Any links to where Scott Alexander deliberately argues that black people have lower IQs for genetic reasons? I've been reading his blog for a decade and I don't recall any posts on this.

I think any discussion of race that doesn't take the equality of races as a given will be considered inflammatory. And regardless of the merits of the arguments, they can make people uncomfortable and choose not to associate with EA.

I think collections like this are helpful, but it's a misleading to say it presents the "frontier of publicly available knowledge."

Taking just the first section on moral truth as an example, it seems like a huge overstatement to say this collection of podcasts and forum posts gets people to the frontier of this subject. Philosophers have spent a long time on this, writing thousands of papers. And at a glance, it seems like all of OPs linked resources don't even intend to give an overview of the literature on meta-ethics. They instead present their own personal perspectives.

And all of the resources in this section are EA/rationalist affiliated. Surely there have been some people who've said intelligent things about the nature of morality prior to Yudkowsky's birth, right? Neglecting these voices seems like an oversight, especially given the stated goal of getting readers to the frontier of publicly available knowledge.

Going forward, I'd suggest making more modest claims about what can be accomplished by a reading list like this and expanding the range of perspectives that's considered worth listening to.

The concept of self-esteem has a somewhat checkered history in psychology. Here, an influential review paper finds that self-esteem leads people to speak up more in groups and to feel happier. But it fails to have consistent benefits in other areas of life such as educational/occupational performance or violence. And it may have detrimental effects, such as risky behavior in teens.

Overall, the benefits of high self-esteem fall into two categories: enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings. We have not found evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic interventions or school programs) causes benefits. Our findings do not support continued widespread efforts to boost self-esteem in the hope that it will by itself foster improved outcomes. In view of the heterogeneity of high self-esteem, indiscriminate praise might just as easily promote narcissism, with its less desirable consequences. Instead, we recommend using praise to boost self-esteem as a reward for socially desirable behavior and self-improvement.

FWIW standard conceptions of existential risk would categorize suffering risks as a type of existential risk. For example, Nick Bostrom has defined it as "threats that could cause our extinction or destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life." (emphasis mine)

I think indoctrination (at least among adults) is actually surprisingly difficult. The psychologist Hugo Mercier was recently on the 80,000 Hours podcast to discuss why.

And the other thing which has had much more dramatic consequences is the idea of brainwashing: the idea that if you take prisoners of war and you submit them to really harsh treatment — you give them no food, you stop them from sleeping, you’re beating them up — so you make them, as you are describing, extremely tired and very foggy, and then you get them to read Mao for hours and hours on end. Are they going to become communists? Well, we know the answer, because unfortunately, the Koreans and the Chinese have tried during the Korean War, and it just doesn’t work at all. They’ve managed to kill a lot of POWs, and they managed to get I think two of them to go back to China and to claim that they had converted to communism. But in fact, after the fact, it was revealed that these people had just converted because they wanted to stop being beaten and starved to death, and that as soon as they could revert back to go back to the US, they did so.

I'd also echo others' comments that I think testing a curriculum will be relatively hard. Even education programs with clear measurables (e.g. financial literacy programs, work-skills programs for former convicts, second language programs) often end up unsuccessful. It would be even more difficult to teach "love." How do you measure how loving someone is and reliably teach it to others?

Fwiw this review discusses why Rutger Bregman's book is deeply flawed.

"That he felt the need to misrepresent the past and other cultures in order to provide a ‘hopeful’ history is rather a message of despair. Bregman presents hunter-gatherer societies as being inherently peaceful, antiwar, equal, and feminist likely because these are commonly expressed social values among educated people in his own society today. This is not history but mythology."

Interesting post! I think what would have made this more helpful would be a discussion of the kinds of arguments that led you to change your mind in each case. For example, you note that you were convinced of universal prescriptivism but then later came to reject it. A brief discussion of the relevant arguments for/against would be interesting!

[What] is required of the philosopher is also to provide grounding or to think about grounding upon which the intuitions pointed to by a thought experiment are consistent.

Why can't a philosopher just present a counterexample? In fact, it seems arguing from a specific alternative grounding would make Timmerman's argument weaker. As he notes (emphasis mine):

I have purposefully not made a suggestion as to how many (if any) children Lisa is obligated to rescue. I did so to make my argument as neutral as possible, as I want it to be consistent with any normative ethical view ranging from moral libertarianism to a view that only permits Lisa to indulge in a comparably insignificant good a single time.

As an analogy, if you make a general claim such as: "All marbles are blue," it's enough to point to a single counterexample to show that that claim is false. I don't also have to have my own view about what colors marbles come in.

Also, as a matter of interpreting Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Singer doesn't justify his principles based on any inferences from the drowning child thought experiment. Instead, he only uses that thought experiment as an application of his principles, which he takes to simply be common-sense. And although Singer is himself a utilitarian, he doesn't make any argument for utilitarianism in that paper, largely for the same reason as Timmerman! He wants diverse people to agree with him regardless of their grounding for the principles he discusses.

I don't quite understand your objection to Timmerman's thought experiment. You say it's "ad hoc" and "justifies our complacency arbitrarily", but it's unclear what you mean by these terms. And it's unclear why someone should agree that it's ad hoc and arbitrary.