Ariel Simnegar 🔸 comments on Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare

[Ariel Simnegar 🔸]

Thanks for the compliment :)

When I write “skepticism of formal philosophy”, I more precisely mean “skepticism that philosophical principles can capture all of what’s intuitively important”. Here’s an example of skepticism of formal philosophy from Scott Alexander’s review of What We Owe The Future:

I’m not sure I want to play the philosophy game. Maybe MacAskill can come up with some clever proof that the commitments I list above imply I have to have my eyes pecked out by angry seagulls or something. If that’s true, I will just not do that, and switch to some other set of axioms. If I can’t find any system of axioms that doesn’t do something terrible when extended to infinity, I will just refuse to extend things to infinity...I realize this is “anti-intellectual” and “defeating the entire point of philosophy”.

You make a good point regarding the relative niche-ness of animal welfare and AI x-risk. I agree that my post’s analogy is crude and there are many reasons why people’s dispositions might favor AI x-risk reduction over animal welfare.