What’s are some questions you hope someone’s gonna ask that seem relatively unlikely to get asked organically?

Bonus: what are the answers to those questions?

Aside from RP, what is your best guess for the org that is morally best to give money to?

Idea/suggestion: an "Evergreen" tag, for old (6 months month? 1 year? 3 years?) posts (comments?), to indicate that they're still worth reading (to me, ideally for their intended value/arguments rather than as instructive historical/cultural artifacts)

As an example, I'd highlight Log Scales of Pleasure and Pain, which is just about 4 years old now.

I know I could just create a tag, and maybe I will, but want to hear reactions and maybe generate common knowledge.

Thanks! Let me write them as a loss function in python (ha)

For real though:

• Some flavor of hedonic utilitarianism
  • I guess I should say I have moral uncertainty (which I endorse as a thing) but eh I'm pretty convinced
• Longtermism as explicitly defined is true
  • Don't necessarily endorse the cluster of beliefs that tend to come along for the ride though
• "Suffering focused total utilitarian" is the annoying phrase I made up for myself
  • I think many (most?) self-described total utilitarians give too little consideration/weight to suffering, and I don't think it really matters (if there's a fact of the matter) whether this is because of empirical or moral beliefs
  • Maybe my most substantive deviation from the default TU package is the following (defended here):
    • "Under a form of utilitarianism that places happiness and suffering on the same moral axis and allows that the former can be traded off against the latter, one might nevertheless conclude that some instantiations of suffering cannot be offset or justified by even an arbitrarily large amount of wellbeing."
• Moral realism for basically all the reasons described by Rawlette on 80k but I don't think this really matters after conditioning on normative ethical beliefs
• Nothing besides valenced qualia/hedonic tone has intrinsic value

I think that might literally be it - everything else is contingent!

Some shrinsight (shrimpsight?) from the comments:

I'm pretty happy with how this "Where should I donate, under my values?" Manifold market has been turning out. Of course all the usual caveats pertaining to basically-fake "prediction" markets apply, but given the selection effects of who spends manna on an esoteric market like this I put a non-trivial weight into the (live) outcomes.

I guess I'd encourage people with a bit more money to donate to do something similar (or I guess defer, if you think I'm right about ethics!), if just as one addition to your portfolio of donation-informing considerations.

Done, thanks!

Even given no electricity, copies stored physically in e.g. a flash drive or hard drive would persist until electricity could be supplied, I'm almost certain

Just chiming in to say I have a similar situation, although less extreme. Was vegan for 4 years and eventually concluded it wasn’t sustainable or realistic for me. Main animal products I buy are grass fed beef, grass fed whey protein, eggs from brands that at least go to decent lengths to make themselves seem non-horrible (3rd party humane certified, outdoor access) and a bit of conventional dairy (cheese, butter). I’d be lying if I said I’ve never bought anything “worse” than those, though.

I’ve definitely thought about this and short answer: depends on who “we” is.

A sort of made up particular case I was imagining is “New Zealand is fine, everywhere else totally destroyed” because I think it targets the general class of situation most in need of action (I can justify this on its own terms but I’ll leave it for now)

In that world, there’s a lot of information that doesn't get lost: everything stored in the laptops and servers/datacenters of New Zealand (although one big caveat and the reason I abandoned the website is that I lost confidence that info physically encoded in eg a cloud server in NZ would be de facto accessible without a lot of the internet’s infrastructure physically located elsewhere), everything in all its university libraries, etc.

That is a gigantic amount of info, and seems to pretty clearly satisfy the “general info to rebuild society” thing. FWIW I think this holds if only a medium size city were to remain intact, not certain if it’s say a single town in Northern Canada, probably not a tiny fishing village, but in the latter case it’s hard to know what a tractable intervention would be.

But what does get lost? Anything niche enough not to be downloaded on a random NZers computer or in a physical book in a library. Not everything I put in the archive, to be sure, but probably most of it.

Also, 21GB of the type of info I think you’re getting at is in the “non EA info for the post apocalypse folder” because why not! :)