i think it's worse because like 90% of the people believe in it, even if they fall short, and 95% of the money is from people who are trying to buy indulgences to get Roko's Basilisk off their back after completing their life's work: a machine which turns puppies into high-quality mulch - ThreadSky

theophite.bsky.social • 11 days ago

i think it's worse because like 90% of the people believe in it, even if they fall short, and 95% of the money is from people who are trying to buy indulgences to get Roko's Basilisk off their back after completing their life's work: a machine which turns puppies into high-quality mulch

Reposted from Microplastics Instrumentality Project

EA is such a depressing subculture because, exactly like conservative evangelicals, there's like 2% of them who really believe it and make incredible sacrifices to live in line with their beliefs, and the other 98% are totally full of shit and gaslighting & stealing credibility from the 2%

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economymedicine.bsky.social•11 days ago

High quality mulch has value, not sure the same applies to what they are producing.

hareksu.bsky.social•11 days ago

And the ones who believe in it are typically people who have never actually worked with optimization algorithms, and are utterly clueless about their myriad of horrible failure modes.

kaiserbrown.bsky.social•11 days ago

I have my complaints about Dylan Matthews as a reporter, but he literally gave a random person his kidney bc he believed it was the best thing he could do with it.

Also, all of these people worried about Roko's Basilisk are the same people who would happily commit suicide by Star Trek transporters.

kaiserbrown.bsky.social•11 days ago

No understanding of how consciousness or sense of self fuckin' works, man.

mlazaric.bsky.social•11 days ago

what continuity of consciousness do you have when going to sleep?

kaiserbrown.bsky.social•11 days ago

I don't, at least not full consciousness. Some species do, cetaceans for example. But barring there being something much weirder going on in the universe than is generally expected I'm still (mostly) the same atoms and molecules and patterns. 1/2

kaiserbrown.bsky.social•11 days ago

You can make a real argument that the person that is realized on the other side of the transporter is going to be exactly like you in every particular, and that that's good enough for you to be cool with doing it. I'd also agree that I am not the myself I was in the past. That said 2/3

kaiserbrown.bsky.social•11 days ago

The people I'm talking about believe Roko's Basilisk will restore themself specifically to torture. These same people would, mostly, happily step on the telepad. So which is it, do we have an immutable/semi-permanent "self" or are we just an instance of ourselves? It really can't be both ways.

lamorak.bsky.social•11 days ago

An interesting philosophical question, but I am not being torn apart on an atomic level when I sleep. That does make teleportation less likely to allow continuation of consciousness.

theophite.bsky.social•11 days ago

if you are doing something objectively evil, the thing which is most within your control is to stop rather to increase the world supply of mosquito nets or to try to improve the lives of krill

neilsinhababu.bsky.social•11 days ago

No, you keep increasing the world supply of mosquito nets and help animals, and stop doing whatever the evil stuff is. These things are on separate tracks.

pfish.zone•11 days ago

this is in reference to the idea of “earning to give” which was popular in EA circles; roughly, you should take the highest-paying job you can get with little concern for the morality of it so you can donate your salary to bed nets and/or robogod

neilsinhababu.bsky.social•11 days ago

do it with bednets but not robogod, problem solved.

Also the robogod stuff was mostly about preventing robogod, but they weren’t very good at it, so I can see why there is confusion

pfish.zone•11 days ago

I think you’re arguing against something that nobody here is saying—the point is that the philosophy that led to “it’s affirmatively good to work at the grandma-mugging factory to donate money to bed nets” is bad, not that donating money to bed nets or whatever is bad.

neilsinhababu.bsky.social•11 days ago

What is the grandma-mugging factory in your analogy?

artino.bsky.social•11 days ago

These are people that think krill are more important than existing human life. They may have a point, but they come at it in the strangest of angles

antitractionist.bsky.social•11 days ago

I think more krill is, on the balance, a net good. but not for the krill, really

artino.bsky.social•11 days ago

I thought I was the only one that understood

antitractionist.bsky.social•11 days ago

Phytoplankton as well in high demand

artino.bsky.social•11 days ago

Still trying figure out if I should short or invest in phytoplankton

ambivalentricky.bsky.social•11 days ago

that's one hell of a sentence you wrote there

nsaphra.bsky.social•11 days ago

One of the bsky features I was cautiously optimistic about turned out to be dumb as hell, as this post made me discover that the "far right accounts" blocklist I was enjoying had blocked you

conjurial.bsky.social•11 days ago

I'm having a hard time imagining anyone far left enough to consider the right rev here to be far-right

marble47.bsky.social•11 days ago

Some "leftists" really did not like being told the only moral option is to vote Democrat

lizthegrey.com•11 days ago

I consider a fair bit of my philanthropy strategy *influenced* by the previous version of EA, but definitely outside the EA orthodoxy.

I search for under-funded problems, that are led by people from the communities they want to help, and where each marginal dollar has an outsize impact.

digifox.binaryden.net•11 days ago

Yeah it's possible to buy into the general idea without buying into the weird quasi-cult bits. (This is also my objection to the lumping together of the "TESCREAL bundle")

lizthegrey.com•11 days ago

and I just straight up won't add more morally bad stuff into the world, even if it results in me being less able to afford earning to give. there are plenty of jobs that pay, say, 20-30% less, but do 1% the amount of ethical harm as mulching babies.

lizthegrey.com•11 days ago

my investment thesis the past decade has been "how does this help black & brown trans people" and "how would my unique expertise and point of view help, given there's plenty of white cis funding floating around there?"

and that means I don't give to the ACLU because they're well funded etc.

austinlawhead.bsky.social•10 days ago

Yea, there are some serious gaps in the moral economy of EA that they seem uninterested in exploring

neilsinhababu.bsky.social•11 days ago

You have the proportions basically in reverse. Look at all the money for bednets and deworming and direct cash donations to poor people. Without those ideas, nobody would have been interested in EA.

This is what happens when you think the EA Forum is all of EA

asazernik.bsky.social•11 days ago

The amount of money motivated by "x-risk" fears is stupendous.

immanentizeslowly.bsky.social•11 days ago

Earning-to-give and the whale targeting plans were an early and giant red flag that made me and many others quit. It's sad that the broader org membership can't recognize the bed they made

bluespacecanary.bsky.social•11 days ago

I think most of them aren't *consciously* full of shit necessarily, but so many of them treat one of the most totalizing moral philosophies I've ever encountered as a *hobby* and idk how a sincere believer can actually do that?

bluespacecanary.bsky.social•11 days ago

Though I guess this does line up with my broader difficulty understanding how so many people are so comfortable living their lives counter to their apparently-sincerely-held beliefs/ideologies

bluespacecanary.bsky.social•11 days ago

I still haven't gotten over the horror of discovering at some point in college that a lot of people I knew didn't think they'd ever done something *they believed to be wrong*, because wow the gap between the moral standards I try to live up to & the ones other people apparently do is terrifying

bigfarts420.bsky.social•11 days ago

Also Roko's Basilisk is just a vengeful God they've rebranded because they read the shittiest science fiction novels we've published and understood none of them.

largesseadultson.bsky.social•11 days ago

I Have No Soul, And I Must Feel Good About Myself

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