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....
I, like probably most reading this, am someone who strongly values reason and believes that helping others is a good thing.
This is why many people choose to 'join' EA: They find EA somewhere, think that the ideas make sense and seem true, presumably because it aligns well with their values and consider it right. The reason-based approach makes sense to them.
But isn't the procedure similar for following any community? Imagine I am looking for meaning, so when I stumble upon a guru which aligns with (some of) my values, I integrate myself into that community. Similarly so for political parties, a football club, a weekly art gathering, etc.
I might as well have different beliefs and values. So these questions follow:
Does EA seem like the right movement to me because there is something inherently right about EA, or just because EA fits my initial values and beliefs? In other words, is EA just built on the belief in potentially arbitrary assumptions (e.g helping others is good), or is there actual substantiation for these assumptions?
I'm curious to hear thoughts about this, I might dig much deeper into this and potentially create a post for the Red Teaming Contest. There seems to be a lot more to be said and I've already got some ideas, but I wanted to find out whether this would be fruitful.