Category Archives: Uncategorized

I often hold back from posting first because I’m very unsure whether what I’m saying is right, and secondly because I wonder whether someone else has already said it, and better, and I’d find it if I did more thorough reading. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s much better to err on theContinue reading “Unoriginal and wrong posts ahead”

In a small Universe, an early Great Filter is unlikely, simply because we’re evidence against it. Suppose the Filter is early; how severe must it be for us to observe what we observe? By “severe” I mean: what proportion of worlds must it stop? Our existence is evidence towards an upper bound on the severity ofContinue reading “The size of the Universe and the Great Filter”

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. In general, people talk about what they’re confident of, and keep quiet about what they’re not confident of. There are areas where this can make sense; if I askContinue reading “Resolving Yeats’s Paradox”

I always have a hard time making sense of preference matrices in two-player games. Here are some diagrams I drew to make it easier. This is a two-player game: North wants to end up on the northernmost point, and East on the eastmost. North goes first, and chooses which of the two bars will beContinue reading “Diagrams for preference matrices”

As charitable causes, MIRI, CFAR, and FHI are the ones that seem to me to do the most good per pound given, and are not far apart in efficiency. However as a UK tax payer, I can give to FHI much more efficiently than I can the other two. I took some wrong turns inContinue reading “How to donate to the Future of Humanity Institute as a UK taxpayer”

In another lovely and fascinating conversation with Dr Meg Barker, the subject of efficient altruism came up. I promised to furnish her with some links – these are good places to start. Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism, TED 2013, Video, 17 minutes Blogs: GiveWell Giving What We Can 80,000 Hours EffectiveContinue reading “Efficient altruism links”

If you want to be signed up for cryonics but you haven’t quite taken the first step, you should send three emails now. First, you’re going to need life insurance to pay for your cryopreservation and storage. For that I recommend my financial advisor, Chris Morgan of Compass Independent; I persuaded him to look intoContinue reading “Some brief notes on how to sign up for cryonics in the UK”

“So you’re saying that there’s nothing wrong with raping and murdering people?” I recently got a response something like this in a discussion about moral philosophy. It’s something that people say a lot when they first encounter the idea of moral anti-realism, and I hope to address it in a future post, but first IContinue reading “Don’t turn up the heat”

In July, along with two dozen other people, I attended a CFAR 8-day minicamp in the Bay Area of California. CFAR plan to test in various ways whether minicamp has made people more effective over the course of one year; this is salient to me because I played a role in the baseline assessments thatContinue reading “State of the Paul”