Claim: EAs should spend a lot of energy and time trying to end the American culture war.

America, for all its terrible problems, is the world's leading producer of new technology. Most of the benefits of the new technology actually accrue to people who are far removed from America in both time and space. Most computer technology was invented in America, and that technology has already done worlds of good for people in places like China, India, and Africa; and it's going to continue help people all over the world in the centuries and millennia to come. Likewise for medical technology. If an American company discovers a cure for cancer, that will benefit people all over the globe... and it will also benefit the citizens of Muskington, the capitol of the Mars colony, in the year 4514.

It should be obvious to any student of history that most societies, in most historical eras, are not very innovative. Europe in the 1000s was not very innovative. China in the 1300s was not very innovative, India in the 1500s was not very innovative, etc etc. France was innovative in the 1700s and 1800s but not so much today. So the fact that the US is innovative today is pretty special: the ability to innovate is a relatively rare property of human societies.

So the US is innovative, and that innovation is enormously beneficial to humanity, but it's naive to expect that the current phase of American innovation will last forever. And in fact there are a lot of signs that it is about to die out. Certainly if there were some large scale social turmoil in the US, like revolution, civil war, or government collapse, it would pose a serious threat to America's ability to innovate.

That means there is an enormous ethical rationale for trying to help American society continue to prosper. There's a first-order rationale: Americans are humans, and helping humans prosper is good. But more important is the second-order rationale: Americans are producing technology that will benefit all humanity for all time.

Currently the most serious threat to the stability of American society is the culture war: the intense partisan political hatred that characterizes our political discourse. EAs could have a big impact by trying to reduce partisanship and tribalism in America, thereby helping to lengthen and preserve the era of American innovation.

What I'm about to say is within the context of seeing you be one of the most frequent commenters on this site.

Otherwise it sounds like entitled whining.

That is really unfriendly to say; honestly the word I want to use is "nasty" but that is probably hyperbolic/hypocritical. I'm not sure if you realize this but a culture of macho challenging like this discourages people from participating. I think you and several other commenters who determine the baseline culture of this site should try to be more friendly. I have seen you in particular use a smiley before so that's good and you're probably a friendly person along many dimensions. But I want to emphasize how intimidated newcomers or people who are otherwise uncomfortable with what is probably interpreted-by-you as joshing-around with LW-friends. To you it may feel like you are pursuing less-wrongness, but to people who are more neurotic and/or more unfamiliar with this forum it can come across as feeling hounded, even if vicariously.

I do not want to pick on people I don't know but there are other frequent commenters who could use this message too.

I'm also interested in what expanded color vision would be like, but it looks like that paper was describing one of the obvious approaches I'd already thought of. I didn't read the whole paper, but from the abstract, it looks analogous to one of the widely-used treatments for color blindness, namely a single red-tinted contact lens.

Many other vertebrates are tetrachromats. Mammals are unusual for being more color-blind. The loss of two types of cone cells is thought to be due to the nocturnal phase of our evolution when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Primates have since evolved a third kind again. Birds never went through this phase and are still tetrachromats.

A gene-therapy experiment gave color vision to color-blind monkeys. This approach could theoretically produce a fourth type of cone cell as well, but could they then distinguish more colors?

Some women may be natural tetrachromats, due to a mutation in a photopigment gene in one X chromosome, but not the other. It's not clear if the tetrachromat ability of certain women is due to ancestral neural pathways from when we were tetrachromats, but given the random way gene therapy works in the monkey's cells, it seems likely that neuroplasticity is enough. Given consistent "pixels" that react preferentially to certain colors, the brain learns to perceive them as colors. Thus, I believe it's likely that the human brain could learn to perceive a color gamut built from even five or more primary colors, given proper inputs.

The fact that sensory substitution works suggests a non-invasive approach. If you could track and target the eye well enough for a display to consistently change the color sensitivity of a scattered subset of retinal cells, it's likely you could use it to train your brain to not only distinguish new colors, but to perceive new color qualia.

Seems like there should be some externalities that overrule, yeah? Like, surely the kid's preferences don't end up mattering. Kids are dumb.

Maybe the union won't let you get rid of the Chinese teacher, so as long as you are paying him you might as well have him teach? Maybe the common core demands that the foreign language be Spanish for whatever reason? Etc. Etc.

What I'm trying to say is that it feels super weird that this moral problem isn't happening in the shadow of a bigger and more boring problem. It's the whole 'for one dramatic thing to need intervention a whole bunch of boring stuff has to set it up' concept.

From a 'right' thing to do perspective, I imagine it would depend on which elective you thought would benefit the students the most. Like, you are the grown up. You know what will be valuable, better than they do. Put your weight behind what will be best for the kids.

Look, surely in your diagram there is more than just the one fork, right? You could have a heart attack, get struck by a meteor, commit suicide, take a sudden vow of poverty or whatever. Point is, there's a zero box fork, right? So what does the cow do when you will zero box?

See the trick? The whole one-box or two-box was a false binary all along. How has the everett fork where you had your heart attack play out? No quantum dice required, the cow has always been a fraud!

Except not, because it's just a logic puzzle. It doesn't need to consider the fork where you zero box. You are given as a profit maximizer. The cow is given as able to discern your future actions (including futile efforts at randomization). These are just parts of the question, same as the jail being inescapable in prisoner's dilemma.

It feels like you are circling (grazing?) around to being right. Like, earlier when you got to "In that case, you one-box.", you were there. 'That case' is the base case, the case that we all mean when we say ''Cow's problem'.

I was always an non-spiritual atheist. (But I am a non-progressive, too,)

It may seems a bit naive, but when I have heard (as a child) about that paradox about omnipotent god who can't create a rock so heavy that even he couldn't lift ... then I suddenly "knew" that quantities too big are (logically) problematic. Let alone infinite quantities.

Today, Yablo's paradox is already good enough for me, to convince me that the infinity doesn't work. How everybody doesn't agree with me about this - baffles me.

I really would prefer to the ability to see IR and UV, but in the meantime this is interesting. Sample:

...we designed a wearable passive multispectral device that uses two distinct transmission filters, one for each eye, to enhance the user's ability to perceive spectral information. We fabricated and tested a design that "splits" the response of the short-wavelength cone of individuals with typical trichromatic vision, effectively simulating the presence of four distinct cone types between the two eyes ("tetrachromacy"). Users of this device were able to differentiate metamers (distinct spectra that resolve to the same perceived color in typical observers) without apparent adverse effects to vision

At the solstice last year someone asked me "What's your origin story?" which I thought was a pretty cool way to phrase what was in the end a sort of generic question.

I would consider the option of creating a utility monster to be a reductio ad absurdum of utlitarianism. http://jsonformatter-online.com

I love how this is the hill we're dying on.