I see these as like important oversights, rather than areas where the post makes explicit false claims. E.g., the post does acknowledge at the top that it assumes total utilitarianism, but it’s still the case that it seems to assume perfect confidence in total utilitarianism and seems to frame that as reasonable rather than just “for the sake of argument”, and I think that both makes the post less valuable and perhaps more misleading than it could be.
But also, tbc, it’s fair enough to write a post that moves conversations forward in some ways but isn’t perfect!
(I haven’t read the comments, so maybe much of this is covered already.)
Thanks for this post. I upvoted this and think the point you make is important and under-discussed.
That said, I also disagree with this post in some ways. In particular, I think the ideal version of this post would pay more attention to:
moral uncertainty*
“doom” outcomes other than extinction (especially unrecoverable dystopia)
the benefits of cooperativeness across worldviews and the harms of adversarial approaches
See e.g. https://longtermrisk.org/gains-from-trade-through-compromise/ and https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/research/why-altruists-should-be-cooperative/
I see these as like important oversights, rather than areas where the post makes explicit false claims. E.g., the post does acknowledge at the top that it assumes total utilitarianism, but it’s still the case that it seems to assume perfect confidence in total utilitarianism and seems to frame that as reasonable rather than just “for the sake of argument”, and I think that both makes the post less valuable and perhaps more misleading than it could be.
But also, tbc, it’s fair enough to write a post that moves conversations forward in some ways but isn’t perfect!
(I haven’t read the comments, so maybe much of this is covered already.)