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....
Hi all,
I'm unsure whether this is fully appropriate for the forum, so please let me know if not (or if better suited elsewhere).
My name is Guerdon Ligon -- a senior computer science undergrad at Boston University, and the founder of the EA group there.
To date I have focused on AIS problems, and was a research fellow with the Swiss Existential Risk Initiative this past summer where I worked on impossibility results in value learning from multiple agents. These experiences have lent me a fair background in AIS, formal game theory and mathematical modelling, general SWE and data analytics, as well as moral philosophy both EA and otherwise.
For various reasons I have found myself at loose ends until this coming September, and would vastly prefer working, even in a minor role, on an impactful project. I do not believe I am fully equipped for many of the research position roles posted here and elsewhere, and am looking for temporary employment besides. Hence this post.
If you or a project you are aware of could use full or part-time assistance in either a technical domain (including writing, research, and documentation for the same) or any other relevant field, please reach out for discussion.
I am hoping not to simply rehash the same job listings as are already present in the community, but rather projects that would specifically benefit from mission oriented, temporary, and low cost help (I am not looking for significant payment beyond cost of living).
Hey,