Ideas coming through my mind, not too well refined:
Reading this post, I came to think of this old joke:
A police officer sees a drunken man intently searching the ground near a lamppost and asks him the goal of his quest. The inebriate replies that he is looking for his car keys, and the officer helps for a few minutes without success then he asks whether the man is certain that he dropped the keys near the lamppost. “No,” is the reply, “I lost the keys somewhere across the street.” “Why look here?” asks the surprised and irritated officer. “The light is much better here,” the man.
So, how could this be applied to cause prioritisation? For one, I think the area where the keys could be lost is quite large.
My second thought would be, that “How do we prioritise what to do, to achieve the most good?” sounds to me partly like an existential question, a bit like “What is the meaning of life?” Perhaps this goes back a bit to the dropped keys, with the GP research being done focusing on the visible area of what can be done concretely. Trying to answer the question of global priorities without a grand narrative of what the globe is to become, seems incomplete to me.
Insofar as the EA moment wants to answer the concrete question of how to do create change according to one’s values instead of discussing values as such, I would expect the different branches to remain interested in their respective agendas and not into how to compare them to one another. That would be contra-productive.
Also, despite EA’s philosophical roots, I think perhaps not enough different parts of philosophy is being used. For example, if value and meaning is created by ourselves, what implications does that hvae on GPR? Has the subconscious been considered when it comes to increasing well-being? To me, the EA movement seems to be in a humanistic, individualistic or such worldview, and if a new grand narrative, like that outlined in Homo deus or Digital libido were to come, and the EA movement stays in the old paradigm, it could very well end up looking to outsiders that the primary question of concern is akin to how many angels can dance on a needle’s point.
Ideas coming through my mind, not too well refined:
Reading this post, I came to think of this old joke:
So, how could this be applied to cause prioritisation? For one, I think the area where the keys could be lost is quite large.
My second thought would be, that “How do we prioritise what to do, to achieve the most good?” sounds to me partly like an existential question, a bit like “What is the meaning of life?” Perhaps this goes back a bit to the dropped keys, with the GP research being done focusing on the visible area of what can be done concretely. Trying to answer the question of global priorities without a grand narrative of what the globe is to become, seems incomplete to me.
Insofar as the EA moment wants to answer the concrete question of how to do create change according to one’s values instead of discussing values as such, I would expect the different branches to remain interested in their respective agendas and not into how to compare them to one another. That would be contra-productive.
Also, despite EA’s philosophical roots, I think perhaps not enough different parts of philosophy is being used. For example, if value and meaning is created by ourselves, what implications does that hvae on GPR? Has the subconscious been considered when it comes to increasing well-being? To me, the EA movement seems to be in a humanistic, individualistic or such worldview, and if a new grand narrative, like that outlined in Homo deus or Digital libido were to come, and the EA movement stays in the old paradigm, it could very well end up looking to outsiders that the primary question of concern is akin to how many angels can dance on a needle’s point.