How does this change the meaning? (Genuine question) You’re still saying it’s likely almost everyone has done things like that email or worse, which seems unlikely to me.
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.
You’re still saying it’s 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). Let’s label that random person as “extremely morally robust” 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 “extremely morally robust” label as defined above.
How does this change the meaning? (Genuine question) You’re still saying it’s likely almost everyone has done things like that email or worse, which seems unlikely to me.
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.
Consider a random human who spent about 278,860 hours as an adult person on earth (as Bostrom has, according to Wikipedia). Let’s label that random person as “extremely morally robust” 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 “extremely morally robust” label as defined above.