It's very surprising to me that he would think there's a real chance of all humans collectively deciding to not build AGI, and successfully enforcing the ban indefinitely.

Patternism is usually defined as a belief about the metaphysics of consciousness, but that boils down to incoherence, so it's better defined as a property of a utility function of agents not minding being subjected to major discontinuities in functionality, ie, being frozen, deconstructed, reduced to a pattern of information, reconstructed in another time and place, and resumed.

That still sounds like a metaphysical belief, and less empirical since consciousness experience isn't involved in it (instead it sounds like it's just about personal identity).

Any suggestions for password management?

Because it's an individualized approach that is a WIP and if I just write it down 99% of people will execute it badly.

Why is that a problem? Do you mean this in the sense of "if I do this, it will lead to people making false claims that my experiment doesn't replicate" or "if I do this, nothing good will come of it so it's not even worth the effort of writing".

I'm confused whether:

1. the point of this article is that the IQ tests are broken, because some trivial life improvements (like doing yoga and eating blueberries) will raise your IQ score or whether:
2. the point of this article is that you actually raised your "g" by doing trivial life improvements, and we should be excited by how easy it is to become more intelligent

Skimming it again I'm pretty sure you mean (2).

If I understand right the last sentence should say "does not hold".

It's not easy to see the argument for treating your vales as incomparable with the values of other people, but seeing your future self's values as identical to your own. Unless you've adopted some idea of a personal soul.

The suffering and evil present in the world has no bearing on God's existence. I've always failed to buy into that idea. Sure, it sucks. But it has no bearing on the metaphysical reality of a God. If God does not save children--yikes I guess? What difference does it make? A creator as powerful as has been hypothesised can do whatever he wants; any arguments from rationalism be damned.

Of course, the existence of pointless suffering isn't an argument against the existence of a god. But it is an old argument against the existence of a god who deserves to be worshipped with sincerity. We might even admit that there is a cruel deity, and still say non serviam, which I think is a more definite act of atheism than merely doubting any deity's existence.

Yeah, it's hard to say whether this would require restructuring the whole reward center in the brain or if the needed functionality is already there, but just needs to be configured with different "settings" to change the origin and truncate everything below zero.

My intuition is that evolution is blind to how our experiences feel in themselves. I think it's only the relative differences between experiences that matter for signaling in our reward center. This makes a lot of sense when thinking about color and "qualia inversion" thought experiments, but it's trickier with valence. My color vision could become inverted tomorrow, and it would hardly affect my daily routine. But not so if my valences were inverted.