personally I love Thiel & Musk and think they’ve been massive net positives for the world!
Strong agree with Musk (undecided on Thiel), and it frustrates me so much that people on this forum casually dismiss him. I would go so far as to say I think he’s been a much bigger net positive than much if not all of the EA movement—massively improving our prospects from climate change, and reducing existential risk by moving us towards being multiplanetary as fast as possible.
The standard counterarguments seem to be ‘bunkers > planets’, ‘AI makes being multiplanetary irrelevant’, and ‘climate change isn’t a big deal so Tesla doesn’t matter’. I think all three of these arguments are a) probably wrong and more importantly b) almost completely unargued for.
I’m unclear who I feel has the burden of proof on such issues. In some sense burden of proof is a silly concept here, but in another I feel like it’s very important. When 80k et al regularly talk people out of becoming engineers to go into AI safety research or similar, a view which is then often picked up by the wider community, it seems very important that those same EAs should put serious thought into counterfactuals .
well clearly Musk is much better than all the EAs, he built these massive multi-billion-dollar companies and created loads of value on the way! We’re going back to space with Elon! How cool is that? If you disagree, well, ok, I guess that’s a very bold take considering the stock market’s opinion....
re EVs, agree as well, even if you don’t believe the climate stuff (I do w/ some caveats) then Teslas are very beautiful, great cars and almost certainly good for the world on other dimensions (i.e less local pollution in urban areas etc)
Strong agree with Musk (undecided on Thiel), and it frustrates me so much that people on this forum casually dismiss him. I would go so far as to say I think he’s been a much bigger net positive than much if not all of the EA movement—massively improving our prospects from climate change, and reducing existential risk by moving us towards being multiplanetary as fast as possible.
The standard counterarguments seem to be ‘bunkers > planets’, ‘AI makes being multiplanetary irrelevant’, and ‘climate change isn’t a big deal so Tesla doesn’t matter’. I think all three of these arguments are a) probably wrong and more importantly b) almost completely unargued for.
I’m unclear who I feel has the burden of proof on such issues. In some sense burden of proof is a silly concept here, but in another I feel like it’s very important. When 80k et al regularly talk people out of becoming engineers to go into AI safety research or similar, a view which is then often picked up by the wider community, it seems very important that those same EAs should put serious thought into counterfactuals .
well clearly Musk is much better than all the EAs, he built these massive multi-billion-dollar companies and created loads of value on the way! We’re going back to space with Elon! How cool is that? If you disagree, well, ok, I guess that’s a very bold take considering the stock market’s opinion....
re EVs, agree as well, even if you don’t believe the climate stuff (I do w/ some caveats) then Teslas are very beautiful, great cars and almost certainly good for the world on other dimensions (i.e less local pollution in urban areas etc)