avoid trying to persuade; instead ask questions that prompt the person to think concretely about the situation themself,
If your target is rational, this should fail.
Your goal is to get someone to believe in AI risk, so by definition you are trying to persuade them of it. You might be trying to persuade only indirectly, but your target should recognize that that's what you're doing and should be equally as skeptical as if you were doing it directly.
Also, remember epistemic learned helplessness. It is correct for most people to refuse to believe in AI risk no matter what you say.
Well, there you go: Since around half the population is under the age of 35, at least one bit of the missing decision power is exerted by 55 delegates in Philadelphia in 1787. Though the “natural-born citizen” clause comes from a letter sent by John Jay to George Washington, a suggestion that was adopted without debate by the Philadelphia Convention.
By this reasoning, the restriction on having to be a US citizen to be a candidate is also something that was decided by 55 delegates in 1787, and you should add 4-5 more bits to cover the fact that these 55 delegates prevented you from picking a non-citizen to be president.
If you are a perfect reasoner, some variations on Newcomb will subject you and Omega to the halting problem, in which case the premise "Omega can predict your actions" is inconsistent.
And my answer to the smoking lesion problem is (given the usual formulation of the problem, which may not include the phrase "want to"), what mechanism are you suggesting leads someone with the gene to be more likely to smoke? If it doesn't affect your reasoning process (but may affect premises, like how desirable smoking is), then deciding to smoke or not smoke as the result of a reasoning process is not correlated with cancer, and you should decide to smoke. If it affects your reasoning process, the question "what should an ideal reasoner choose" is irrelevant.
1It reads like an essay arguing X with a tiny disclaimer at the end to cover yourself, but fair enough. I've retracted the downvote.
I voted this down. Why? Because if you're going to post an old argument which has been disputed many times, you should acknowledge the common responses to it and be able to articulate some reason as to why you don't accept them. This post has utterly failed at doing that.
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1What I said had nothing to do with the specific number 12, except that that's what the original post used. My point was that you can't make a list of a lot of evils (regardless of the exact number) and assign percentages and multiply them together. When asked to assign percentages for unlikely events, people assign them in a logically inconsistent way. The entire argument consists of abusing this inconsistency in order to make the chance of evil look high.
11There are lots of conceivable ways one might do enormous evil. Thus, the odds that we’d manage to avoid doing evil in any of those ways are fairly low. If there were just one potential atrocity, it wouldn’t be too hard to avoid it. But when there are many different ones, even if there’s a 90% chance of avoiding any particular one, the odds we’d avoid them all are low.
That depends on the probability you assign to each one. This is just another argument that takes advantage of 1) the fact that people are bad at estimating small probabilities in the first place, and 2) scope insensitivity leading people to not make smaller probability estimates for things that are less likely and more specific. (And the number 90% is ridiculous anyway.)
If you name 12 possible sources of evil, the probability for each one shouldn't sum up to more than the total probability of evil. It should not be possible to get a large total by naming 12 cases, asking for probabilities for each case, and combining them. The fact that you can do this doesn't mean that the probability of evil is high, it means that people are bad with numbers.
1Companies that discriminate make less money, but that doesn't mean that the company goes out of business tomorrow. It just means that on the average, the company may not last quite as long as other companies. You still get a steady state where companies keep entering and leaving the market, but each company that enters with bad business practices lasts somewhat less time than the other companies. That will never result in such companies not existing in the market at all. (And woe be you if a company doesn't discriminate, gets huge, and then starts discriminating. Its advantages from being big and entrenched are so big that discrimination won't reduce its survivability by a noticeable amount.)
That also ignores the possibility of multipolar traps where most companies discriminate, and failing to do so gets a company in trouble from all the ones that do. They would be better off if nobody discriminated, but a single company who fails to discriminate would lose.
By your reasoning, Disney and Google would have gone out of business already.
(And I can name a lot of money-losing practices where companies with those practices are still around.)
1Noah Smith’s argument that American pop culture is stagnant in part because we’ve mined out some of the creative fields that new tech has unlocked.
Marvel superhero movies used to be reliable hits. This is no longer true. DC has been doing much worse for superhero movies, but still has had some hits. The tech for being able to create them is pretty recent. I don't believe for a moment that there are fewer hits because it's been mined out; the studios are just producing crappy superhero movies.
The big image on his page is the Rise of Skywalker and I don't believe for a moment that Star Wars has been mined out either. There have been some good Star Wars productions; the recent movies just weren't among them.
If you have a way to buy a first class ticket and bypass the TSA, I'd like to know about it.
I would call this evidence of quality decreasing. Superhero movies have gone down in quality, which is why people don't watch so many of them. People who hate superheroes anyway tend to be aghast at the idea that superhero movies can vary in quality, but that's what you are seeing.
I'd also point out that heavy woke influence has made movies and TV worse. There's a discussion on ACX right now about movies that can't be made any more. And Disney has run Marvel and Star Wars into the ground because of woke.
And ten years ago I could watch multiple new science fiction television shows with only basic cable. I can't do this any more because streaming services have fragmented the market.
"Best information" ignores slop taking over the Internet and enshittification of just about every online services. "Best cars" ignores not only touchscreens, but always on Internet spyware in cars now that the technology allows it. Even most phones no longer have 35mm connections or SD slots. Video games have worse spyware and anticheat malware, and have to be constantly patched online. And game consoles have peaked already; compare the PS5 exclusives to the PS4. (Many video games are also subject to woke.)