Agreed entirely. There is a large difference between âWe should coexist alongside not maximally effective causesâ and âWe should coexist across causes we actively oppose.â I think a good test for this would be:
You have one million dollars, and you can only do one of two things with itâyou can donate it to Cause A, or you can set it on fire. Which would you prefer to do?
I think we should be happy to coexist with (And encourage effectiveness for) any cause for which we would choose to donate the money. A longtermist would obviously prefer a million dollars go to animal welfare than be wasted. Given this choice, Iâd rather a million dollars go to supporting the arts, feeding local homeless people, or improving my local churches even though Iâm not religious. But I wouldnât donate this money to the Effective Nazism idea that other people have mentionedâIâd rather it just be destroyed. Every dollar donated to them would be a net bad for the world in my opinion.
Hmm, I think these arguments comparing to other causes are missing two key things:
they arenât sensitive to scope
they arenât considering opportunity cost
Hereâs an example of how that plays out. From my perspective, the value of the very large number of potential future lives dwarfs basically everything else. Like the value of worrying about most other things is close to 0 when I run the numbers. So in the face of those numbers, working on anything other than mitigating x-risk is basically equally bad from my perspective because thatâs all missed opportunity in expectation to save more future lives.
But I donât actually go around deriding people who donate to breast cancer research as if they donated to Nazis even though they, by comparison in scope to mitigating x-risks and the missed opportunity to have more mitigated x-risk, did approximately similarly âbadâ things from my perspective. Why?
I take their values seriously. I donât agree, but they have a right to value what they want, even if I disagree. I donât personally have to help them, but I also wonât oppose them unless they come into object level conflict with my own values.
Actually, that last sentence makes me realize a point I failed to make in the post! Itâs not that I think EAs must support things they disagree with at the object level, but that at the meta level metaethical uncertainty implies we should have an uncomfortable willingness to âhelp our âenemiesââ at the meta level even as we might oppose them at the object level.
Agreed entirely. There is a large difference between âWe should coexist alongside not maximally effective causesâ and âWe should coexist across causes we actively oppose.â I think a good test for this would be:
You have one million dollars, and you can only do one of two things with itâyou can donate it to Cause A, or you can set it on fire. Which would you prefer to do?
I think we should be happy to coexist with (And encourage effectiveness for) any cause for which we would choose to donate the money. A longtermist would obviously prefer a million dollars go to animal welfare than be wasted. Given this choice, Iâd rather a million dollars go to supporting the arts, feeding local homeless people, or improving my local churches even though Iâm not religious. But I wouldnât donate this money to the Effective Nazism idea that other people have mentionedâIâd rather it just be destroyed. Every dollar donated to them would be a net bad for the world in my opinion.
Hmm, I think these arguments comparing to other causes are missing two key things:
they arenât sensitive to scope
they arenât considering opportunity cost
Hereâs an example of how that plays out. From my perspective, the value of the very large number of potential future lives dwarfs basically everything else. Like the value of worrying about most other things is close to 0 when I run the numbers. So in the face of those numbers, working on anything other than mitigating x-risk is basically equally bad from my perspective because thatâs all missed opportunity in expectation to save more future lives.
But I donât actually go around deriding people who donate to breast cancer research as if they donated to Nazis even though they, by comparison in scope to mitigating x-risks and the missed opportunity to have more mitigated x-risk, did approximately similarly âbadâ things from my perspective. Why?
I take their values seriously. I donât agree, but they have a right to value what they want, even if I disagree. I donât personally have to help them, but I also wonât oppose them unless they come into object level conflict with my own values.
Actually, that last sentence makes me realize a point I failed to make in the post! Itâs not that I think EAs must support things they disagree with at the object level, but that at the meta level metaethical uncertainty implies we should have an uncomfortable willingness to âhelp our âenemiesââ at the meta level even as we might oppose them at the object level.