To your footnote, I’m not sure how many people are directly uncomfortable, but I do find arguments that roughly boil down to “but what about Nazis?” lazy as they try to run around the discussion by pointing to a thing that will make most readers go “Nazis bad, I agree with whatever says ‘Nazis bad’ most strongly!”. This doesn’t mean thinking Nazis are bad is an unreasonable position or something, only that it looms so large it swamps many people’s ability to think clearly.
Rationalists the to taboo comparing things to Nazis or using Nazis as an example for this reason, but not all EAs are rationalists and it is a specific point in idea space that most everyone will agree is bad, but I’m also pretty sure we can cook up worse views even more people would disagree with (cf. the baby eaters of Three Worlds Collide).
Maybe the formatting of your comment cut off the later portions. It seems like your response to my comment only included a discussion of my end note. To be clear, my end note was meant as merely a side-conversation, only tangentially related to the main body of the comment.
I’ll be generous in assuming that it was merely a formatting error — I wouldn’t hope to assume that you ignored the main points of my comment in favor of writing only about my relatively unimportant end note.
I await your response to the content of my comment! :)
To your footnote, I’m not sure how many people are directly uncomfortable, but I do find arguments that roughly boil down to “but what about Nazis?” lazy as they try to run around the discussion by pointing to a thing that will make most readers go “Nazis bad, I agree with whatever says ‘Nazis bad’ most strongly!”. This doesn’t mean thinking Nazis are bad is an unreasonable position or something, only that it looms so large it swamps many people’s ability to think clearly.
Rationalists the to taboo comparing things to Nazis or using Nazis as an example for this reason, but not all EAs are rationalists and it is a specific point in idea space that most everyone will agree is bad, but I’m also pretty sure we can cook up worse views even more people would disagree with (cf. the baby eaters of Three Worlds Collide).
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Maybe the formatting of your comment cut off the later portions. It seems like your response to my comment only included a discussion of my end note. To be clear, my end note was meant as merely a side-conversation, only tangentially related to the main body of the comment.
I’ll be generous in assuming that it was merely a formatting error — I wouldn’t hope to assume that you ignored the main points of my comment in favor of writing only about my relatively unimportant end note.
I await your response to the content of my comment! :)