I’m not familiar enough with the case of Andrew Carnegie to comment and I agree on the point of political tribalism. The other two are what bother me.
On the professor, the problem is there explicitly: you omitted a key line ‘I tried asking for his opinion on existential threats’, which is a strongly EA-identifying approach, and one which many people feel is too simplistic. Eg see Gideon Futurman’s EAGx Rotterdam talk when it’s up—he argues the way EAs think about x-risk is far too simplified, focusing on single-event narratives, ignoring countless possible trajectories that could end in extinction or similar any one of which is vanishingly unlikely, but which collectively we should take much more seriously. Whether or not one agrees with this view, it seems to me to be one a smart person could reasonably hold, and shows that by asking someone ‘his opinion on existential threats, and which specific scenarios these space settlements would help with’, you’re pigeonholing them into EA-aligned specific-single-event way of thinking.
As for Elon Musk, I think the same problem is there implicitly: he’s written a paper called ‘Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species’, spoken extensively on the subject and spent his life thinking that it’s important, and while you could reasonably disagree with his arguments, I don’t see any grounds for dismissing them as ‘really flimsy and incredibly speculative’ without engagement, unless your reason for doing so is ‘there exists a pool of important research which contradicts them and which I think is correct’. There are certainly plenty of other smart people who think as he does, some of them EAs (though maybe that doesn’t contribute to my original complaint). Since there’s a very clear mathematical argument that it’s harder to kill all of a more widespread and numerous civilisation, to say that the case is ‘really flimsy’, you basically need to assume the EA-aligned narrative that AI is highly likely to kill us all.
I’m not familiar enough with the case of Andrew Carnegie to comment and I agree on the point of political tribalism. The other two are what bother me.
On the professor, the problem is there explicitly: you omitted a key line ‘I tried asking for his opinion on existential threats’, which is a strongly EA-identifying approach, and one which many people feel is too simplistic. Eg see Gideon Futurman’s EAGx Rotterdam talk when it’s up—he argues the way EAs think about x-risk is far too simplified, focusing on single-event narratives, ignoring countless possible trajectories that could end in extinction or similar any one of which is vanishingly unlikely, but which collectively we should take much more seriously. Whether or not one agrees with this view, it seems to me to be one a smart person could reasonably hold, and shows that by asking someone ‘his opinion on existential threats, and which specific scenarios these space settlements would help with’, you’re pigeonholing them into EA-aligned specific-single-event way of thinking.
As for Elon Musk, I think the same problem is there implicitly: he’s written a paper called ‘Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species’, spoken extensively on the subject and spent his life thinking that it’s important, and while you could reasonably disagree with his arguments, I don’t see any grounds for dismissing them as ‘really flimsy and incredibly speculative’ without engagement, unless your reason for doing so is ‘there exists a pool of important research which contradicts them and which I think is correct’. There are certainly plenty of other smart people who think as he does, some of them EAs (though maybe that doesn’t contribute to my original complaint). Since there’s a very clear mathematical argument that it’s harder to kill all of a more widespread and numerous civilisation, to say that the case is ‘really flimsy’, you basically need to assume the EA-aligned narrative that AI is highly likely to kill us all.
Thanks!