I am sympathetic to the idea that on average what humans are doing is neither good nor bad, but from that perspective we are back at the divide by zero problem. As we don’t have a good sense of how good the work of a typical person is—not even whether it’s positive, neutral or negative—we should avoid using it as a unit of measure.
I generally see people as making the world slightly better. It seems that the world has become slightly better over time, in comparison to the past. So before the EA movement was around, the world was improving. This suggests a non-zero value for the “typical person.”
However, the EA movement, per individual within it, has improve the world a great deal more than the typical person, and has the potential for improving it even further as it gets more value-aligned people on board, or more non-value aligned people behaving like EA participants. So this is the value I am trying to get at with the large difference between “typical person” and “EA participant.” We can have a conversation about the numbers, of course :-)
I am sympathetic to the idea that on average what humans are doing is neither good nor bad, but from that perspective we are back at the divide by zero problem. As we don’t have a good sense of how good the work of a typical person is—not even whether it’s positive, neutral or negative—we should avoid using it as a unit of measure.
I generally see people as making the world slightly better. It seems that the world has become slightly better over time, in comparison to the past. So before the EA movement was around, the world was improving. This suggests a non-zero value for the “typical person.”
However, the EA movement, per individual within it, has improve the world a great deal more than the typical person, and has the potential for improving it even further as it gets more value-aligned people on board, or more non-value aligned people behaving like EA participants. So this is the value I am trying to get at with the large difference between “typical person” and “EA participant.” We can have a conversation about the numbers, of course :-)