Just regarding this bit: “MacAskill, Ord and others seem to me to have advocated a highly pluralistic future in which humanity is able to reflect on its values.”
I have posited, multiple times, in different EA spaces, that EAs should learn more languages in order to be better able to think, better able to understand perspectives further removed from that which they were raised in, healthier (trilinguals are massively protected against dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc), etc.
And the response I have received has been broadly “eh” or at best “this is interesting but I don’t know if it’s worth EAs time”.
I have not seen any EA “world literature” circles based around trying to expand their horizons to perspectives as far from their own as possible. I have not seen any EA language learning groups. I have not seen any effort put towards using the EA community (that is so important to build!) in order to enable individual EAs to become better at understanding radically different perspectives, etc.
So like… Iunno, I don’t buy the “it’s not a problem we’re mostly wealthy white guys” argument. It seems to me like a lot of EAs don’t know what they don’t know, and don’t realize the axes along which they could not-know-things on top. They don’t behave the way people who are genuinely invested in a more pluralistic vision of the future would behave. And they don’t react positively to proposals that aim to improve that.
Hi,
I have a BASc in Philosophy and Psychology. I’m still trying to figure out how I could do anything useful here, so maybe someone could help me out.
I’m 27 years old, and currently work in an after-school program teaching children music. I tend to have a talent for accelerated learning (I am currently teaching piano, violin, guitar, ukulele and drums, and have now been teaching at least two of those instruments for as long or longer than it took me to learn them to a level where I can teach them). That’s sadly coupled with a lack of consistent emotional investment, though, so I have not been able to successfully capitalize on it.
I got 94th percentile on Verbal in the GRE and a perfect 6 in writing, but a 30th percentile on quant (it bothers me personally that a score that would have been an A- in most educational contexts I’ve experienced, or perhaps a B+ in some of the more rigorous ones in absolute terms was so low, as I think that’s misleading, but that is the nature of the skew in the distribution I guess). I had a 3.6 GPA in my last 2 years and a 3.3 GPA cummulative. All from a relatively unremarkable university. I am also disabled in such a way that I cannot count on my own reliability for prolonged periods of time, which makes everything harder, but because I’m “so smart” (according to the people around me) it seems rather wasteful that I haven’t found anything I can have a higher impact on thus far.
This means that, when dealing with 80,000 hours, etc, I find it rather hard to see what is actually applicable to me. I find it rather unlikely that I will get into a “top 20 school”, for example, which is a fairly recurrent pattern in all of the academic paths (which professors told me over and over that I should pursue during my undergrad).
This is not a way of despairing (“Oh no! Can I even make the world better if I don’t have a perfect score on one unnecessarily expensive test?!”) but instead a personal angle through which I can bring up that:
1.) I don’t believe that 80,000 hours provides actually useful advice to people who are not exoribitantly high achievers (or at least, it hasn’t provided it for me thus far and I’ve been checking it out on and off for like 7 years at this point).
2.) I do believe that people here can provide such advice, so it would be nice if I could receive some.
On top of that, I’ve been nursing a notion that it might be a good idea to make “rationality”, “futurism” or even “emotional resilience” summer camps for children, and if anybody is interested in a project like that, please let me know.