Been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to stop humanity from developing AI.

I think the answer is almost definitely not.

Interesting that the very first thing he discusses is whether AI can be stopped

This post is really really good, and will likely be the starting point for my plans henceforth

I was just starting to write up some high level thoughts to evaluate what my next steps should be. The thoughts would've been a subset of this post

I haven't yet had time to process the substance of this post, just commenting that you've done a better job of putting words to what my feelings were getting at, than I expect I myself would have at this stage

Scott Alexander wrote a solid follow up to this piece last year. 

TLDR; the brain obviously wishes to avoid pain, but not at the cost of like, avoiding thinking about painful things at all costs. 

Like, you don't want to be eaten by a lion, so you avoid doing things that lead to you being eaten by lions. 

But this pain avoidance shouldn't compromise on your epistemics; you shouldn't go so far to avoid pain as to avoid thinking about lions at all. this doesn't work. 

This is potentially also what's going on with ugh fields. avoiding thinking about painful thoughts, as an overextension of pain-avoiding mechanisms of the brain. 

Thinking about ugh fields in this way helps me actually confront them far more reliably.

wait so is a viable strat re: antibiotic resistant infections to just go a while without any antibiotics, then restart? granted, the patient needs to survive, and ideally not spread the infection to others, but still. Is this a documented action suite?

feels unlikely

This post seems better suited to twitter. If this LW post was for a signal boost, I'd suggest at least posting on twitter in parallel, and linking to that on all your posts. 

also, in the correct contrarian cluster, atheism is listed twice.

"should"s kinda cripple me. a lot. so far, this has possibly been the most useful post in the replacing guilt sequence.