All of Ty's Comments + Replies

Ty
2y5
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Air purifiers with UVC are gimmicks. For safety reasons, the UVC light (which can take hours to kill/inactivate almost everything present) has to be emitted within the machine which means it will act upon pumped air that will be sent through a HEPA filter anyways (which filters at or above 99.7% of the most penetrating particle size of ~0.3 microns).

Intuitively, UVGI should possess substantial pathogen destroying potential. This study(1) states, "35% (106/304) of guinea pigs in the control group developed TB infection, and this was reduced to 14% (43/303) ... (read more)

Ty
2y1
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I wont soon forget the "there is no evidence that masks work unless you're a healthcare worker" (roughly approximated) type statements. It can often be difficult to distinguish between dishonesty and incompetence; however, the guidance on masks was excessively unreasonable to be explained by ignorance alone and demonstrated the folly in carelessly deferring to experts (ie, even if they're more intelligent or educated, they may be lying to you).

Ty
2y4
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I wonder if the increased demand would result in increased prices and other people not being able to afford as much food? Perhaps the greater good for the population as a whole would be to focus on increasing the supply of food, if possible.

Ty
2y6
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An AGI war machine is different than nuclear weapons in a few important ways: a) they risk blowback (and indeed existential blowback)--somewhat like biological WMDs (and this should provide common ground for transparancy and regulation), b) an AGI weapon is vastly more difficult to construct which is and should continue to buy time to develop cooperation that wasn't available for the nuclear threat, and c)  a MAD scenario may not occur as one AGI may be able to neutralize other AGIs without incurring a grave cost (the lack of relative short-term secur... (read more)

Ty
2y1
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I appreciate your philosophy being written in a manner that does not require decoding.

"I don’t think there is an objective morality. "

- If a person, such as myself, believes that the value we give to the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain is arbitrary (in the sense that we appear to be programmed to give worth to these emotionally attractive ideas for evolutionary survival purposes),  then a foundation for objective morality is lost and any selfish or selfless behaviour is ultimately performed to induldge our comfortable delusions.

"I can’t sci... (read more)

Ty
2y7
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My view is that for anything reasonably consequential (ie potentially worth the time spent investigating), one should at least briefly probe before deferring as a) virtually everyone lies at least occasionally and b) popular opinions are often clearly dubious due to the inertia they carry within a group (even a group of experts) from other people deferring without investigating (this can result in evidence needing to be overwhelming to shift majority opinion and overcome this self-perpetuating cycle).

Ty
2y2
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It puts the world in a tough spot when a nation like Russia brandishes nukes and we either have to call their bluff and risk nuclear warfare or back off which, among other undesirable consequences, incentivizes other nations to develop and brandish nukes themselves.

Improvements in technology will almost certainly make developing these weapons gradually easier over time (eg continued development of laser isotope enrichment techniques for uranium) and there is always some possibility of a major breakthrough. The goal of a world with zero nukes either acknowl... (read more)

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Sharmake
2y
My guess is I don't think the tech for nukes is dual use or easily hidden, unlike other existential risks because they require enrichment levels so high it's easy to distinguish them from peaceful uses and it's probably not going to be so easy that every state can make a nuke. That said, agree with the other parts of your comment.
Ty
2y2
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The major difference, at least for me, is that with religion you're expected to believe in an oncoming superpower based on little more than the supposed credibility of those giving testimony whereas with superintelligent AI we can witness a god being incubated through our labor. 

A person does not need a great amount of technical knowledge or a willingness to defer to experts to get the gist of the AI threat. A machine that can continually and autonomously improve its general problem solving ability will eventually render us potentially powerless. AI c... (read more)

Ty
2y2
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Thanks for your response. 

I checked out your website (including your FAQ where you point out the limits of storing food rather than focusing on the means to resiliently produce it) and I was wondering if you guys thought there might be some merit to strategic supplies of vegetable oil even if to only help buy several months of time for other operations to ramp up? A 55 gallon barrel of vegetable oil has ~2,100,000 calories, is edible for ~2 years, and--in order to prevent waste--could be sold and replaced after several months as it has industrial value (eg as biofuel).

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JuanGarcia
2y
While you are correct that vegetable oil would be the most compact way of storing edible calories, we wouldn't be able to rely only on it as it misses several key nutrients, and it would still not solve the prohibitive cost of storing enough food to last for a multi-year catastrophe. We think strategic micronutrient supplement stocks could be cost-effective but haven't looked into it in depth yet. Any type of food stock would be very useful on the onset of a catastrophe, but the cost-effectiveness of large-scale long-term food storage interventions is not great.