I’m not so sure about this. Speaking as someone who talks with new EAs semi-frequently, it seems much easier to get people to take the basic ideas behind longtermism seriously than, say, the idea that there is a significant risk that they will personally die from unaligned AI. I do think that diving deeper into each issue sometimes flips reactions—longtermism takes you to weird places on sufficient reflection, AI risk looks terrifying just from compiling expert opinions—but favoring the approach that shifts the burden from the philosophical controversy to the empirical controversy doesn’t seem like an obviously winning move. The move that seems both best for hedging this, and just the most honest, is being upfront both about your views on the philosophical and the empirical questions, and assume that convincing someone of even a somewhat more moderate version of either or both views will make them take the issues much more seriously.
Hmmmm, that is weird in a way, but also as someone who has in the last year been talking with new EAs semi-frequently, my intuition is that they often will not think about things the way I expect them to.
I’m not so sure about this. Speaking as someone who talks with new EAs semi-frequently, it seems much easier to get people to take the basic ideas behind longtermism seriously than, say, the idea that there is a significant risk that they will personally die from unaligned AI. I do think that diving deeper into each issue sometimes flips reactions—longtermism takes you to weird places on sufficient reflection, AI risk looks terrifying just from compiling expert opinions—but favoring the approach that shifts the burden from the philosophical controversy to the empirical controversy doesn’t seem like an obviously winning move. The move that seems both best for hedging this, and just the most honest, is being upfront both about your views on the philosophical and the empirical questions, and assume that convincing someone of even a somewhat more moderate version of either or both views will make them take the issues much more seriously.
Hmmmm, that is weird in a way, but also as someone who has in the last year been talking with new EAs semi-frequently, my intuition is that they often will not think about things the way I expect them to.
Really? I didn’t find their reactions very weird, how would you expect them to react?