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.
Arjun Panickssery
Karma: 446
Big EA and Its Infinite Money Printer
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.
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?
If so, this is cool, not embarrassing.
The link doesn’t work for me
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.
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?
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”?
Sick post
What do you think of adopting Enlightment liberal aesthetics more directly (and their classical influences indirectly)
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.
This is very much an online progressives thing, no? In America, the classics are our cultural heritage and carry a lot of respect.
My comment referred to “America,” not liberal university students at top schools. I was making an explicit contrast to “online progressives.”
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.
It is a common misconception that because a piece of fiction was bad for the particular individual writing, or is low status, or is missing some desired marker of ‘goodness’, that it therefore is not ‘good’.
I should clarify that my potshot was mocking the prose. There are other ways that HPMOR was good (or so I suspect—I only got through the first 5 or 10 chapters). I also failed to get through the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged even though I would probably find its aesthetic more agreeable than most people and even though it was much more influential than HPMOR.
EDIT: Actually, I think my comment had more value than just a potshot. I know a bunch of wannabe writers, my past self included, who were overly concerned with prose quality.
I have been told that there are a lot of Effective Altruists who would accept some degree of environmental harm, at least if the payoff in terms of human lives saved was great enough. (And I’ve also seen this tendency in some of the members of the EA courses I have been attending.)
Yes.
This attitude is rooted in a mindset, however, that is the cause of many of our problems in the first place: the idea that we humans are somehow separate from nature, and can do with it what we will. Many of us, even if we do not consciously espouse a religion, are still conditioned by monotheistic ideas of humans as the pinnacle of Creation, set above it and in dominion over it.
Depending on what you mean by this, yes. There is no intrinsically “pure” quality about things that aren’t man-made. It is up to us to subdue the earth (and outer space) for the benefit of ourselves and our descendants.
There is no ultimately no distinction between us and nature (https://theconversation.com/humanity-and-nature-are-not-separate-we-must-see-them-as-one-to-fix-the-climate-crisis-122110).
What do you mean by this? Your linked post lists a bunch of views like Zen Buddhism and European paganism.
I agree with you that the prose is passable, readable and fairly solid
I didn’t say the prose was “fairly solid.” I would have to go back (and maybe it improves after the first several chapters) but I remember it being bad.
Just Say No to Utilitarianism
What do you think is the source of ethical knowledge if not intuitions
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:
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.