Tell me one or more things almost nobody agrees with you on.

Brain in a vat is probably good.

Consciousness is a mathematical property of matter arrangements: people, or anything else, can have more or less of it.

Intelligence can be built purely out of scale/resources (the OpenAI approach), and in fact will most likely be built that way.

A human-values-aligned AGI dictator would almost certainly be better than democracy.

The Boston Marathon bomb plot was likely an FBI sting operation that got out of hand.

Democracy is vastly overrated

Insider trading is not immoral and while there are arguments for making it illegal, those arguments are quite weak.

late-onset gender dysphoria in males is not an intersex condition

Nuclear weapons are no worse than conventional ones and the nuclear taboo may be counterproductive in terms of preventing war

Chemical and biological weapons taboos are also not really morally or strategically justifiable and they are probably routinely violated by both adversaries and allies of the USA alike.

The concept of copyright should be eliminated in its entirety on consequentialist grounds.

Of all large, natural groupings of people, the most oppressed and underprivileged group is children.

If you care a lot about your mind, it is not unreasonable to avoid advertisements like plague rats, up to and including muting your speakers and averting your gaze.

I assume that every journalist has incentives that are significantly misaligned with my own. They are like used car salesmen but worse.

Mathematics : Induction :: Philosophy : Coinduction

Life is irreducibly in medias res. There is no imaginable perspective at the beginning or end of things.

Most adults born after 1980 in North America have been poisoned by [REDACTED]

The concern about Unfriendly AGI is right, but almost all work so far on how to make Safe AGI is still at the level of Not Even Wrong. I furthermore suspect that Eliezer would agree.

GMO foods are a boon to society. Price gouging does not exist.

Giving women the vote was a bad idea.
Difference between social classes, races, sexes in achievement are significantly genetically based.
A renewable / low carbon economy is going to be difficult to impossible.
Magick is very useful.
Free will, qualia and most of all "consciousness" are bogus ideas that will turn out to be merely delusions.

75%: Mating success (after genetics) is the strongest determinant in life satisfaction for humans.
25%: All animals feel just as strongly as humans, their perceptions are just less complex (contain less information) than the perceptions of human beings. Example: ants fear just as strongly, but the emotion of fear has no intentional content (fear of something).
25%: "Soft" panpsychism: everything is conscious, but non-animals contain mostly unstructured perceptions (phenomenological fuzz/noise).
30%: Apart from physical damage, pedophilia has no long-term negative effects on the victim.
80%: Humans do not seek happiness/feeling good. They mostly execute social/genetic programs. If they were seeking happiness/feeling good, they would behave very differently (trying to learn more about happiness, taking drugs more often, meditating a lot etc.)

The correct dollar value to assign to one human life is probably below 500$.

"Free will" is not only undefined underspecified in most people's thinking, it's irrelevant. If you don't "have it," you'll act however you act in accordance with whatever forces determine your choices and actions. If you have it, you'll act however you choose to act.

Words don't have definitions, only uses.

The true laws of reality, whatever they are, have no exceptions, anywhere, ever. One small and definitely non-central piece of this: If the things we currently call "supernatural" turn out to exist, it just means we were wrong about what those laws are, and how big nature is. Again.

Science fiction and fantasy and myth are better sources for initial learning of philosophical ideas than reasoned discourse, but have to be non-preachy to make the audience want to think about them.

Insight into a difficult problem or question often seems to involve a kind of inversion of background and foreground, where you switch which things you think of as the objects and actors. Like functions and maps instead of numbers and equations. Or money and labor instead of goods and materials. Or "holes" as charge carriers in semiconductors, and other quasi-particles (similarly, defects in otherwise perfect crystals like vacancies and dislocations instead of real but imperfect crystals).

Status is a social construct that does not and cannot fulfill anyone, and your life will be better if you learn to see through the illusion, than if you manage to attain high status.

"Enlightenment" in the Buddhist sense is a real and non-mystical thing that anyone can attain, that is closely related to metarationality and to what-therapists-point-at, and that makes life better in hard to quantify ways like "be less bothered by things" and "more adeptly shift your perspective to changing circumstances."

Music can heal in a literal sense in similar ways to guided meditation, but more passively. Certain styles of music and other types of sound can shift our mental state in a lasting way, decreasing pain, improving sleep and relaxation, and activating the body's own repair mechanisms similar to the placebo effect. This has real, quantifiable medical benefits and can reduce dependence on some medications for some patients.

Fundamental physics is probably uncomputable and acts on general real variables, but in a way we can't feasibly capture to do hypercomputation.

If you have a lot of money, your kid should not be enrolled in a regular school with a 6h school day (plus homework) and 30 students per teacher. They should be getting private tutoring with an adaptive curriculum plus some specific socialization-oriented extracurriculars. Anything less and you're just a lazy parent.

To start with, most of the material as covered on LessWrong and the rationalist community, which I for the most part agree with, is contrarian- to name a few, atheism, radical probabilism, transhumanism, and probably a few more things that end in -ism. As such, I'm going to list several things that I believe, and yet most of LessWrong (I think) does not agree with me about:

1. MIRI IS AN INEFFECTIVE GROUP. Yudkowsky and MIRI did a great job of identifying problems with AI alignment. They determined all of the ways that the current ideas and solutions didn't work, and then presented the questions regarding alignment that needed to be solved to build an FAI. And then they sat there and accomplished pretty much nothing for several years. Yes, yes, they've published some obscure papers, but they haven't made much real progress.

2. THERE IS NO REAL MORALITY. First off, I'm relativist, and I recognize that there's no point in following any select system because none of them are justified from any outside criterion. As such, anyone can choose their own utility function, and while it might be 'wrong' it is not in fact irrational. But more importantly, even those who do legitimately try to do the right thing are very confused, as morality is not a real utility function, just a set of contradictory rules that were not meant for many of the philosophical issues we face. As such, I choose to follow a utility function of my own, with morality and/or selfishness blended as I see fit.

3. MEDITATION IS POINTLESS. This definitely isn't a major issue, but so many people on LessWrong seem to like it that I wanted to include it. All right, maybe meditation helps relax you, and it's fine if you have it for a hobby, but it doesn't reveal the truth of your mental processes or any of that trash. Meditation is biasing people to think about Deeply Wise things, and while it isn't harmful it really help you think.

4. [...] IS A TERRIBLE POLITICAL PARTY. I put ellipses there because Democrat/Libertarian/Republican/any other party as typically expressed is a really bad system. My own political philosophy is somewhat of a very strange blend between far left and far right, but the current political parties are all affiliating ideas with each other when they are completely unrelated, forcing you to think of it as a package deal. Admittedly this has been discussed on LessWrong, but I doubt most people have factored it into their worldview. If you hold allegiance to any political party you will be drastically biased.

5. THERE IS A SIGNIFICANT (I WOULD ESTIMATE 33%) CHANCE THAT INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS IN FACT CORRECT. The reason I believe this is possible is not because of some religion (in fact, my estimate that any currently held religion is accurate is around 1%) but because of the simulation hypothesis. I believe that if future civilizations do end up developing sentient simulations, then the chance that we are the first in the chain of simulators to do so, and not in fact simulated ourselves, is low. Sentient simulations are almost definitely physically possible, but the question is whether they could be developed- and I think the chance of that is around 30%.

There are more places I disagree with beliefs held by members of LessWrong, but these are probably some of the most important.

Human life is far less valuable than most people think. Each one lasts less than a century, and we can make more very easily. If it didn't cause panic and overreaction, losing a billion or two would have very little impact.

1. Alcohol consumption should be drastically reduced in an industrialized society, close to forbidden.
2. White lies are worse than normal lies as the one who says it will convince themselves they are doing the right thing. You should never say a white lie.

All possible universes exist, but the usefulness of this statement is severely limited by the fact that we have no good ways of figuring out what a universe is.

Shakespeare was not an exceptionally good writer compared to moderns, his influence is because he had fewer competitors

Most people's lives are not worth living.

Humans will be happier without smartphones

I can probably find a wiki article with a list of supporters for each of this, but whatever:
I lean towards non-negative personal utility, i.e. ignore suffering and count only good things - that way death is the worst without infinities.
Consequently, multiplicative utility aggregation (or some other practical approximation of maxmin) makes more sense than utilitarianism (meaning additive aggregation).
https://myanimelist.net/anime/308/Zettai_Shounen is masterpiece.
Intelligence may be very subjective/human-centric the way other things like time or quantum measure seem to be.
And it's basically mainstream, but I've yet to make someone agree with me on this one the way I want: panpsychism with non-fundamental self completely solves the Hard problem of consciousness.

infanticide should be legal (up to age ~2-3)

Money is pretty much the best tool we have for benchmarking value and coordinating mutually beneficial exchanges

From adolescence through to their mid thirties, most women wield immense social power that is almost wholly unavailable to most men

Black people in the US probably have worse life outcomes in large part because of lower (compared to e.g. Asians) average intelligence and conscientiousness, and this is indeed genetic.

Minors (of any age) should have the right to vote.

Benevolent dictatorships are possible

The worst consequences of climate change might be caused by the future political reactions to the crisis

child-adult sex is sometimes permissible,

Monarchy with epistocracy is the superior form of governernment.

Only property owners should be able to vote.

Racism is generally correct. We should be genetically engineering humanity to be superior, and sacrificing many lives to develop the science and engineering principles for it.

Using Trump to disrupt the incestuous ruling class and advance plans to pull out of the middle east was worth it.

Utility of destroying cultural groups

Humans are more bad than good

Racial and gender differences are genetically induced and real

90% of humans should be exterminated

Gender should be abolished.

Fiction is useless and very harmful.

A lot of good has come out of the pandemic

"noise music" is more enjoyable to listen to than "normal music"

Fuck copyright. I don't know any alternative, but still, fuck copyright.

There should be a 100% tax on inheritance

[RE[RE[RE[re[...]ted]TED]TED]TED]

Sometimes allowing the good guys to win means facilitating bad guys too (e.g. end to end encryption, anonymous internet browsing, etc)

The US has committed, and keeps committing, crimes against humanity.

Access to technological progress is not the most efficient way to improve people's life.

the family unit is the root cause of inequality and in a truly equal society nobody would know who their biological parents were

There is no such thing as consciousness.

Death/inexistence is a perferable state to consciousness

Capitalism is the greatest force of good ever. Most charities are either misguided or scams.

Veganism is actually a good thing

Land Value Tax, Rent Control and Immigration Control

performance fees are justified even if the fund went down as long as you beat the benchmark

The true value of professional wrestling

Intelligence is hereditary. Therefor it is important that smart people have more children.

Hitler was not the ultimate villain of the world. Communism is.

Living is isomorphic to being dead

Islam has a problem with terrorism.

Capitalism will end in this century

You can do right for wrong reasons

People can usually be trusted to do good.

That alcohol is a drug, and shouldn't be used regularly.

Everyone is selfish and rather spends money for personal entertainment than donate money to save starving children in Africa.

Bribing an official is not immoral. The official sets a price, and then you should be legally able to pay it. It doesn't matter whether what the official does is legal or not, because it's not up to you to decide this. As there is usually no way around an official, and if she wants a bribe, it's your only option.