Do you truly not care that people are accidentally spreading misinformation here?

Why do you attribute to me a view I never stated and do not hold? If I say that one cost is greater than another, it doesn’t mean that I do not care about the lesser cost.

In your original shortform, you listed three separate criticisms, but your reply now focuses on just one of those criticisms, in a way that makes it look that my concerns would be invalidated if one granted the validity of that specific criticism. This is the sort of subtle goalpost moving that makes it difficult to have a productive discussion.

Why are you not more concerned about flawed calculations being spread than about me pointing out that flawed calculations are being spread?

Because there is an asymmetry in the costs of waiting. Waiting a week or so to better understand the alleged problems of a tool that will likely be used for years is a very minor cost, compared to the expected improvement in that understanding that will occur over that period.

(ETA: I didn’t downvote any of your comments, in accordance with my policy of never downvoting comments I reply to, even if I believe I would normally have downvoted them. I mention this only because your most recent comment was downvoted just as I posted this one.)

I think comments like these are valuable when they are made after the relevant parties have all had enough time to respond, the discussion is largely settled, and readers are in a position to make up their minds about the nature, magnitude and importance of the problems reported, by having access to all the information that is likely to emerge from the exchange in question. Instead, your comment cautions people to be careful in using a tool based on some issues you found and reported less than two days ago, when the discussion appears to be ongoing and some of the people involved have not even expressed an opinion, perhaps because they haven’t yet seen the thread or had enough time to digest your criticisms. Maybe these criticisms are correct and we should indeed exercise the degree of caution you advise when using the tool, but it seems not unlikely that we’ll be in a better epistemic position to know this, say, a week or so from now, so why not just wait for all the potential evidence to become available?

Very nice post.

Do you think that size and intensity are reducible to a common factor? Somewhat metaphorically, one could say that, ultimately, there are only atoms of pleasantness and unpleasantness, which may be more or less concentrated in phenomenal space. When the atoms are concentrated, we call it ‘intensity’; when they are dispersed, we call it ‘size’. But when all is said and done, the value of a state of affairs is entirely determined by its net hedonic “quantity” (i.e., the number of pleasantness atoms minus the number of unpleasantness atoms).

So recently I've found myself not finishing, or even skipping, some of the AI episodes. I see the guests, think I can guess the general perspectives they and Rob/Luisa will take on AI, and don't think it'll add too much to my knowledge of the topic. If there are particular episodes that you think this is particularly incorrect about, then please let me know!

I’d be very surprised (and very impressed) if the Carl Shulman episodes did not add much to your knowledge of the topic (relative to how much you learned from the listed episodes).

This does not seem obvious. According to an analysis from Rethink Priorities:

Thanks for drawing this study to my attention. In this context, the truth of the price, taste, and convenience hypothesis is irrelevant, though; what matters is whether consumers of animal products have an intrinsic preference that this food comes from live animals in extreme agony, which is the feature of factory farming by virtue of which we regard it as seriously morally wrong. I have partly crossed out a sentence in my previous comment to make this clear.

Citizens of the Axis powers also did not have an intrinsic preference to cause lots of human suffering.

The claim is not that the Holocaust was morally evil because German citizens supported it. The claim is that the Holocaust was morally evil, to a significant degree, because it consisted of a systematic plan to exterminate all members of an ethnic group. Whether this was intended only by the Nazi leadership or by larger sections of German society is primarily relevant for assessing their degree of moral responsibility and blameworthiness, rather than for evaluating the Holocaust itself.

At the same time, I believe striving to be impartial is good. I value welfare the same regardless of species, country, time or ethnic group.

Me too, but as I said, our intuitive appraisal of the badness of the Holocaust is clearly shaped by the commonsense moral views I described.

do you think factory-farming is less intentional and systematic than the Holocaust?

Yes, because consumers of animal products mainly demand the taste and texture associated with meat, eggs and milk; exceptions aside, people do not have an intrinsic preference that these products come from live animals (let alone sentient beings). Furthermore, even if factory farming could be described as intentional and systematic, it would not be the intentional and systematic extermination of an entire ethnic group, which seems central in the intuition shaping commonsense evaluations of the Holocaust.

I agree with the general reasoning of your comment.

However, I also think that this specific comparison is not very illuminating. You comapre these two moral tragedies along the dimension of QALYs lost. However, commonsense moral intuitions about the Holocaust—which shape our own intuitions, even if we reject commonsense morality—aren't solely driven by an implicit quantification of its QALY burden. The intentional, systematic, and large-scale effort to exterminate an entire ethnic group also plays a significant role in our intuitive assessment. When multiple dimensions of evaluation influence our grasp of the moral value of something, comparing something else to it along only one of these dimensions may not help us much to internalize how good or bad it really is.

(ETA: I made a few edits to make the comment clearer.)

@RobBensinger had a useful chart depicting how EA was influenced by various communities, including the rationalist community.

I think it is undeniable that the rationality community played a significant part in the development of EA in the early days. I’m surprised to see people denying this.

What seems more debatable is whether this influence is best characterized as “rationalism influenced EA” rather than “both rationalism and EA emerged to a significant degree from an earlier and broader community of people that included a sizeable number of both proto-EAs and proto-rationalists”.