Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
This personal post is not part of the competition, as my intent is not to produce an original constructive response to cluelessness. However, Toby Tremlett encouraged me to share it insofar as it contributes to this week's conversation.
TL; DR: I work in animal welfare and am clueless....
Consider adopting the term o-risk.
William MacAskill has recently been writing a bunch about how if you’re a Long-Termist, it’s not enough merely to avoid the catastrophic outcomes. Even if we get a decent long-term future, it may still fall far short of the best future we could have achieved. This outcome — of a merely okay future, when we could have had a great future — would still be quite tragic.
Which got me thinking: EAs already have terms like x-risk (for existential risks, or things which could cause human extinction) and s-risk (for suffering risks, or things which could cause the widespread future suffering of conscious beings). But as far as I’m aware, there isn’t any term to describe the specific kind of risk that MacAskill is worried about here. So I propose adding the term o-risk: A risk that would make the long-term future okay, but much worse than it would optimally be.
might want to check out this (only indirectly related but maybe useful).
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zuQeTaqrjveSiSMYo/a-proposed-hierarchy-of-longtermist-concepts
Personally don't mind o-risk think it has some utility but s-risk ~somewhat seems like it still works here. An O-risk is just a smaller scale s-risk no?