My philosophical axioms that are relevant for EA are largely utilitarian as long as that doesn’t interfere with truthfulness. To be clear though I am not a moral realist!
My interests are:
-forecasting
-animal welfare
-politics (unfortunately)
-intelligence research
Hanania released a new blogpost about his diet. It seems like part of the reason for not going vegan is his lack of self control. You can eat less calories and more protein on a vegan diet than he does on a nonvegan one.
I’m snacking on chocolate covered almonds all day.
Is there any charity that works on shrimp welfare that you would consider worth giving to based on this analysis? My preferred charity currently is The Humane League.
I thought it might be helpful to share this article. The title speaks for itself.
What you (yes, you) can do to move humanity forward
So far his e-mail has gotten relatively little media attention, his English Wikipedia page was changed (not the German one though) and there was little social media outrage.
This seems like a pretty good outcome for him. The reasons I can think of why that happened.
His strategy of preemptively publishing the e-mails worked.
He has no social media presence which would be the natural place for people to pile up on him.
He might simply have gotten lucky.
EA should deprioritize human welfare causes i.e. global health (unless it is an existential risk) and global poverty.
My initial comment seemed completely innocent to me. I didn’t expect the backlash and don’t want to clog this thread further with a discussion that isn’t really on topic, so this will be my last reply here. (DM me if you want)
thx @RAB for the reply
To all the people who downvoted. My comment was asking for clarification. If you then downvote it for presumably the same reason you took offense to the Bostrom comment without explaining why this isn’t very productive.
@moderators I edited my comment.
The effect that the rules will have won’t be that I(and I assume this is true for others as well) will act the way that you think is proper, instead I will just not engage at all. This isn’t just true for this instance (which would be trivial), but in general.
Did I link to an incorrect e-mail or why does this comment have −6 agreement karma? In general it would be helpful if people explained their downvote.
The reason why I don’t say “the n-word” as you did is because it can be misleading. I have seen people using it to quote somebody else who just said “negro”. So to me saying “the n-word” would violate another (to my mind much more important) norm:
“Be honest.
Don’t mislead or manipulate.”
I try to follow rules I disagree with. However if I violated any rules here then at least they should have been clearer, so I appreciate the ongoing effort.
So I get this mail is bad PR, but people seem to object to it beyond that and it isn’t clear to me why. If it is because he claims that Blacks have a lower average IQ than mankind in general I think that would be a terrible reason as I am not aware of a single intelligence researcher who would dispute this. Or is it because he uses the word [edited: see moderators comment]?
I checked what strong forum norms Bostroms mail would have violated.
“Unnecessary rudeness or offensiveness”
This would make sense to me, although I will point out that his point back then was precisely that his offensiveness is not unnecessary.
“Hate speech or content that promotes hate based on identity.”
I don’t think he did this:
“They would think that I were a “racist”: that I _disliked_ black people and thought that it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t.”
I am very sceptical that there is a lot you can do about depression. This post explains why.
The time, effort and money spent in addition to the side effects of anti-depressants make me strongly doubt that treatment attempts are worth it.
I am afraid I don’t have a good answer to that. I just find it insufferable when people try to surpress (by the speaker believed to be) true statements for any reasons. My thought process is just that the consequences of a true statement don’t change that it is true and so you get to say that it is true. This just feels very natural to me. To psychoanalyze myself a bit, I score relatively high (33/50 - indicting significant Autistic traits) on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient Test and exceptionally low (0th percentile) on the aspect Compassion of OCEAN Agreeableness.
I think the degree to which you can argue yourself into a different ethical position is limited by your psychological predispositions. People more empathetic than me ironically might just not be able to relate to my position.
Hello everyone.
I have been following the 80000hours podcast and Peter Singers work for years. So naturally I had considered creating an account here as well, but what ultimately pushed me over the edge was that I wanted to point out a typo xD
My philosophy can mostly be described as utilitarian to the extent that this doesn’t interfere with truthfulness, which fits well with EA to a point (I also value certain virtues and principles, but that shouldn’t be too relevant). The main reason why I decided against joining this forum for the longest time is its policy regarding information hazards.
The EA cause I care most about is animal rights.
I am not sure how active I’ll be here if at all. But just in case I wanted to introduce myself anyways. Nice to meet you all.
In the row for “Nuclear conflict scales beyond Ukraine in the next month after the initial nuclear weapon use” it says that the probability is 0.36%. I think that is a typo and should say 0.386%.
A lot of EAs wanted to slow down AGI development to have more time for alignment. Now Trump’s tariffs have done that—accidentally and for the wrong reasons—but they did slow it down. Yet no EA seems happy about this. Given how unpopular his tariffs are maybe people don’t want to endorse them for PR reasons? But if you think that AI is by far the most important issue that should easily lead you to say the unpopular truth. Scenarios where China reaches AGI before the US became more likely, but that was always an argument against AI slowdown and it didn’t seem to convince many people in the past.
Thoughts?
Maybe this post should be placed in some AI safety thread, but I wasn’t sure where exactly.