hanging fruit would be in preventing (or healing) disfiguring diseases and injuries.

The answer I followed ended up being 2 into 6.

Hunter: Americans have a very distorted perception of how safe a city is.

Here are three different questions:

1. How likely are you to be murdered in the next year?
2. How likely is the median person in your city to be murdered in the next year?
3. How likely are the most murder-prone people in your city to be murdered in the next year?

I suspect that these diverge pretty widely.

Perhaps related: My understanding is that a large portion of property crime in the US today doesn't look like the popular impression of "property crime" — robbery, burglary, shoplifting, purse-snatching — but rather is in forms such as fraud and wage theft.

Wage theft is kind of like an economic parallel to domestic violence; it is insidious because the victim often has an ongoing dependence on the perpetrator. If the person or firm who pays your wages is stealing from you, raising a fuss about the theft runs you the risk of not having any paycheck at all.

People can easily be mistaken about what experiences they will enjoy, when they haven't tried them yet but have only read about them. It's pretty common for people to read exciting descriptions of an activity and believe vividly that they would like doing it, but then actually do the activity and find out they don't.

So we should be careful to distinguish between enjoying fiction about an activity, and enjoying doing that activity.

Thought experiment: If a mad scientist gave a newborn infant a third eye that was offset along a fourth spatial dimension from the baby's other two eyes, the baby's brain would naturally acquire the ability to visualize in four dimensions. Wiring up three eyes probably requires three visual cortices, which will have knock-on effects on the overall geometry of the brain. I doubt that it requires the brain itself to be a 4D structure though.

I think what's being pointed at there is not literary excellence, but rather the specific idea of a highly creative, goal-focused, and adaptable character.

Even people who are pretty big into capitalism, like prediction-markets users, don't tend to think that capitalism is aligned with human value generally.

One possible conclusion here is that we're already living with a misaligned superhuman optimizer. However, capitalism to date is built out of humans. One way superhuman AI can go bad, is for capitalism to shift over to be built mostly out of AI instead of humans. Then there might not be a market for human labor anymore, nor any reason for the system to pay to keep the humans fed.

(Also, it doesn't imply the existence of any particular anti-capitalist or non-capitalist world system that would be better aligned with human values.)

There are claims for which believing the claim would require more confidence than I have in my own thought processes. That is, if I think I have evidence for X, I should first doubt whether my thinking has run astray and ceased to be connected to reality, rather than going ahead and believing X.

After all, it's not just the claim that can be true or false. My reasoning can run truly or falsely too. There are circumstances under which self-doubt is the correct mental motion: "The fact that I am about to believe this claim is itself evidence. What has been true about others who have come to believe claims like this one?"

Example: Occasionally, a human will come to believe that God is telling them to go murder a bunch of people. As far as anyone can tell, they have all been wrong. And the world would be better off if each of them had thought, "Huh, everyone else who's ever come to this conclusion turned out to be wrong. I wonder if maybe I'm having a schizophrenia or something?"

Huh. VN was obvious from the start, but led me to initially expect M=Morgenstern, which turned out not to be the case.