I thought this was very interesting, thanks for writing up. Two comments
It was useful to have a list of reasons why you think the EV of the future could be around zero, but it still found it quite vague/hard to imagine—why exactly would more powerful minds be mistreating less powerful minds? etc. - so I’d would have liked to see that sketched in slightly more depth.
It’s not obvious to me it’s correct/charitable to draw the neglectedness of MCE so narrowly. Can’t we conceive of a huge ammount of moral philosophy, and well as social activism, both new and old, as MCE? Isn’t all EA outreach an indirect form of MCE?
I’m sympathetic to both of those points personally.
1) I considered that, and in addition to time constraints, I know others haven’t written on this because there’s a big concern of talking about it making it more likely to happen. I err more towards sharing it despite this concern, but I’m pretty uncertain. Even the detail of this post was more than several people wanted me to include.
But mostly, I’m just limited on time.
2) That’s reasonable. I think all of these boundaries are fairly arbitrary; we just need to try to use the same standards across cause areas, e.g. considering only work with this as its explicit focus. Theoretically, since Neglectedness is basically just a heuristic to estimate how much low-hanging fruit there is, we’re aiming at “The space of work that might take such low-hanging fruit away.” In this sense, Neglectedness could vary widely. E.g. there’s limited room for advocating (e.g. passing out leaflets, giving lectures) directly to AI researchers, but this isn’t affected much by advocacy towards the general population.
I do think moral philosophy that leads to expanding moral circles (e.g. writing papers supportive of utiltiarianism), moral-circle-focused social activism (e.g. anti-racism, not as much something like campaigning for increased arts funding that seems fairly orthogonal to MCE), and EA outreach (in the sense that the A of EA means a wide moral circle) are MCE in the broadest somewhat-useful definition.
Caspar’s blog post is a pretty good read on the nuances of defining/utilizing Neglectedness.
I thought this was very interesting, thanks for writing up. Two comments
It was useful to have a list of reasons why you think the EV of the future could be around zero, but it still found it quite vague/hard to imagine—why exactly would more powerful minds be mistreating less powerful minds? etc. - so I’d would have liked to see that sketched in slightly more depth.
It’s not obvious to me it’s correct/charitable to draw the neglectedness of MCE so narrowly. Can’t we conceive of a huge ammount of moral philosophy, and well as social activism, both new and old, as MCE? Isn’t all EA outreach an indirect form of MCE?
I’m sympathetic to both of those points personally.
1) I considered that, and in addition to time constraints, I know others haven’t written on this because there’s a big concern of talking about it making it more likely to happen. I err more towards sharing it despite this concern, but I’m pretty uncertain. Even the detail of this post was more than several people wanted me to include.
But mostly, I’m just limited on time.
2) That’s reasonable. I think all of these boundaries are fairly arbitrary; we just need to try to use the same standards across cause areas, e.g. considering only work with this as its explicit focus. Theoretically, since Neglectedness is basically just a heuristic to estimate how much low-hanging fruit there is, we’re aiming at “The space of work that might take such low-hanging fruit away.” In this sense, Neglectedness could vary widely. E.g. there’s limited room for advocating (e.g. passing out leaflets, giving lectures) directly to AI researchers, but this isn’t affected much by advocacy towards the general population.
I do think moral philosophy that leads to expanding moral circles (e.g. writing papers supportive of utiltiarianism), moral-circle-focused social activism (e.g. anti-racism, not as much something like campaigning for increased arts funding that seems fairly orthogonal to MCE), and EA outreach (in the sense that the A of EA means a wide moral circle) are MCE in the broadest somewhat-useful definition.
Caspar’s blog post is a pretty good read on the nuances of defining/utilizing Neglectedness.