I'm a senior software developer in Canada (earning ~US$70K in a good year) who, being late to the EA party, earns to give. Historically I've have a chronic lack of interest in making money; instead I've developed an unhealthy interest in foundational software that free markets don't build because their effects would consist almost entirely of positive externalities.
I dream of making the world better by improving programming languages and developer tools, but AFAIK no funding is available for this kind of work outside academia. My open-source projects can be seen at loyc.net, core.loyc.net, ungglish.loyc.net and ecsharp.net (among others).
I don't know any other EAs in my area so I haven't witnessed this phenomenon. On the one hand, I like the self-deprecating style because it is the exact opposite style to my arch-nemeses, the anti-science/dark-epistemology people (you know them by many names: climate dismissives, anti-vaxxers, anti-nuclear-power zealots, math deniers...).
On the other hand, there is a reason my nemeses act this way: it works well for them. Certain anti-vaxxers probably earn over $1 million annually on Substack from $5/mo. subscriptions. Clearly, a great many people are attracted to a confident "I'm always right" style of speaking and acting. Are there people who would like EA more if it were more like that? No doubt. Are there enough people who reject "weirdness" that EA would grow more if it worked harder to look cool? Plausible. Can we look cool without risking the soul of EA? Maybe.
But golly, I wouldn't want to take a position without collecting empirical data on all this!
Yeah, but who is speaking here? Beckstead? I don't know any "Beckstead"s. Phil Torres is claiming that The Longtermist Stance is "we should prioritise the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries", even though I've never heard EAs say that. At most Beckstead thinks so, though that's not what Beckstead said. What Beckstead said was provisional ("now seems more plausible to me") and not a call to action. Torres is trying to drag down discourse by killing nuance and saying misleading things.
Torres' article is filled with misleading statements, and I have made longer and stronger remarks about it here. (Even so I'm upvoting you, because -6 is too harsh IMO)
Summary of the talk:
Depends if you like Peter Thiel. I don't know much about him, but his support for Trump was a big turnoff for me. I'm not sure why he wrote the techno-optimistic book "Zero to One" and then decided to plonk down his cash on a pathological liar bullshitter whose greatest concern seemed to be keeping Mexicans and Muslims out of the U.S. ... but he did get a tax cut out of it.
Anyway, Phil Torres is cheating here by saying "longtermists are directly associated with a Trump supporter in 2013!" when Trump did not run for president until 2015.
I see. Rather than being "the" keynote speaker in 2013, there were four keynote speakers of which Thiel was one (the others were Peter Singer, Jaan Tallinn, and Holden Karnofsky.)
Thanks for pointing that out! Of course, my actual worry is that she won't pick up on EA principles when the only EA in her environment is me. I hate to have to move to an overpriced EA hub city to provide more intellectual infrastructure, but it's on the table.
Wow. I only lived two years with a legal guardian who was similarly intolerant of me for being "weird" and not making friends and loving computers.
Would you say you had some kind of insatiable need to go against your parents' wishes, or was it more like a limitation in which you simply didn't know how to be what they wanted?
I'm worried about the same problem in reverse. I'm having a child soon, and worry about her being normal. I don't want normal, I want weird like me! I want a high-curiosity, high-openness, high-altruism, thoughtful, epistemologically strong naturist like myself... which may be out of reach. Maybe she will love to play with Barbie dolls, spend tremendous effort fitting into a school clique, read romance novels, swoon for the next Beiber, and fret about having too few shoes and dresses? There's no EA community in my area to lean on... I wonder if there are any EA children's books.
(Edit: Jeez, EAs sure can be mean with their votes.)
I propose someplace affordable. What's wrong with, say, Toledo, OH (between Detroit and Cleveland), which according to one source has the least expensive rent among U.S. cities? Its location on Lake Erie should give it reasonably good weather.
Yup, I saw somebody on Medium speaking favorably about a Phil Torres piece as a footnote of his article on Ukraine (I responded here). And earlier I responded to Alice Crary's piece. Right now the anti-EAs are often self-styled intellectual elites, but a chorus of bad faith could go mainstream at some point. (And then I hope you guys will see why I'm proposing an evidence clearinghouse, to help build a new and more efficient culture of good epistemics and better information... whether or not you think my idea would work as intended.)