I claim that there is a healthy amount of moral calculation one should do, but doing too much of it has harmful side-effects. I claim, for these reasons, that Consequentialism (and the culture surrounding it) tends to result in abuse of moral calculation more so than VE. I don’t expect abuse to arise in the majority of people who engage with/follow Consequentialism or something – just more than among those who engage with/follow VE. I also claim, for reasons at the end of this section, that abuse will be more prevalent among those who engage with rationalism than those who don’t.
If I’m right about this flaw in the community culture around here, and this flaw in anyway contributed to SBF talking the way he did, shouldn’t the community consider taking some steps to curb that problematic tendency?
But also: if the EA community will only correct the flaws in itself that it can measure then… good luck. Seems short-sighted to me.
I may not have the data to back up my hypothesis, but it’s also not as if I pulled this out of thin air. And I’m not the first to find this hypothesis plausible.
I claim that there is a healthy amount of moral calculation one should do, but doing too much of it has harmful side-effects. I claim, for these reasons, that Consequentialism (and the culture surrounding it) tends to result in abuse of moral calculation more so than VE. I don’t expect abuse to arise in the majority of people who engage with/follow Consequentialism or something – just more than among those who engage with/follow VE. I also claim, for reasons at the end of this section, that abuse will be more prevalent among those who engage with rationalism than those who don’t.
If I’m right about this flaw in the community culture around here, and this flaw in anyway contributed to SBF talking the way he did, shouldn’t the community consider taking some steps to curb that problematic tendency?
What you have is a hypothesis. You could gather data to test it. But we should not take any significant action on the basis of your hypothesis.
Fair enough!
But also: if the EA community will only correct the flaws in itself that it can measure then… good luck. Seems short-sighted to me.
I may not have the data to back up my hypothesis, but it’s also not as if I pulled this out of thin air. And I’m not the first to find this hypothesis plausible.