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”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Efficient altruism links
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”
Some brief notes on how to sign up for cryonics in the UK
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”
Don’t turn up the heat
“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”
State of the Paul
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”
Greatest video of all time
I made this video in several drafts over the course of last year. It illustrates where human events sit on the scale of all time, at a scale of a million years per meter. I’d meant it to show how short human timescales are on the scale of all history, but I worry that itContinue reading “Greatest video of all time”
My questions for Leah Libresco
Leah Libresco made waves earlier this year when, after years of blogging for the Patheos atheism portal, she announced her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Shortly after that, in late July, she attended the same CFAR one-week camp as me, and it was a privilege to spend time with her: she’s smart, energetic, thoughtful and veryContinue reading “My questions for Leah Libresco”
No architectural leap required
I recently listened to the Yudkowsky-Hanson debate that took place at Jane Capital in June 2011. It’ll surprise no-one that I’m more convinced by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s arguments than Robin Hanson’s, but the points below aren’t meant to recap or cover the entire debate. At roughly 34 minutes in, Hanson leans hard on the idea thatContinue reading “No architectural leap required”
Lambda calculus and Graham’s number
Very big numbers like Graham’s Number are often expressed with lengthy, clumsy, semi formal explanations. But it’s concise and convenient to express such numbers precisely in the pure lambda calculus, using Church numerals. Starting with Knuth’s up-arrow, if we define fn,a(b) = a↑nb, then f0,a(b) = ab and fn+1,a(b) = fn,ab(1). From this we get thatContinue reading “Lambda calculus and Graham’s number”
Welcome to my new blog!
When I first went to set up a blog, I wanted something I had the option of hacking on myself, based on a decent programming language and decent toolkit. Being a Pythonista, I looked for something Django based, and settled on Byteflow. I set it up and started blogging. This turns out to have beenContinue reading “Welcome to my new blog!”
Minds aren't magic 