How does this change the meaning? (Genuine question) Youâre still saying itâs likely almost everyone has done things like that email or worse, which seems unlikely to me.
It changes the emphasis a bit from âwritten evidenceâ (and âexpressed worldviewsâ) to âanything whatsoever.â
E.g., if classrooms in 2005 had CCTV, you could find a video of my 14-year-old self deliberately mispronouncing someone elseâs name to make it sound dumb and making a comment about them having âgirlyâ 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 âhard to watchâ? I understand the view that Bostromâs comments were much worse, but I think thereâs something especially jarring about expressed lack of empathy when the person whoâs being hurt is right in front of you, as opposed to saying dumb stuff in a small/âclosed setting to be intellectually edgy.
Unless people here have a far better story than âEugenics is horrible because eugenics!â behind their usage of the word âhorribleâ with respect to Bostromâs words I suggest they stop using it. This is the EA forum after all and we ought to do better here than circular logic.
Youâre still saying itâs likely almost everyone has done things like that email or worse, which seems unlikely to me.
Consider a random human who spent about 278,860 hours as an adult person on earth (as Bostrom has, according to Wikipedia). Letâs label that random person as âextremely morally robustâ if during those 278,860 hours they have not once done something at least as horrible as writing that email (as a philosophy student, in a discussion about offending people, in 1995).
Suppose someone is robust to the point that the chance of them doing something at least as horrible in a random hour of their adult life is like the chance to flip a coin and get heads 15 times in a row. Even that hypothetical human is very unlikely (~0.02% chance) to get the âextremely morally robustâ label as defined above.
How does this change the meaning? (Genuine question) Youâre still saying itâs likely almost everyone has done things like that email or worse, which seems unlikely to me.
It changes the emphasis a bit from âwritten evidenceâ (and âexpressed worldviewsâ) to âanything whatsoever.â
E.g., if classrooms in 2005 had CCTV, you could find a video of my 14-year-old self deliberately mispronouncing someone elseâs name to make it sound dumb and making a comment about them having âgirlyâ 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 âhard to watchâ? I understand the view that Bostromâs comments were much worse, but I think thereâs something especially jarring about expressed lack of empathy when the person whoâs being hurt is right in front of you, as opposed to saying dumb stuff in a small/âclosed setting to be intellectually edgy.
Unless people here have a far better story than âEugenics is horrible because eugenics!â behind their usage of the word âhorribleâ with respect to Bostromâs words I suggest they stop using it. This is the EA forum after all and we ought to do better here than circular logic.
Consider a random human who spent about 278,860 hours as an adult person on earth (as Bostrom has, according to Wikipedia). Letâs label that random person as âextremely morally robustâ if during those 278,860 hours they have not once done something at least as horrible as writing that email (as a philosophy student, in a discussion about offending people, in 1995).
Suppose someone is robust to the point that the chance of them doing something at least as horrible in a random hour of their adult life is like the chance to flip a coin and get heads 15 times in a row. Even that hypothetical human is very unlikely (~0.02% chance) to get the âextremely morally robustâ label as defined above.