-dsr-

Grew up in fairly rural upstate New York, where you can expect lots of snow and you can unironically envy neighbors who have working Franklin stoves when the power goes out.

I can confirm all of the above, plus: if you are lucky enough to have an Army-Navy surplus store around, one of your handmedowns is likely to be an N3B parka. Definitely not Russian or German or stylish. But it will keep everything above your thighs warm, except your hands. The pockets are uninsulated.

What would effective accounting even look like?

True, it’s too advanced for my brain due to being poisoned by Perl at a young age.

This is just shit.

A bunch of youse is thinking irrationally.

It’s them what go in front of the cannon.

Good luck with that – I’m a pzombie this year for tax purposes.

Genetically altering IQ is more or less about flipping a sufficient number of IQ-decreasing variants to their IQ-increasing counterparts. This sounds overly simplified, but it’s surprisingly accurate; most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present

Contradicted by previous text in the same article (diabetes), not to mention have you even opened a college-level genetics text in the last decade?

Anyway, I would encourage these people to flip their own genome a lot, except that they probably won’t take the minimum necessary precautions of doing so under observation in isolation. “Science is whatever people in white coats say it is, and I bought a nice white coat off Amazon!”

The thing about rationalists is that they are fully invested in irrational beliefs, which they prefer not to examine. In other words, just like most people, but with a specific terminology that, if they use it properly, identifies them as one of the elect.

I suggest that whenever your relative talks about EA, you talk about kindness. When they bring up longtermism, point out that you have to survive in the short term to reach the long term, so working on better policies now is rather important. If they start in on life extension, note that until quite recently, all the major advances in improving average human lifespan come from improving infant mortality, and be prepared to explain the demographic transition.

When they go extropian, say that it’s a nice vision of the future but your kids are unlikely to see it unless we fix the world we’re currently in.

But most of all, point out that multiplying infinitesimals by infinities to justify any course of action (a) is Pascal’s Wager and (b) justifies every course of action – so it can’t justify any.

That’s the downside of the XKCD unlucky ten thousand.

I’d like to believe that it’s a temporarily embarrassed millionaire coping mechanism: “I will of course come out on top as an alpha techbro philosopher-king, but while I’m in the process of being recognized you should all definitely give me money. Better not make it conditional on me doing anything.”

Whereas I prefer forging a clear path to long-term happiness for humans by getting them all past the demographic transition, improving quality of life and reducing the numbers by making it less attractive to have many kids. I suspect the best way to do that involves regulating capitalism down to a nice incentive system.

“If there’s an order for Ebola that’s being ordered by the CDC in Atlanta, that’s great,”

said no one sane, ever.

How about: “We have an installation in the CDC’s BSL-4 laboratory where we print dangerous DNA on demand, and a second installation in their BSL-2 space where we print less-dangerous material. Nothing ever has to leave the building.”

That would be something close to rational policy.