All of brunoparga's Comments + Replies

Apparently @Francis and the forum moderation team think there are aspects of this post that could be improved to make it adhere to the Forum's rules. I am happy to collaborate to edit the post into compliance!

I think 1 is >95% likely. We're in an arms race dynamic for at least some of the components of AGI. This is conditional on us not having been otherwise wiped out (by war, pandemic, asteroid, etc).

I think 2 and 3 are the wrong way to think about the question. Was humankind "motivated to conquer" the dodo? Or did we just have a better use for its habitat, and its extinction was just a whoopsie in the process?

[This article](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/) explores why it is useful to work with subjective, "made-up" statistics.

My own view hinges on the following:

• instrumental convergence: agents will tend to try and accumulate some kinds of resources like money, regardless of what their goals are;
• value-capabilities orthogonality (often known as just "the orthogonality thesis"): regardless of their capabilities, agents might have pretty much any kind of goal;
• the fact that most possible goals are in

Another solution that might be more palatable than allowing someone who just lost their own district to become PM is to normalize having PMs from either of the Houses of Parliament. I'm not sure how Canada elects its senators, but if you make that as province-wide PR then party leaders can be decently assured to get a Senate seat. (Actually, I checked and Senators are appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the Prime Minister; constitutional convention might make for the leaders of any parties represented in the Commons to be guaranteed a Senate seat).

It makes sense to me that you'd describe my proposal as easier than Fair Majority Voting - I understand the former, but not the latter!

As for "targeted killing", I think a threshold of, say, 5% of the nationwide vote prevents that. The Tories cannot tell their voters in Trudeau's riding to vote for the NaziLoons, because the NaziLoon vote is discarded as it doesn't reach 5% nationwide (hopefully!). So those Tories have wasted their vote and Trudeau still gets elected. Do you think that makes sense?

The US already has primaries. And the votes someone sabotages away from a comrade might be the ones that mean they themselves do not get elected, while they would if they didn't sabotage.

I think the incentive for a unified messaging "vote for our party no matter who's on the ballot" is stronger than any sabotage incentives.

Edit: I think this deserves some more detail. Keep in mind that I've developed an 'ugh' field with regards to the article, so some of the below might repeat or contradict what I said there - we'll wing it if it happens.

First. Let's... (read more)

lucy, given Linch's admonition elsethread, I am taking a break from engaging with the content you present. I am not sure how best to phrase this, but I just wanted to say I empathize with your perception of being viewed as an outgroup/outcaste. I think that must feel quite bad. In spite of so far not agreeing a lot, I don't want to contribute to you feeling that way, quite the contrary; I want everyone to feel welcomed here and in all EA spaces, and I apologize if my actions unwittingly had the opposite effect.

Thank you for your admonition, Linch. I'd point out I wouldn't like to be grouped together with people up- or downvoting lucy; I haven't voted on their comments except but one each way. As for the actual content of the conversation, this is not how I wanted it to be perceived; I wonder if you could help me identify what went wrong at a more detailed level, in private. I know about identifying clear cruxes and having a scout's mindset, I endorse collaborative truth-seeking, yet here I failed to implement these things and it is not clear to me why; I could use help with that.

I was with you until the very end, then I got confused. Do you think it is fair to say that people don't know what's best for them when it comes to trade liberalization? (I do.)

I have way fewer qualms about saying that voters don't know what's best for them. Take, for example, South Africa. They use a pretty darn good voting system - single-ballot closed-list proportional representation with half the seats coming from province-level lists and the other half from nationwide lists - and I think the conduct of the elections themselves is d... (read more)

The nation with highest life expectancy is Japan at 84 years, Chile, USA and every "developed" country is 75+ I would say all of them are on par

If pretty much all developed countries have a similar life expectancy (apart from Japan), and the USA is quite significantly richer, than yes, it is the US that's the outlier, not Chile.

I'm just going by India's self-identification.

I was going by India's *socialist* self-identification. There's reason to dispute e.g. North Korea's democratic credentials. India said it was soc... (read more)

I'm not sure I get what the core of the disagreement is. Perhaps you could try expressing to me what your understanding of my view is, to clarify the comparison with yours? In general I think I agree with most of your comment.

Thank you, Linch. My question was more focused on the education part than the health part, although I agree I should have made that clearer. The information you provided is still good to know, though - and impressive indeed.

life expectancy in Chile is on par with US, my interest about Chile would be more around how they have same life expectancy as US with less money.

I think the outlier there is the US, not Chile.

Sure you can call them socialist, although I don't like labels.

I'm just going by India's self-identification.

Under Nehru basic education was neglected, as was basic healthcare.

I don't know enough to comment on this.

I don't want to argue or think about labels, it is just a waste of time.

I find this particular label useful because it seems to ... (read more)

Lucy, thank you for your comment, even though I disagree with most of it :)

Chile was ahead of much of South America in 1950

AFAIK, Chile crumbled in the 1970s. Electing Socialist Salvador Allende is an example of what I mean by "choosing anti-growth policies"; the first half of the Pinochet dictatorship didn't help with growth (and, obviously, was a disaster for human rights).

I would not put Singapore in the same bucket as China

I agree they're quite different, but the point is that in both countries the leadership can just outright decid... (read more)

I am ridiculously late to the party, and I must confess that I have not read the entire article.

My comment is about what I would expect to happen if EA decided to shift towards encouraging pro-growth policies. What I have to say is perhaps a refining of objection 5.4, politicization. It is how I perceive this would be instantiated. My perceptions are informed by being from a middle-income country (Brazil) and living in another (Chile), while having lived in the developed world (America) to know what it's like.

The authors correctly acknowledge that thi... (read more)

I'm gonna write a slightly more detailed top-level comment about this, but the gist of it is: policies that can reasonably be expected to produce growth are *strongly opposed* in the countries that need them.

This isn't a commitment, but, just as a curiosity: does the CEA take cryptocurrency?

I messaged Nate Soares of MIRI for them to apply, in case they hadn't done it yet. If they do, the post should probably be updated to reflect that (same for other EA charities).

Edit: they've already applied.