https://workflowy.com/shared/15df86ce-1b8e-57ca-dbb2-30a42d949a59/

https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/some-rambling-ai-prognostication/

I think this is what convinced MIRI to take seriously the idea that intelligence explosion might not be a local FOOM

I’m a straightforward person; I don’t expect or want to be told pretty lies. The situation is very simple. I don’t like any of these people at all, to the extent that I would be indifferent on an emotional level if they actually were wiped out by some horde of malcontents. I don’t believe that they are cultured, or civilised; they strike me as shit that naturally rises to the top of a shitty system. That goes for their employees too. Nonetheless, I am merely a critic, or aspiring critic, in an infantile culture who is neither equipped nor remotely inclined towards political violence.

The problem is that, whereas initially I believed their fuss about “single panes” being shattered, at this point I no longer regard them as capable of rational diplomacy. It might seem oh so clever to make light of the police state, abuse of power, and big political lies but after a point, the total inability to be sincere makes these people seem worthless and sub-human. “Ha ha, I’m a police state”; “You’re leaning on one pane of glass“. Sorry, but these things don’t go together. I’m very much inclined to ignore any of these po-faced, unsubstantiated claims from now on.

That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx

The author of such a diagram would learn how much they owe to other thinkers. Indeed rather than describing their beliefs they could simply list the names that thought them first. And that would be a grave narcissistic injury.

Similarly, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology can all be united without difficulty. It’s so obvious that I really shouldn’t have been the first to do it, yet I have seen no hint of it elsewhere.

What I do for now is just slap it into google and sometimes add ‘stanford’ if necessary.

Alternatively you can just ask me, I have infinite patience for this stuff. Downside being I’m an eccentric.

Is there a webbed Moral Philosophy 101 article you could steer me towards, describing the major schools of thought? A Venn diagram would be ideal. I am trying to relate snippets that I have picked up at places like EconTalk:

moral sympathy
contractarianism
deontology
consequentialism
utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is obviously a subset of consequentialism, but the boundaries of the former are unclear to me. Is there something major missing here?

The context for this is Handle’s discussion of Arthur Leff’s Memorandum from the Devil.
http://www.xenosystems.net/chaos-patch-8/#comment-33086

Some of the books by Lewis (Screwtape Letters, Hideous Strength) have elements that highlight the Janus-faced danger of occultism: the risks of becoming a materialist who denies demons or a magician who bargains with demons, both courting danger in their own way. Many forget that demons can think for themselves, have their own agenda, and are watching you, meaning they have your psych profile. Dealing with such entities is generally not safe. The worst idea, that the demons try to promote, is becoming a materialist magician, a sort of New Age guru who thinks, as I gather many self-help publishers of the bad sort do, that their interactions with preternatural entities can be explained by “cosmic forces” or “the Law of Attraction” or such twaddle.

Demons are unlikely to appear with horns and a tail anywhere. To paraphrase Einstein, demons are subtle and very malicious. For a simple hypothetical situation illustrating how much mischief one can get up to with a little hidden information and the ability to give bad suggestions, imagine a demon which peeks at a winning lottery ticket, and stealthily whispers in a poor man’s ear “It’s your lucky day”, so the man spends his last coin on a lottery ticket and wins five hundred quid. Convinced that this was his own idea and that he can now detect “lucky days”, the man is later influenced to take out a loan for some other lottery, loses, and winds not merely broke but deep in debt.

If you consider what behavior is intuitively advisable for avoiding this sort of shit, you may notice that Applied Demonology (ha) is close to basic rationalism: believe in the material when it can be demonstrated material, avoid people vaguely claiming to connect your chakras to the Soul of the Universe for guidance, and estimate the value of lottery tickets based on what generally happens with lottery tickets, not on whether you feel lucky or whether you won last time.

You’re welcome. Just another side benefit provided by Christianity, much like our monotheism laid the basis for science. If you believe in a bunch of gods all squabbling with one another, where the sea god tried to steal the tree god’s crown so the tree god had the wind god beat up the sea god, predicting natural phenomena seems like a task involving a theopsychologist, a theoanthropologist, a chronicler tracking the grievances, and perhaps a few offerings to get the particular god of something on your side. Once it becomes clear that there’s a single God who made wind and water both, it’s easier to expect that wind and water will behave in accordance with the laws laid down by God, and now it’s a matter of figuring out what those laws are.

I am, of course, generalizing and simplifying horribly for the internet comment section. Read a book on the topic if you want a book on the topic.

But seriously, don’t do occultism. At best it’s an amusing waste of time, which you could get with a computer game. At worst it’s an opportunity to take some of the most terrible advice in the world.

Since I’ve given demonological advice here, I might as well append another suggestion on topic: Don’t try untrained exorcisms, either. The “good” outcome is that you end up yelling lines from horror movies at psychiatric patients who just need valium. The “bad” outcome is that you end up trying to have argument with an entity that has access to a complete list of every argument you’ve ever been in, while you can’t even see its facial expression, and if anyone else is present, things can get far worse as the demon’s host begins destroying your reputation by publicly listing your misdeeds then adding a few unverifiable accusations that sound worryingly plausible in light of the verifiable ones it’s just given.

To round out a list which seems like it should have three wackadoo-sounding items, be careful about mysticism too. One metaphor is that it’s like fasting, another is that it’s like staring at the sun. Not as dangerous as occultism or exorcism, but still risky. Perform mysticism only under the guidance only under the guidance of experienced, stable mystics. This requires good judgment, for which there is little that can substitute.

(The ban on DNA testing is a response to some bullshit ‘gene-therapy’ scam that involves being injected with stem cells by cowboy entrepreneurs linked to the PLA — so it’s nothing to do with eugenics-phobia.)