All of philosophytorres's Comments + Replies
I don't know how to embed snapshots, but anyone who wishes is welcome to type "phil torres" into linkedin or email me for the snapshots I've just taken right now - it brings up "Researcher at Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge". As I say, it's unclear if this is deliberate - it may well be an oversight, but it has contributed to the mistaken external impression that Phil Torres is or was research staff at CSER.
[Responding to Alex HT above:]
I'll try to find the time to respond to some of these comments. I would strongly disagree with most of them. For example, one that just happened to catch my eye was: "Longtermism does not say our current world is replete with suffering and death."
So, the target of the critique is Bostromism, i.e., the systematic web of normative claims found in Bostrom's work. (Just to clear one thing up, "longtermism" as espoused by "leading" longtermists today has been hugely influenced by Bostromism -- this is a fact, I believe, about intel... (read more)
Have you seen my papers on the topic, by chance? One is published in Inquiry, the other is forthcoming. Send me an email if you'd like!
You don't even have the common courtesy of citing the original post so that people can decide for themselves whether you've accurately represented my arguments (you haven't). This is very typical "authoritarian" (or controlling) EA behavior in my experience: rather than given critics an actual fair hearing, which would be the intellectually honest thing, you try to monopolize and control the narrative by not citing the original source, and then reformulating all the arguments while at the same time describing these reformulations a... (read more)
Sloppy scholarship. Please do take a look, if you have a moment: https://www.salon.com/2019/01/26/steven-pinkers-fake-enlightenment-his-book-is-full-of-misleading-claims-and-false-assertions/.
Wow, this is absolutely stunning. I can't myself participate, but I genuinely hope this project takes off. I'm sure you're familiar with the famous (but not demolished) Building 20 at MIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20. It provided a space for interdisciplinary work -- and wow, the results were truly amazing.
Friends: I recently wrote a few thousand words on the implications that a Trump presidency will have for global risk. I'm fairly new to this discussion group, so I hope posting the link doesn't contravene any community norms. Really, I would eagerly welcome feedback on this. My prognosis is not good.
A fantastically interesting article. I wish I'd seen it earlier -- about the time this was published (last February) I was completing an article on "agential risks" that ended up in the Journal of Evolution and Technology. In it, I distinguish between "existential risks" and "stagnation risks," each of which corresponds to one of the disjuncts in Bostrom's original definition. Since these have different implications -- I argue -- for understanding different kinds of agential risks, I think it would be good to standardize the n... (read more)
Oh, I see. Did they not ask for his approval? I'm familiar with websites devising their own outrageously hyperbolic headlines for articles authored by others, but I genuinely assumed that a website as reputable as Slate would have asked a figure as prominent as Bostrom for approval. My apologies!
Very interesting map. Lots of good information.
Note: news publications impose titles on authors without consulting them. Obviously he would never write that title.