Probably just Oxford vs Cambridge founder effects/path dependency.
EDIT: By ‘Oxford founder effects’ I mean something like “many of the early xrisk researchers came up through Oxford & naturally tend to cite Oxford folks; and two of the best book-length recent intros are from Toby and Will at Oxford; so the introductory materials are skewed towards Oxford”.
He also provided a blurb for Emile Torres’ book, well after Torres said that Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Toby Ord, Hilary Greaves etc endorse white supremacist ideology and eugenics.
I guess if that were the reason it’d probably be because people worry that implies Rees might agree with a bunch of Torres’ views they think are very bad. though I think that forwarding someone’s book or blurbing someone’s book is pretty consistent with disagreeing strongly with a bunch of their stuff (if you even know about it).
unsure why downvoted. upvoted for being a possible reason he might not be mentioned more (not saying it’s a good reason ).
sidenote: if we’re so parochial that Cambridge is too far for Oxford-doninated ea to take notice of what goes on there.… that seems like pretty bad news.
Oxford vs Cambridge seems more likely to me than the blurb explanation because Torres’ book was published in 2017 and would only explain changes after that time, but I don’t have any particular reason to think anything changed at that time. Happy to be corrected though.
Probably just Oxford vs Cambridge founder effects/path dependency.
EDIT: By ‘Oxford founder effects’ I mean something like “many of the early xrisk researchers came up through Oxford & naturally tend to cite Oxford folks; and two of the best book-length recent intros are from Toby and Will at Oxford; so the introductory materials are skewed towards Oxford”.
He also provided a blurb for Emile Torres’ book, well after Torres said that Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Toby Ord, Hilary Greaves etc endorse white supremacist ideology and eugenics.
Can you give a link for verifying this claim?
Also, I’d be pretty surprised if this were the reason for EA avoiding heavy promotion of Rees’s work.
https://www.xriskology.com/books
I guess if that were the reason it’d probably be because people worry that implies Rees might agree with a bunch of Torres’ views they think are very bad. though I think that forwarding someone’s book or blurbing someone’s book is pretty consistent with disagreeing strongly with a bunch of their stuff (if you even know about it).
Rees has also written multiple blurbs for Will MacAskill, Nick Bostrom et al.
unsure why downvoted. upvoted for being a possible reason he might not be mentioned more (not saying it’s a good reason ).
sidenote: if we’re so parochial that Cambridge is too far for Oxford-doninated ea to take notice of what goes on there.… that seems like pretty bad news.
Oxford vs Cambridge seems more likely to me than the blurb explanation because Torres’ book was published in 2017 and would only explain changes after that time, but I don’t have any particular reason to think anything changed at that time. Happy to be corrected though.