I follow Crocker's rules.
I'd be curious about a list of topics they would like others to investigate/continue investigating, or a list of the most important open questions.
Due to the sudden work of unsung heroes, he was cryopreserved despite not having been signed up at the time of his deänimation.
I wonder whether the lives of those moths were net negative. If the population was rising, then the number of moths dying as larvae might've been fairly small. I assume that OPs apartment doesn't have many predatory insects or animals that eat insects, so the risk of predation was fairly small. That leaves five causes of death: old age, hunger, thirst, disease and crushing.
Death by old age for moths is probably not that bad? They don't have a very long life, so their duration of death also doesn't seem very long to me, and couldn't offset the quality of their life.
Hunger and thirst are likely worse, but I don't know by how much, do starved moths die from heart problems? (Do moths have hearts?)
Disease in house moth colonies is probably fairly rare.
Crushing can be very fast or lead to long painful death. Seems the worst of those options.
I think those moths probably had a better life than outside, just given the number of predatory insects; but I don't think that this was enough to make their lives net-positive. But it's been a while since I've read into insect welfare, so if most young insects die by predation, I'd increase my credence in those moths having had net-positive lives.
More:
Encountered while logged in. Now it doesn't happen anymore. Maybe it was because I'd opened a bunch of tabs before dismissing the notification, which had still pre-loaded on other pages? Anyway, now it's fixed, at least for me.
Basically a bug report: The popup "Sign up for the weekly EA Forum Digest" appears on every new page, even when I've already clicked "No thanks" on other pages. I highly dislike this.
Yep, seems true that useful advice comes from people who were in a similar situation and then solved the problem.
Does it happen often in EA that unqualified people give a lot of advice? 80,000 hours comes to mind, but you would hope they're professional enough to having thought of this failure mode.
Ideally, I would include at this point some readings on how aggregation might work for building a utopia, since this seems like an obvious and important point. For instance, should the light cone be divided such that every person (or every moral patient more broadly, perhaps with the division taking moral weight into account) gets to live in a sliver of the light cone that’s optimized to fit their preferences? Should everybody’s preferences be aggregated somehow, so that everyone can live together happily in the overall light cone? Something else? However, I was unable to find any real discussion of this point. Let me know in the comments if there are writings I’m missing. For now, I’ll include the most relevant thing I could find as well as a more run-of-the-mill reading on preference aggregation theory.
It would probably be worth if for someone to write out the ethical implications of K-complexity-weighted utilitarianism/UDASSA on how to think about far-future ethics.
A few things that come to mind about this question (these are all ~hunches and maybe only semi-related, sorry for the braindump):
Which, given its length, isn't that out there. ↩︎
I've thought a bit about this and updated to include a (admittedly minor) discount for impactful or interesting work, "$20 for impactful or interesting projects, $35 for work with a public result, $50 otherwise".
Not central to EA, but there's Gwerns open questions.