My comment referred to “America,” not liberal university students at top schools. I was making an explicit contrast to “online progressives.”
Arjun Panickssery
Karma: 534
This is very much an online progressives thing, no? In America, the classics are our cultural heritage and carry a lot of respect.
I don’t associate the Enlightenment with racism.
I’m curious what example you’re thinking of in Descartes’s writings related to your listed complaints. I guess Kant and Smith made racist remarks but not in any characteristically “Enlightenment” way.
Sick post
What do you think of adopting Enlightment liberal aesthetics more directly (and their classical influences indirectly)
I suspect what you stated is true for many “median engaged EA’s” but not true for highly engaged EA’s.
Not sure if my visualization of a median-engaged EA is the same as yours but what percentage of Boston conference attendees do you estimate you would call “highly-engaged”?
I think three really good books are One minute to Midnight, Nuclear folly, and Gambling with Armageddon. Lots of other ones have shortish sections but these three focus more almost completely on the crisis.
What conclusions do they come to?
He seems to have gotten his money’s worth on Trump now that Trump’s endorsement of Mithril Capital principal J.D. Vance is about to propel him into the Senate. Thiel Foundation president Blake Masters might end up in the same spot in Arizona.
The link doesn’t work for me
If so, this is cool, not embarrassing.
I think this gives the most likely reason why JFK and the rest of excom couldn’t allow the missiles to stay in Cuba. It was simply unconscionable that the USSR could have missiles in America’s backyard—in Cuba of all places! - after Khrushchev had committed that he wouldn’t put any missiles in Cuba.
. . .
I think the key takeaway here is that there is a pretty high probability—it seems to me hard to argue that it’s below 25% or so, and very hard below 10% - that probably the most dangerous episode in human history was caused by not by the chess moves of great powers in a great game but by the fog and thunder of pride and fear.
Do you have any sources pointing toward an academic consensus on Kennedy and Khrushyev’s thinking during the CMC?
Update: I think he actually said “very good” AI safety researcher or something and I misremembered. The conversation was in January and before I knew anything much about the EAverse.
This is what I remember Devansh (whom I pinged about your comment; I’ll update when he replies) telling me when I first called him. I might have misremembered.
Big EA and Its Infinite Money Printer
But I think if you’re a movement that reaches the point where it contemplates maybe trying to include Group X, or at least the ones who aren’t truly awful and are semi-thoughtful, it’s maybe a sign that your movement is actually super-unwelcoming to Group X.
I think this is bad. Effective altruists, or a lot of them, are pretty sympathetic to George Mason economists, some of them with fringe views about education, social status games, open borders, and artificial intelligence. Or open to claims that our moral theories need to account for maybe living in a multiverse. This seems good! But it seems bad that people with wholly conventional views about US politics would feel excluded! And it also seems obviously bad that people who could have a big, positive impact on the world by joining the Republican Party are repelled by cold uggies, when they should be attracted by them.
For what it’s worth, my experience at EAGx Boston two weeks ago was in line with this comment I remember from How Effective Altruists Can Be Welcoming To Conservatives:
Of all the academic, activist, and Silicon Valley-type communities I belong to, EA is the most inclusive to (US) conservative ideas.
I remarked to some friends while leaving that I had never met so many people so left-wing whose eyes lit up with enthusiasm when I mentioned that I was interested in Republican party politics. Cause areas related to X-risk, foreign aid, etc. are relatively bipartisan.
This is huge.
Fiction like Atlas Shrugged and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle have been massively influential.
A surprising number of people have told me they got into the EA/LessWrong sphere through HPMOR, which at least tells us that the writing doesn’t even have to be good to make a difference.