I think part of titotal’s point is it’s not the ‘strawman’ interpretation but the straightforward one, and having it framed that way would understandably be frustrating. It sounds like he also disagrees with Eliezer’s actual, badly communicated argument [edit: about the size of potential improvements on biology] anyway though? Based on the response to Habryka

As someone in the ‘general public rather than chemistry/physics PhD’ group, which Eliezer is saying he’s targeting, I definitely thought he meant that

It looks like the same comment got posted several times?

I’m not sure how I feel about this as a pathway, given the requirement that zakat donations only go to other people within the religion. On the one hand, it sounds like any charity that is constrained in this way in terms of recipients but had non-Muslim employees/contractors, would have to be subsidised by non-zakat donations (based on the GiveDirectly post linked in another comment). It also means endorsing a rather narrow moral circle, whereas potentially it might be more impactful to expend resources trying expand that circle than to optimise within it.

Otoh, it does cover a whole quarter of humanity, and so potentially a lot of low hanging fruit can be gained without correspondingly slowing moral circle expansion.

Unclear whether this makes it better or worse to be endorsing that framing

FWIW I would have guessed the reverse re role titles

It's common enough that the initial net karma doesn't resemble the long term net karma, I wouldn't read too much into it :)

Oh interesting haha

You could just say ‘Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley are out’.

Larry Summers has said he agrees with at least some EA arguments. So the accuracy of ‘EAs are out’ is ambiguous, except in the sense of ‘people who have an explicit identification with the EA community’. Which seems tribal.

How long will that last though?