There were lots of explicit statements that no, of course we did not mean that and of course we do not endorse any of that, no one should be doing any of that. And yes, I think everyone means it. But it’s based on, essentially, unprincipled hacks on top of the system, rather than fixing the root problem, and the smartest kids in the world are going to keep noticing this.
You seem to be saying that Sam was among the smartest and so saw that these were unprincipled hacks and ignored them, yet the rest of the post goes into great detail on how profoundly stupid Sam was for buying into such a naive, simplistic world model that very predictably failed on its own terms. I would expect the smartest people in the world to make better predictions and use better models.
I interpret EA as common sense morality+. Abiding by common sense morality will often leave you with a lot of time and energy left over. If you want to do more good, you should use those to increase welfare, and do so in a scientific and scope-sensitive way. Is that clearly not EA or an unprincipled hack?
I was confused by this:
You seem to be saying that Sam was among the smartest and so saw that these were unprincipled hacks and ignored them, yet the rest of the post goes into great detail on how profoundly stupid Sam was for buying into such a naive, simplistic world model that very predictably failed on its own terms. I would expect the smartest people in the world to make better predictions and use better models.
I interpret EA as common sense morality+. Abiding by common sense morality will often leave you with a lot of time and energy left over. If you want to do more good, you should use those to increase welfare, and do so in a scientific and scope-sensitive way. Is that clearly not EA or an unprincipled hack?