(Thanks, dm sent.)
Nisan
Karma: 72
CSER and Leverhulme, which I think are institutions that have overall caused more harm than good and I wish didn’t exist
I’d love if you could comment on which concrete actions were harmful. (I donated to CSER a long time ago and then didn’t pay attention to what they were doing, so I’m curious.)
You might be interested in Building Human Values into Recommender Systems: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis as well as Jonathan Stray’s other work on alignment and beneficence of recommender systems.
Since around 2017, there has been a lot of public interest in how youtube’s recommendation algorithms may affect individuals and society negatively. Governments, think tanks, the press/media, and other institutions have pressured youtube to adjust its recommendations. You could think of this as our world’s (indirect & corrupted) way of trying to instill humanity’s values into youtube’s algorithms.
I’ve seen a few proposals for a world without power structures, and they’ve all had glaring theoretical problems. They don’t have great answers to all of:
What if there’s a bad harvest?
What if someone gets cancer?
What about children?
What about people who don’t like the system?
If I saw a description of a way of organizing society without power structures and that addressed all of my theoretical objections, I’d start to get interested.
I think you’re likely to be contagious, even though you’re asymptomatic.
In my experience, many people express gratitude when I inform them I’m infected and offer to cancel meetings.