I like this a lot, the world is an absurd place, and consciously realizing this once in a while can be very soothing, freeing, and strangely motivating!
I've found the books by Kurt Vonnegut, especially Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle supremely effective at reminding me of the glorious absurdity of civilization and the human experience and I try to re-read them semi-regularly for this reason. Big recommendation to anyone who wants to try a taste of realizing absurdity as it is described in this post but doesn't find it natural/easy to really viscerally see the world like that.
I strongly agree with this post.
Thinking consequentially, in terms of expected value and utility functions, will make you tend to focus on the first-order consequences of your actions and lead to a blind-spot for things that are fuzzy and not easily quantifiable, e.g. having loyal friends or being considered a trustworthy person.
I think that especially in the realm of human relationships the value of virtues such as trust, honesty, loyalty, honor is tremendous - even if these virtues may often imply actions with first-order consequences tha...
Thanks for your comment, very interesting!
I do not agree that UOM is necessarily non-naturalist in essence, it might very well be that some natural property of the world turns out to be synonymous with good/meaningful/right/UOM. I am currently agnostic in regards to this. (I might be misunderstanding the terminology, though.)
>Without knowing anything about the concept's content and without understanding the success criteria for having found the right content, is there a way for the concept to have a well-specified meaning (instead of being a pointer to ...
Hi Kat, thanks so much for your post, that's a lot of food for thought! Do you have any examples that you're thinking of when writing about crucial considerations, evidence, social/psychological factors? I'd love to hear more about the specific cases where these were so important. :)
A very small fraction of MDs are admitted to joint MD-PhDs. [...] in many other degrees a similar fraction of students would be publishing papers with supervisors. And the PhD that a medic does will not necessarily be as relevant as those of a computer scientist. <
It being a small fraction doesn't make it less viable for an EA approach to studying med school. Every EA approach to uni will incorporate some tight admission rate.. It might not be relevant for AI safety but it will be super relevant for e. g. neartermist EAs or EAs that don't rank AI ris...
Hi Ryan, thank you for your comment!
Great to hear that you agree with most of the post (two out of its three main points), let me focus on the disagreements regarding the impact potential of choosing to go to med school:
As far as I can see, you raise three general points of disagreement. (do let me know if you don't feel like I represented your points well)
Great, congratulations on the high agency and the great success so far!
I like this a lot and I know from experience that other national groups are dealing with similar questions of balancing precaution/quality over proactiveness/quantity when discussing meta community building strategies! (and currently balancing more on the precautionary side, e.g. High Impact Medicine Germany, EA Germany)
What do you think were the greatest risks of this fast approach and what did you do to proactively mitigate them?
+1 für Zukunftsschutz, da sehr treffend und relativ kurz, dadurch wahrscheinlich für die breitere Öffentlichkeit weniger abschreckend als andere Wortmonster in diesem Thread; positiv konnotiert durch Nähe zu Naturschutz!
Thanks for your comment!
Fascinating, haven't heard of them thus far, I will look into their work!
Yes, I agree. I believe that past successes with cause prioritization and forecasting could lead to some overconfidence in regard to competence at discovering unknown cause areas: It will be important to keep up the cause-neutrality, especially in regards to the unknown!
Thanks for your comment! Yes I am not sure about this factor myself, it is not based on a comprehensive review of all EA efforts on global resilience relative to total efforts.
Checking OpenPhil's Grant Database just now was not as conclusive as I'd hoped as grant categories such as 'Global Catastrophic Risks' or 'Global Health & Development' leave open whether these are spent on generalist resilience or specialist efforts.
I love the idea , sign me up! Are you planning to also publish this in a printed form? I would be interested in ordering this as a haptic copy as well - if just for the feel of it.
I was one of the people that got to meet Ben at the Conference! I just wanted to independently verify that it was a great conversation and that it brought great value. :)
Love the statistics here and the ESH mission generally, all the best and hopefully see you soon at the next conference!
Great points, thanks!
I think the well-being enhancements you describe definitely fit this post's definition of mind enhancement and could in many ways also affect 'Benevolence, Intelligence, Power' (especially 'Power'). This means that in this regard most of the post's considerations would equally apply to well-being enhancements too.
However, the aspects I list mostly focus on the instrumental implications of mind enhancements, i.e. how they could increase/decrease effective-altruist impact done by certain actors/society. As the enhancements you ...
Psychedelics could be a tool for enhancing 'benevolence' in a mind enhancement context.. (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FvZmZdqHNofJyw4Xv/mind-enhancement-a-high-impact-high-neglect-cause-area) Also, there is quite a bit of literature on moral enhancement, some of it focusing on psychedelics. I am planning on writing a cause area profile examining Importance, Neglectedness and Tractability of moral enhancement soon. Would be happy to collaborate/chat!
Important point! I think a healthy lifestyle including optimal sleep, exercise, diet and sufficient recreational/social time are most probably the most important things you can do to reach optimal baseline for possible further mind enhancement. This has the nice effect of also reducing risk for almost all mental diseases. It would be exciting to know if certain MEIs further lower the risk of mental disease, but AFAIK there are already a few examples of this, e.g. certain substances having neuroprotective effects or language learning possibly postponing onset of dementia by a few years!
The event being a disaster doesn't match my experience of myself attending and talking to other attendees who - on the contrary - all seemed to find it very valuable, too. Also, given the circumstances, the venue swap seemed to have been professionally handled IMO.
data point: I attended, and while I'm glad I did I felt misled by the promotional material. I know of at least two other people who felt the same, and attributed some of the blame to EA as a whole rather than the organizers.