David Mathers makes a similar comment, and I respond, here. Seems like there are multiple definitions of the word, and EA folks are using the narrower definition that’s preferred by smart philosophers. Wheras I had just picked up the word based on vibes, and assumed the definition by analogy to racism and sexism, which does indeed seem to be a common real-world usage of the term (eg, supported by top google results in dictionaries, wikipedia, etc). It’s unclear to me whether the original intended meaning of the word was closer to what modern smart philosophers prefer (and everybody else has been misinterpreting it since then), or closer to the definition preferred by activists and dictionaries (and it’s since been somewhat “sanewashed” by philosophers), or if (as I suspect ) it was mushy and unclear from the very start—invented by savvy people who maybe deliberately intended to link the two possible interpretations of the word.
David Mathers makes a similar comment, and I respond, here. Seems like there are multiple definitions of the word, and EA folks are using the narrower definition that’s preferred by smart philosophers. Wheras I had just picked up the word based on vibes, and assumed the definition by analogy to racism and sexism, which does indeed seem to be a common real-world usage of the term (eg, supported by top google results in dictionaries, wikipedia, etc). It’s unclear to me whether the original intended meaning of the word was closer to what modern smart philosophers prefer (and everybody else has been misinterpreting it since then), or closer to the definition preferred by activists and dictionaries (and it’s since been somewhat “sanewashed” by philosophers), or if (as I suspect ) it was mushy and unclear from the very start—invented by savvy people who maybe deliberately intended to link the two possible interpretations of the word.