Good and Real
Book review: Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics by Gary Drescher. This book tries to derive ought from is. The more important steps explain why we should choose the one-box...
View ArticleHuman Enhancement
Book review: Human Enhancement, edited by Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom. This book starts out with relatively uninteresting articles and only the last quarter of so of it is worth reading. Because...
View ArticleThe Honor Code
Book review: The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah. This book argues that moral changes such as the abolition of dueling, slavery, and foot-binding are not the result of...
View ArticleThe Righteous Mind
Book review: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt. This book carefully describes the evolutionary origins of human moralizing, explains why tribal...
View ArticleSingularity Hypotheses
Book review: Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment. This book contains papers of widely varying quality on superhuman intelligence, plus some fairly good discussions of what...
View ArticleEthical diets
I’ve seen some discussion of whether effective altruists have an obligation to be vegan or vegetarian. The carnivores appear to underestimate the long-term effects of their actions. I see a nontrivial...
View ArticleBeyond AI
Book review: Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine by J. Storrs Hall The first two thirds of this book survey current knowledge of AI and make some guesses about when and how it will take...
View ArticleWhy Humans Cooperate
Book review: Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation by Joseph Henrich, Natalie Henrich. This book provides a clear and informative summary of the evolutionary theories that...
View ArticleTurning the Repugnant Conclusion into Utopia
Some of Robin Hanson’s Malthusian-sounding posts prompted me to wonder how we can create a future that is better than the repugnant conclusion. It struck me that there’s no reason to accept the...
View ArticleMoral Machines
Book review: Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong by Wendell Wallach and Collin Allen. This book combines the ideas of leading commentators on ethics, methods of implementing AI, and the...
View ArticleEthical Diet Reviewed
My first year of eating no factory farmed vertebrates went fairly well. When eating at home, it took no extra cost or effort to stick to the diet. I’ve become less comfortable eating at restaurants,...
View ArticleChildhood’s Em
Will young ems be created? Why and how will it happen? Any children that exist as ems will be important as em societies mature, because they will adapt better to em environments than ems who uploaded...
View ArticleDealism
In this post, I’ll describe features of the moral system that I use. I expect that it’s similar enough to Robin Hanson’s views I’ll use his name dealism to describe it, but I haven’t seen a...
View ArticleThe Life You Can Save
Book review: The Life You Can Save, by Peter Singer. This book presents some unimpressive moral claims, and some more pragmatic social advocacy that is rather impressive. The Problem It is all too...
View ArticleOntological Crises
Descriptions of AI-relevant ontological crises typically choose examples where it seems moderately obvious how humans would want to resolve the crises. I describe here a scenario where I don’t know how...
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