Is there a principled place to disembark the crazy train?

To elaborate, if we take EV-maximization seriously, this appears to have non-intuitive implications about e.g. small animals being of overwhelming moral importance in aggregate, the astronomical value of X-risk reduction, the possibility of infinite amounts of (dis)value, suffering in fundamental physics (in roughly ascending order of intuitive craziness to me).

But rejecting EV maximization also seems problematic.

(answered my own question - 'read' means stayed on page >30s).

However, one of my posts has a negative bounce rate, seems like a bug! Or maybe my post was just that engaging ;)
 

Nice! I didn't actually know we had access to our author stats, cool. What is the difference between 'views' and 'reads'? Also, how 'true' do you think these numbers are? They seem rather surprisingly high to me, could there just be a bunch of bots racking up numbers?

Nice post, this is a useful critique I think!

What are the main things you agree with Leopold on? Maybe:

• 'The Project' is a significant possibility.
• Improving cybersecurity is very important.
• Neutral pro-humanity observers should prefer the US/ the 'Free World' to have relatively greater power than China/other authoritarian countries, all else equal.

I think these are important points that I agree with Leopold on. But I agree with you (and your piece moved me a bit in this direction) that national securitization is risky.

I initially felt similarly to Tristan, but then Richard's comment also was persuasive to me, so now I am thinking about it more.

I am fairly confident of these claims:

1. It is not wrong to use the orange diamond symbol on EAF.
2. It is less valuable to use the orange diamond symbol on EAF than on LinkedIn etc.

It seems to me that there is huge value in something (10% pledging, veganism, effective career choices, etc) going from so rare many people do not know anyone in that category, to common enough that most people (in some relevant reference class) have encountered the ideas and the people. However, if e.g. 90% of EAF users pledged and used the diamond, I think this would be socially hard for some of the remaining 10%. This is partly the point, re social norms. But also I think there are legitimate reasons to not want to pledge (yet) and so I think the norm I would love is one where everyone knows about the pledge, knows lots of people who have taken it, and has seriously considered it, but not more pressure than that probably.

I suppose another issue for me is I am sad that humans are so socially conformist and that the fraction of our friends using a symbol will greatly affect our decision, but this basically just is the case, so maybe I need to get over my qualms about using some forms of the dark arts for good.

And as to @Michael_2358 🔸 's original question, @Lizka has written about not taking the pledge here and discussed it at EAG London recently.

Nice! Have personality questions been included in subsequent EA surveys? I am guessing not, given you only report the 2018 data. Why is there a ~6-year lag in reporting these results? I assume there are good reasons, just seems a bit strange at first glance.

Nice, yes quite a clear trend. Re David Moss's comment, it will be interesting to see what the fuller data shows, including countries with <25 EA survey respondents.

Nice! Seems like from the interest generated on this post there is a fair bit of appetite for this.

Thanks, good idea to make this graph, and indeed that is quite a high R^2! I wonder if a log-log version of this graph would be more informative, particularly for the y-axis?