It changes the emphasis a bit from “written evidence” (and “expressed worldviews”) to “anything whatsoever.”
E.g., if classrooms in 2005 had CCTV, you could find a video of my 14-year-old self deliberately mispronouncing someone else’s name to make it sound dumb and making a comment about them having “girly” hair after someone else had already started making fun of him. I think that video would be similarly hard to watch as the original Bostrom email is hard to read.
edit: At least on some dimensions of “hard to watch”? I understand the view that Bostrom’s comments were much worse, but I think there’s something especially jarring about expressed lack of empathy when the person who’s being hurt is right in front of you, as opposed to saying dumb stuff in a small/closed setting to be intellectually edgy.
Unless people here have a far better story than “Eugenics is horrible because eugenics!” behind their usage of the word ‘horrible’ with respect to Bostrom’s words I suggest they stop using it. This is the EA forum after all and we ought to do better here than circular logic.
It changes the emphasis a bit from “written evidence” (and “expressed worldviews”) to “anything whatsoever.”
E.g., if classrooms in 2005 had CCTV, you could find a video of my 14-year-old self deliberately mispronouncing someone else’s name to make it sound dumb and making a comment about them having “girly” hair after someone else had already started making fun of him. I think that video would be similarly hard to watch as the original Bostrom email is hard to read.
edit: At least on some dimensions of “hard to watch”? I understand the view that Bostrom’s comments were much worse, but I think there’s something especially jarring about expressed lack of empathy when the person who’s being hurt is right in front of you, as opposed to saying dumb stuff in a small/closed setting to be intellectually edgy.
Unless people here have a far better story than “Eugenics is horrible because eugenics!” behind their usage of the word ‘horrible’ with respect to Bostrom’s words I suggest they stop using it. This is the EA forum after all and we ought to do better here than circular logic.