Not that I take the whole Bostrom superintelligence argument too seriously, but this is an incredibly weak argument (or more accurately, bundle of barely-related arguments thrown at a wall in the hope that some stick) against it. Feel free to skip the long digression about how nerds who think technology can make meaningful changes in a relatively short amount of time are presumptuous megalomaniacs whose ideas can safely be dismissed without consideration, it's nothing that hasn't been said before.
I'd prefer links to stories about new ventures, their strategic impact, etc, but given that anything worth discussing usually produces multiple stories it's better that all the discussion occur on a single thread with a link to the announcement.
I'm confident that heavily armed hicks trying to found some sort of confederacy 2.0 could offer at least as much resistance as the Taliban. The US government doesn't exactly have a great track record of successfully suppressing insurgencies, even without having to do it on American soil, which would increase the public relations hit for collateral damage (I imagine CNN would care more if predator drones started bombing American weddings, for example).
Thanks for putting this together! As someone interested in cognitive biases, I wonder: how many of these effects have survived the recent replication crisis intact?
Based on your inability to provide a citation my immediate assumption is that your assertion is untrue. This is generally a reasonable heuristic. If only for the sake of convincing bystanders, can you please provide a citation for this claim?
Right, right of course. Your totally secular belief system is what led you to a moral viewpoint in which it is immoral to rent the mouth, vagina or anus, of another human being, but (one assumes) renting their penis is totally fine.
So as a gay man, it would be highly immoral for me to have sex with a prostitute whom is a bottom, but renting the services of a top for the night would be totally fine. Am I interpreting you correctly (not that I have, or plan on, engaging the services of sex workers. Not really my scene.)?
Maybe you can start purifying your soul (because clearly there's some sort of puritanical religious thing going on here) by abstaining from the use of electronic devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan_mining_and_ethics
Then replace selling fruit with backbreaking manual labor: coal mining, digging ditches, whatever. Something that causes real and permanent damage to one's body over time. Is selling your labor in such a way morally wrong?