People get very nervous about defending the value of the human brain "just because," I find.

There is nothing logically wrong with simply stating that it seems to you that human beings are the only agents worthy of moral consideration, and that this is true even in the face of an ASI which can effortlessly beat them at any task. Competence does not require qualia.

But it is an aggressive claim that people are uncomfortable making because the instant someone pushes back with "Why?", you don't have a lot of smart sounding options to return to. In the absolute best case you will get an answer somewhat like the following: I am an agent of moral consideration; agents more similar to me are more likely to be of moral consideration than agents less similar to me; we do not and probably cannot know which metrics actually map to moral consideration, so we have to take a pluralist prior; computer systems may be very similar to us along some metrics, but they are extremely different to us along most others; computer systems are very unlikely to be of moral consideration.

"As a member of my species, I think chauvinism in favor of my species is fine, and it's commonplace among all animals. Such behavior is also generally accepted, so it's easy not to feel too bad about it."

I think that's the most honest, no bullshit reply to that question. I've had some opportunity to think about it in discussions with vegetarians. There are other arguments, but it soon gets very hard to even define what one is even talking about with questions like "what is consciousness" and such.

> ASI which can effortlessly beat them at any task

This doesn’t exist, though. The development of ASI is far from inevitable. Even AGI seems out of reach at this point.

You could ask the company to remove that clause for you, but it may come with two or three extra zeroes at the end of the price tag because of the legal and support ramifications that come with it.

You could make such a clause illegal, but then all software would have to come with those two or three extra zeroes.

The opposite conclusion is that you are more risk-taking when it comes to dictating the actions of others, because neither their gains nor their losses directly accrue to you. But human beings feel loss aversion more keenly than they desire gain, so this biases the advice you would give others (but not yourself) riskier in general.

I think this is exactly it. It's easy to see that there's a chance to improve things while ignoring the ways it could make things worse when they won't affect you. Should you quit the job you don't like? "Of course" the friend will say. But then you might just end up with a job you hate more that pays less, or even no job. Whether the outside perspective is helpful probably depends on how much your own perception deviates from reality. Though people do have a tendency to prefer the status quo until things change, so maybe you should always prefer the "change" option when you aren't sure.

To my ears that just sounds like a mind trick.

If you convince yourselves $250k is practically nothing, you might be able to psychologically push yourself that extra bit harder to get to $500k.

But if you look around and say "Gee, objectively speaking I am one of the richest people who has ever lived" you might be inclined to actually enjoy that money, which involves spending more time enjoying the money and less time working, which lowers your chances of eventually getting to $500k.

I imagine similar strats are employed by relative high earners in e.g. Albania, trying to go from $25k to $50k, or Pakistan trying to go from $2.5k to $5.0k.

I was about to say "Wait, you want to live in the world where gene therapy is as heavily marked up as toll roads?" in the same spirit as this. Low profit margin is the good outcome, not the bad outcome.

You seem to be in agreement with the top-level poster, then. "Margin is inversely correlated with value to humanity" corresponds to "low margin is the good outcome", presuming that you see value to humanity as the good outcome.

>I can't imagine they work well on Linux either

They do, and they work better on Ubuntu/Debian than on e.g. Alpine, which in turn works better than some wonky Yocto build (ask me how I know). The mere existence of different distributions and tool selections is not the important factor here, but the amount of discourse there is in the training data. Debian and Debian-likes run the table here.

If you dislike crunch time, you should be thankful we live in the superlinear world, and not the sublinear world. Imagine how bad the winner take all dynamics would be if 5% extra effort from you resulted in a game that is not 2% but 2 times as good as it would be otherwise.

How do I know this very comment wasn't written by someone who was having a bad time, though? The tone is frustrated and critical. I'd put the odds at maybe 1 in 5.

Where do we draw the line where we have to delete our own grouchiness from the Internet for fear of letting others consume something we created in anger?

On reddit, I delete it daily. Partly for that reason and partly because the Internet is scary.

The line though, is probably when you put my harm out into the world than good. That's probably a good place to draw it.

It's probably you! My personality has been basically the same since I was 4. I also live abroad and have for the past 5 years, though, so I guess I just lucked out and got a personality that works well in most conditions and with most people.

To math it out: 8 hours a day at $3 USD per hour with 2 weeks vacation is about $15,000 per year.

That's not a lot of money to someone who lives in the United States. But here in 2025 it gets you out of the bottom quintile of earners in China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Japan, Central America, South America, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, most of Eastern Europe...

For a job that's on demand, and requires, as far as I can tell, decent English skills and an Internet connection, but no real barriers to entry otherwise. It would have been a much stronger deal back in 2012, of course.

I'd be interested to know if the introduction of MTurk as a market competitor pushed entry level clerical wages up in some of these areas. Probably not, because English proficiency in a non English speaking country is a very rare skill not usually borne by people in the bottom 20% of income. But that's probably less true today given the dominant of English language YouTube.