All of CBiddulph's Comments + Replies

Sounds like there are four distinct kinds of actions we're talking about here:

1. Bringing about positive lives
2. Bringing about negative lives
3. Preventing positive lives
4. Preventing negative lives

I think I was previously only considering the "positive/negative" aspect, and ignoring the "bringing about/preventing" aspect.

So now I believe you'd consider 3 and 4 to be neutral, and 2 to be negative, which seems fair enough to me.

Why would my thinking that actions like using birth control are morally neutral imply that I should also think that having children is

I think Richard was trying to make the point that

• You believe that actions that bring about or prevent the existence of future people have no moral valence
• Therefore, you believe that an action that brings about suffering lives is also morally neutral
• Therefore, you would take any small positive moral trade (like getting a lollipop) in exchange for bringing about arbitrarily large amounts of suffering lives

If I'm not misinterpreting what you've said, it sounds like you'd be willing to bite this bullet?

Maybe it's true that you won't actually be able to make these choices, but we're talking about thought experiments, where implausible things happen all the time.

Cool!

A philosopher shares his perspective on what we should do now to ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed.

The summary seems pretty reductive - I think most of the book is about other things, like making sure civilization doesn't collapse at all or preventing negative moral lock-in. I wonder how they chose it.

It's probably largely for historical reasons: the first real piece of "rational fiction" was Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and many other authors followed in that general vein.

Also, it can be fun to take an existing work with a world that wasn't very thoroughly examined and "rationalize" it by explaining plot holes and letting characters exploit the rules.

Hi Ada, I'm glad you wrote this post! Although what you've written here is pretty different from my own experience with AI safety in many ways, I think I got some sense of your concerns from reading this.

I also read Superintelligence as my first introduction to AI safety, and I remember pretty much buying into the arguments right away.^[1] Although I think I understand that modern-day ML systems do dumb things all the time, this intuitively weighs less on my mind than the idea that AI can in principle be much smarter than humans, and that sooner or lat... (read more)

Thanks for the post, I think this does a good job of exploring the main reasons for/against community service.

I've heard this idea thrown around in community building spaces, and it definitely comes up quite often when recruiting. That is, people often ask, "you do all these discussion groups and dinners, but how do you actually help people directly? Aren't there community service opportunities?" This seems like a reasonable question, especially if you're not familiar with the typical EA mindset already.

I've been kind of averse to making community service ... (read more)

Thanks for taking this over from my way-too-ambitious attempt!

Meh, never mind. I get the feeling that unlike some Internet communities, most people in EA actually have important things to do. I spent a while placing pixels and got burnt out pretty quickly myself :)

Written hastily; please comment if you'd like further elaboration

I disagree somewhat; if we directly fund critiques, it might be easier to make sure a large portion of the community actually sees them. If we post a critique to the EA Forum under the heading "winners of the EA criticism contest," it'll gain more traction with EAs than if the author just posted it on their personal blog. EA-funded critiques would also be targeted more towards persuading people who already believe in the idea, which may make them better.

While critiques will probably be published anyway, increasing the number of critiques seems good; there ... (read more)

You cited a Gallup poll that said that 1 in 25 adults said that high school was the "worst period in their life." You presented this as positive evidence, but this seems to me like a strong point against your thesis.

To illustrate this with a simple model, we can imagine that the average survey respondent is 40 years old and that they split up their life into 10 4-year "periods." If the quality of people's lives are about evenly distributed across time, we'd expect high school to be the worst period for 10% of respondents, which is way more than 4%.

More imp... (read more)