Gain of function research is supposed to help with pandemics, right? Did it help with COVID?

"Better" according to what metric?

It may be the case that there is a tendency for high-intelligence humans to pick "more enlightened" goals. Perhaps there is a natural "enlightened goals" attractor for our species.

However I don't think we can extrapolate from that to a fundamentally alien AI.

I think even if this statistical tendency exists, it has clear counterexamples -- consider that 2 genius chess players may have opposite goals, of beating one another. And we shouldn't bet the future of humanity on this statistical tendency extrapolating outside of the original distribution of human species.

Here are some intuition pumps on how diverse goals can be even across intelligent species:

* Orcas killing sharks for their livers: https://www.livescience.com/2-orcas-slaughter-19-sharks-in-a... I don't believe dolphins show the same level of violence, even though both are smart cetaceans

* Intelligent dogs bred to be responsive and attentive to human needs -- unlike close cousins like the wolf

* Chimpanzees and bonobos are both related to humans, both highly intelligent, but with very different culture and goals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Ko0Hzi47U

This has been discussed under "warning shots" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/idipkijjz5PoxAwju/warning-sh...

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7b9ZDTAYQY9k6FZHS/...

What's the most complex life which could conceivably exist in such a cold environment? Presumably there's very little sunlight penetrating through the ice to the liquid ocean.

My understanding is that opinion polls show most people have a moderate opinion on abortion, which seems pretty reasonable given that "becoming human" is something that happens in a continuous manner over a 9-month period.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35006303

Re: "the edifices from which actual powers spring" -- if you want a high-paying job as a doctor, maybe you'll be best served by adopting their language guidelines. I could see the trend spreading through the general population because playing the language game becomes the best way to achieve "actual powers".

I think public opinion polling might actually solve the problem, because the actual group has greater moral authority than language police activists. I suspect people might not cite this Atlantic article during a discussion of whether their organization should adopt language policing for fear of coming across as a reactionary old fogey. But if you were citing a poll of the group in question, that's a level of moral authority that's hard for a language police activist to argue against.

Basically the hypothesis to test here is that a latinx-type reaction is fairly common, it just doesn't generally reach public consciousness the way it did in the case of latinx.

The troll argument here is: now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".

Did you notice this section?

>Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington.

>....

>Public criticism led Stanford to abolish outright its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative—not for being ridiculous, but, the university announced, for being “broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity.”

Even if no one is arguing back, it seems like the language police are winning.