I think the systemic change point and the treatise on human nature points are meaningfully different. One presumes that “we” (leftist society) knows how to do good and EA is empirically mistaken, while the latter is saying that we’re lost on how to do good but having smart people explore their inclinations is plausibly a better path on getting there. Just addressing the latter point for now:
I find Hume a bad example from Collison, since empirically EA has a lot of philosophers and interest in psychology/philosophy, and “understanding human nature or we can better make decisions” feels right up the alley of EAs and people adjacent to us (eg rationality community).
If I wanted to make the point that EAs in history would have been insufficiently exploratory, I would’ve pointed to Newton instead of Hume. Newton ~ spent his life doing 4 things : astronomy/physics/calculus, Bible studies, alchemy, and managing the British banking system.
Arguably an EA I/N/T framework at the time would have said (given empirical beliefs at the time) that any of the latter 3 would be a better use of time than staring at stars and understanding how they move across the sky. And of course these days Newton is famous mainly as the inventor of calculus.
So I’d be more interested in whether EA would have stunted Isaac Newton’s intellectual development, more than Hume.
I think the systemic change point and the treatise on human nature points are meaningfully different. One presumes that “we” (leftist society) knows how to do good and EA is empirically mistaken, while the latter is saying that we’re lost on how to do good but having smart people explore their inclinations is plausibly a better path on getting there. Just addressing the latter point for now:
I find Hume a bad example from Collison, since empirically EA has a lot of philosophers and interest in psychology/philosophy, and “understanding human nature or we can better make decisions” feels right up the alley of EAs and people adjacent to us (eg rationality community).
If I wanted to make the point that EAs in history would have been insufficiently exploratory, I would’ve pointed to Newton instead of Hume. Newton ~ spent his life doing 4 things : astronomy/physics/calculus, Bible studies, alchemy, and managing the British banking system.
Arguably an EA I/N/T framework at the time would have said (given empirical beliefs at the time) that any of the latter 3 would be a better use of time than staring at stars and understanding how they move across the sky. And of course these days Newton is famous mainly as the inventor of calculus.
So I’d be more interested in whether EA would have stunted Isaac Newton’s intellectual development, more than Hume.