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....
Money spent to hold EAGx conferences, and support given to attendees to EAGx conferences, is not being used efficiently.
What follows is my personal opinion, and the opinion of a few others I have talked to about the subject. Of course, this money is not mine to spend and I am sure that this subject has been given some thought already. However, I still think it would be useful to give my opinion.
The EAGx conferences I have been to have been quite fun, disappointingly unprofessional and on the whole, mostly useless.
I do not think that the money being spent on them is worth the corresponding number of lives saved by donating to global health interventions or GiveDirectly, which is (or should be) the benchmark of all EA spending.
Remark: I am aware of the standard arguments for why these events are "worth it", like getting new people into EA, building a sense of community which helps us progress, and connecting EAs to each other.