As for “Beyond the Reach of God,” I’d prefer to avoid pieces with a heavy atheist slant, given that one goal is for the series to feel welcoming to people from a lot of different backgrounds.
I think that if the essay said things like “Religious people are stupid isn’t it obvious” and attempted to do social shaming of religious people, then I’d be pretty open to suggesting edits to such parts.
But like in my other comment, I would like to respect religious people enough to trust they can deal with reading writing about a godless universe and understand the points well, even if they would use other examples themselves.
I also think many religious people agree that God will not stop the world from becoming sufficiently evil, in which case they’ll be perfectly able to appreciate the finer points of the post even though it’s written in a way that misunderstands their relationship to their religion.
I think either way, if they’re going to engage seriously with intellectual thought in the modern world they need to take responsibility and learn to engage with writing about the world which doesn’t expect that there’s an interventionist aligned superintelligence (my terminology, I don’t mean nothing by it). I don’t think it’s right to walk on eggshells around religious people, and I don’t think it makes sense to throw out powerful ideas and pieces of strongly emotional/artistic work to make sure such people don’t need to learn to engage with art and ideas that don’t share their specific assumptions about the world.
Scott’s piece was part of the second edition of the Handbook, and I agree that it’s a classic; I’d like to try working it into future material (right now, my best guess is that the next set of articles will focus on cause prioritization, and Scott’s piece fits in well there).
I think either way, if they’re going to engage seriously with intellectual thought in the modern world they need to take responsibility and learn to engage with writing about the world which doesn’t expect that there’s an interventionist aligned superintelligence.
If there were no great essays with similar themes aside from Eliezer’s, I’d be much more inclined to include it in a series (probably a series explicitly focused on X-risk, as the current material really doesn’t get into that, though perhaps it should). But I think that between Ord, Bostrom, and others, I’m likely to find a piece that makes similar compelling points about extinction risk without the surrounding Eliezerisms.
Sometimes, Eliezerisms are great; I enjoy almost everything he’s ever written. But I think we’d both agree that his writing style is a miss for a good number of people, including many who have made great contributions to the EA movement. Perhaps the chance of catching people especially well makes his essays the highest-EV option, but there are a lot of other great writers who have tackled these topics.
(There’s also the trickiness of having CEA’s name attached to this, which means that — however many disclaimers we may attach, and — there will be readers who assume it’s an important part of EA to be atheist, or to support cryonics, etc.)
To clarify, I wouldn’t expect an essay like this to turn off most religious readers, or even to complete alienate any one person; it’s just got a few slings and arrows that I think can be avoided without compromising on quality.
Of course, there are many bits of Eliezer that I’d be glad to excerpt, including from this essay; if the excerpt sections in this series get more material added to them, I might be interested in something like this:
What can a twelfth-century peasant do to save themselves from annihilation? Nothing. Nature’s little challenges aren’t always fair. When you run into a challenge that’s too difficult, you suffer the penalty; when you run into a lethal penalty, you die. That’s how it is for people, and it isn’t any different for planets. Someone who wants to dance the deadly dance with Nature, does need to understand what they’re up against: Absolute, utter, exceptionless neutrality.
If there were no great essays with similar themes aside from Eliezer’s, I’d be much more inclined to include it in a series (probably a series explicitly focused on X-risk, as the current material really doesn’t get into that, though perhaps it should). But I think that between Ord, Bostrom, and others, I’m likely to find a piece that makes similar compelling points about extinction risk without the surrounding Eliezerisms.
I see. As I hear you, it’s not that we must go overboard on avoiding atheism, but that it’s a small-to-medium sized feather on the scales that is ultimately decision-relevant because there is not an appropriately strong feather arguing this essay deserves the space in this list.
From my vantage point, there aren’t essays in this series that deal with giving up hope as directly as this essay. I think Singer’s piece or the Max Roser piece both try to look at awful parts of the world, and argue you should do more, to make progress happen faster. Many essays, like the quote from Holly about being in triage, talk about the current rate of deaths and how to reduce that number. But I think none engage so directly with the possibility of failure, of progress stopping and never starting again. I think existential risk is about this, but I think that you don’t even need to get to a discussion of things like maxipok and astronomical waste to just bring failure onto the table in a visceral and direct way.
I think that if the essay said things like “Religious people are stupid isn’t it obvious” and attempted to do social shaming of religious people, then I’d be pretty open to suggesting edits to such parts.
But like in my other comment, I would like to respect religious people enough to trust they can deal with reading writing about a godless universe and understand the points well, even if they would use other examples themselves.
I also think many religious people agree that God will not stop the world from becoming sufficiently evil, in which case they’ll be perfectly able to appreciate the finer points of the post even though it’s written in a way that misunderstands their relationship to their religion.
I think either way, if they’re going to engage seriously with intellectual thought in the modern world they need to take responsibility and learn to engage with writing about the world which doesn’t expect that there’s an interventionist aligned superintelligence (my terminology, I don’t mean nothing by it). I don’t think it’s right to walk on eggshells around religious people, and I don’t think it makes sense to throw out powerful ideas and pieces of strongly emotional/artistic work to make sure such people don’t need to learn to engage with art and ideas that don’t share their specific assumptions about the world.
Checks out, that makes sense.
If there were no great essays with similar themes aside from Eliezer’s, I’d be much more inclined to include it in a series (probably a series explicitly focused on X-risk, as the current material really doesn’t get into that, though perhaps it should). But I think that between Ord, Bostrom, and others, I’m likely to find a piece that makes similar compelling points about extinction risk without the surrounding Eliezerisms.
Sometimes, Eliezerisms are great; I enjoy almost everything he’s ever written. But I think we’d both agree that his writing style is a miss for a good number of people, including many who have made great contributions to the EA movement. Perhaps the chance of catching people especially well makes his essays the highest-EV option, but there are a lot of other great writers who have tackled these topics.
(There’s also the trickiness of having CEA’s name attached to this, which means that — however many disclaimers we may attach, and — there will be readers who assume it’s an important part of EA to be atheist, or to support cryonics, etc.)
To clarify, I wouldn’t expect an essay like this to turn off most religious readers, or even to complete alienate any one person; it’s just got a few slings and arrows that I think can be avoided without compromising on quality.
Of course, there are many bits of Eliezer that I’d be glad to excerpt, including from this essay; if the excerpt sections in this series get more material added to them, I might be interested in something like this:
I see. As I hear you, it’s not that we must go overboard on avoiding atheism, but that it’s a small-to-medium sized feather on the scales that is ultimately decision-relevant because there is not an appropriately strong feather arguing this essay deserves the space in this list.
From my vantage point, there aren’t essays in this series that deal with giving up hope as directly as this essay. I think Singer’s piece or the Max Roser piece both try to look at awful parts of the world, and argue you should do more, to make progress happen faster. Many essays, like the quote from Holly about being in triage, talk about the current rate of deaths and how to reduce that number. But I think none engage so directly with the possibility of failure, of progress stopping and never starting again. I think existential risk is about this, but I think that you don’t even need to get to a discussion of things like maxipok and astronomical waste to just bring failure onto the table in a visceral and direct way.