Then why have a complicated special name like “transhumanism” ? For the same reason that “scientific method” or “secular humanism” have complicated special names. If you take common sense and rigorously apply it, through multiple inferential steps, to areas outside everyday experience, successfully avoiding many possible distractions and tempting mistakes along the way, then it often ends up as a minority position and people give it a special name.
I feel that EA is like this. If you take a common sense idea like “Do the most good possible”, and actually really think about how to do that, and actively compare different things you could be doing—not just the immediate Overton window of what your friends or your colleagues are doing—and then make a serious commitment of resources to make that answer happen, then it ends up as a minority position and people give it a special name.
I notice some parallels between the old essay “Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism” (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism) and current criticisms of EA—that the idea of “doing the most good possible” is obvious and has been thought of many times before. Really, in a way, this is just common sense. And yet:
Then why have a complicated special name like “transhumanism” ? For the same reason that “scientific method” or “secular humanism” have complicated special names. If you take common sense and rigorously apply it, through multiple inferential steps, to areas outside everyday experience, successfully avoiding many possible distractions and tempting mistakes along the way, then it often ends up as a minority position and people give it a special name.
I feel that EA is like this. If you take a common sense idea like “Do the most good possible”, and actually really think about how to do that, and actively compare different things you could be doing—not just the immediate Overton window of what your friends or your colleagues are doing—and then make a serious commitment of resources to make that answer happen, then it ends up as a minority position and people give it a special name.