Is it reasonable that less privileged people might have some hope? Does anyone want to live in a luxurious mansion surrounded by people who are just trying to make ends meet?
Find me an evil corporation advertised in the job listings. A single one.
Your entire argument is a projection and strawman. You have no idea what you're talking about. The imperative popularized in EA circles is to work in fields that have the most humane impacts where possible, and otherwise donate money you earn by providing value.
If you're going to argue that merely working for FANG or high-earning positions is tantamount to aiding "evil" corporations then you're chastising a lot more people than just EA adherents.
Your whole thing I suspect is informed by the sentiment that making good money must categorically be evil, or some other leftist notion.
On the 80000 website itself, the list of problems it presents is so wildly disconnected from actual problems people rationally face every day it's hard to read. All the problems they present (AI, pandemics, whatever) is a hypothetical consequence of the capitalist system.
Start applying solutions to real problems people face. That's rational. Then notice how by removing the bad actors from the equation your scifi problems disappear too. That's rational. Telling the billions of people who suffer to shut up because AI extinction is the real problem and we need to throw money at it so that a hypothetical future might be better is just completely irrational, disrespectful, and anything but altruist or efficient.
> Start applying solutions to real problems people face. That's rational.
Done, that's what the charity and grass-roots movements for housing is for.
> actual problems people rationally face every day
Actual problems can be qualified instead of being referred to in abstract. Food in the developed world is effectively a solved problem. Housing should be, but it remains inelastic owing to bad policy.
> All the problems they present (AI, pandemics, whatever) is a hypothetical consequence of the capitalist system.
If some other wink wink system couldn't possibly introduce novel externalities, it is tautologically regressive and imposes more barbaric ones.
> Find me an evil corporation advertised in the job listings. A single one.
It's hard to find one that's not evil on this list, except maybe for reporter at MIT Tech Review? Some of these job titles sound good, but wield no power to make good things in practice (hence the turnover rate for many "ethicist" or QA roles). But i didn't have to scroll much to find unambigously evil corporations (eg. RAND, Google).
> work in fields that have the most humane impacts where possible
I'm sensitive to this argument, but i'm not sure that's possible in practice. It might be possible in some public sector or non-profit jobs, but i'm pretty sure it's impossible when driven by market value and share prices. EA does not ask such profound questions about actual political and social structures affecting our lives and therefore in my view silences the actual solutions to actual problems we face.
> merely working for FANG or high-earning positions is tantamount to aiding "evil" corporations
No. Many people do the minimum that's asked of them to put food on the table, that's just human and we can't really blame them. Those who go above and beyond thinking they'll save the world through Silicon Valley startups and foundations actually destroying it are the ones in my view aiding "evil".
Many, in fact. What do we work on, and for whose benefits? How to make useful products without destroying the environment or negatively impacting our bodies and minds? Why, despite an over-abundance of resources and products, do we have such profound inequalities? How could we address them?
Small example: why fixate on AI safety and risk of human extinction when 1) AI problems run much deeper (loss of QA, more economic inequalities, insane resource extraction, etc) 2) human extinction is actually already on track due to pre-AI industrial activities, and addressing the problems we had before ChatGPT came out would de facto solve the problems posed by OpenAI and others in the field?
That's just a small overview, we can (and should) ask many more, and i think what you called class warfare definitely has a place in that list. I'm just as much fascinated by numbers as the next EA blogger, but i do believe being fixated on numbers prevents from asking deep moral and philosophical questions about our shared humanity. Maybe my feeling of the EA community is wrong, and i'd be interested in reading more radical EA-adjascent blogs if you have links to share.
Why is inequality bad when material wealth has been increasing for decades and centuries? And do you think we have more inequality now or in the last centuries?
(BTW EAs are the ones redistributing their wealth so I wonder why you'd oppose them)
Why is resource extraction bad? Because of climate change? Almost all EA folks want to help with climate change. And no, climate change wouldn't cause human extinction - there's a very small chance of it happening. p(doom) climate change is lower than p(doom) of AI is what EA would argue.
> EA does not ask such profound questions about actual political and social structures affecting our lives and therefore in my view silences the actual solutions to actual problems we face.
Adherents do ask that. You'd have known that if you'd bother to look. But no, it does not reduce all concerns and solutions to your pet ideology.
Your ideological slant isn't much of a mystery, and reveals a conceit that EA itself has an overt political ideological alignment. Demographic surveys show EA is 70% left-leaning. Your far-left sensibility probably more represented than in average population, though still not that much. This is a projection partly owing to high-profile individuals associated you don't like, but mostly because you're not interested in charity, these improvements and what it means to people, because it doesn't satisfy your worldview.
Donations for malaria nets and direct cash transfers lead to tangible immediate difference in peoples' lives. Meanwhile, you sneer at concerns like climate and AI you deem too abstract, while lamenting that EA isn't fixated on some other abstract notion: that a total upheaval of the system, of doing away with Liberalism and private property, solves every problem (the unsaid corollary to the conceit that any solution doesn't matter if it doesn't mean overthrowing Capitalism). You can hand-wave anything and everything as a symptom of Capitalism, as if to say they couldn't happen otherwise, but it's not a compelling argument to most who haven't forgotten 20th-Century Communist experiments. Yeah they sure could sleepwalk their way to success (and to that we hear "oh, they weren't real Communists", or "they failed because of the Capitalists", depending on the day. Completely unserious). Anarchists have even less credibility.
> Show us the counterexample, then. Preferably more than one.
The thousands who donate to charity like Against Malaria Foundation or direct cash transfers, and many who pledge to donate a large percentage of their income?
I am not familiar with their beliefs (open to learning). But what circulates is troubling. E.g. statistically optimising for future even if it means harming current can be bad dressed in an excuse. Assigning value e.g. to lives (from prawns to humans) can also be a statistical way to do harm with an excuse. Overall, if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck…
The smear campaign will work if that’s all that’s out there. Are they public with their beliefs/principles or does someone need to go through levels of billions valuation to know the truth.
The article here pretty much debunks itself given the over-the-top absurdity and irrationality of its "arguments". But of course only when read critically in the first place.
When two opposing forces meet, you don’t get truth from either side, you get it by critically looking at what’s left between the lines. And it doesn’t look good for EA if I go by the discussion here. Lots of pushing problematic to crazies and anecdotal altruism that is not in any way related to EA principles specifically. I don’t judge. Everyone is entitled to do what they think is best. But we can also be concerned on our side on the impact EAs actions can have on us who are not in agreement with the vagueness of it. And we can say that it is looking as much about altruism as Scientology is about science.
> I am not familiar with their beliefs (open to learning)
That much is clear. No one "owns" or "leads" EA, it's not a monolith; people have their own beliefs and co-opt it, including crazies. The only common tenet is in the name.
Notwithstanding that "shrimp welfare" and the like is in the margins, it does not preclude the overwhelmingly anthropocentric charitable giving by most members.
I mean, the most popular writer associated with that world, Scott Alexander, donated his kidney just to help others. Knowing the good people are trying to do, it's unseemly to me for EA not only to be discarded but viciously attacked because of "vibes" and weirdos who associate themselves with it.
You used the term "an excuse" twice; for what, a hidden motive to do harm? I think some types like Bentham's Bulldog are wrong or misguided in some respects, that doesn't mean you can leap to some notion that they want to harm humanity in the most stupid way possible: donating a meagre sum to shrimp welfare.
I wouldn’t be against the co opt interpretation and I do believe people will be co opting something both with good and bad or crazy intentions. The thing is, if a fraction that co opts is so overwhelmingly outranks everyone else, then the original intent may end up the fringe. From my perspective the issue starts with the name. Why effective? The moment you introduce an optimisation problem you open the back door to biases. I would suggest blind altruism. Engineers can accept readily that random processes can optimise. Let the randomness optimise blindly and just be altruistic. You don’t have to publish an altruism balance sheet.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. How are you "ranking"? The most high-profile EA-adjacent personalities are guys like Scott Alexander, Benjamin Todd.
Ranking by influence. Claiming that adjacent personalities have influence that could even be compared to that of AI behemoths signing agreements with the President of the US is not going to convince anyone.
That's not what an Economist does. They can tell you that a specific policy is likely to have an impact along one or two dimensions (e.g. interest rate), but they don't know what policymakers at home or abroad are going to do, e.g. Trump's trade wars, or impacts of innovations across industries, e.g. AI leading to RAM shortage and data centres.
It's childish to pretend like Economists are supposed to anticipate everyone's every move in order for their work to be given credence. If you think tariffs are bad for consumers, an Economists worked that out for you.
Similar sentiment, have not read the book but I imagine I've absorbed some of it through rat/ea circles and here. I can appreciate an argument that rapidly-improving AI, with mere probabilistic output, could lead to bad outcomes owing to neglect and complacency, or aiding at wreaking havoc. What I don't buy is the argument that sentient super-intelligence could "accidentally" manifest itself through recursive self-improvement, which is along few dimensions. I'm not sure it would be even possible to intentionally create one, but it would be redundant; you don't need RSI to generate the value people want from AI. We could pass strict laws against that, but it wouldn't satisfy the doomers who are already arguing that human minds are "just an algorithm", as though AI sentience is a foregone conclusion
What's interesting is how low alcohol ranks compared to obesity and diet. It makes the recent moral panic following loose interpretations of the Lancet study seem hypocritical, if not misguided. If anything deserves a "may cause cancer" sticker, it's nitrate-ridden processed meat.
Nitrate ridden processed meat already has a “may cause cancer” sticker on it (unless you mean a literal sticker warning when you buy meat from stores?):
I like to drink. With that being said, there are a lot of downsides to alcohol other than an increased risk of cancer. Also, alcohol can lead to obesity and a bad diet. Is it ever healthy to drink? I do not know. I am going to do it anyway though.
No. But drinking every now and then makes so little difference it's not a huge concern. Drinking a lot, though -- that's more problematic.
Like most of my friends around my age, I've cut out almost all alcohol in the last few years. None of us miss it. But it's still nice to drink occasionally, and I'm not going to stop entirely.
There's downsides to heavy or frequent drinking, sure. But since the cancer risk is minimal, what's the downside of a glass of wine or beer a couple of times a week?
I'm less convinced of the negatives of this than I used to be. Humans are quite well adapted to alcohol.
If it's something you enjoy, I'd say go for it, in moderation. It's probably less unhealthy than e.g. living in a city, eating processed meat, or working an office job.
Its all fun and games until you get cancer. I had cancer (and a few drinks) myself, it sucked. Can you ever be certain it was caused by an unhealthy lifestyle? No. Probability and causality is weird tbh.
How sure we are that something causes cancer and how often it causes cancer are not the same. Those WHO classifications are about the former. Usually the two are pretty much entwined, because you can more easily find larger effects. The effect of meats is a counterexample though: because it causes specific types of cancers that are otherwise rare you can be pretty sure it causes cancer even though the effect is not as big as e.g. smoking.
Is there really a moral panic? Apart from a few viral Twitter posts, I don't see a major sobriety push by my colleagues.
Profits of main alcohol suppliers has certainly taken a hit over the last 5 years but this is arguably far more because of rise of remote working, inflation (drinking at pubs have become much more costly than before) and people in general just addicted to their phone rather than going out (similar to the impact on almost all social activities no just going to pubs)
Recent demographic shifts have given rise to a vocally anti-alcohol contingent in large parts of the Western world. There's substantial motivated reasoning.
In the US, there is a large demographic shift on alcohol drinking. What I've seen is not an explicitly vocal anti-alcohol stance. But younger generations just aren't as interested in it. At the very least what they consume is different.
My personal theory is that they are scared of ending up on the Internet when they don't have control.
People are broke. They can't afford the bottle or the place you go to to drink a glass. Or the Uber back/costs associated with a DUI. There's no reason to waste any of that money when you can just stay home and goon.
Of course, there are still people who go out and have a good time, or who grab a bottle on the way home from work. But as with most things these days, there's been a socioeconomic bifurcation that has split the fertile consumerist middle into haves and (mostly) have-nots. And the have-nots aren't bothering.
That's my theory too. When I was in college (late 1980s) the bars had dime beers. It was bottom-end lager and served in an 8 oz cup but still, going to the bars for a night could be done cheaply. Now a drink is $10 and you pay a cover charge even if there isn't a band performing.
What I'm talking about is slightly different than that.
This is more like alcohol apathy - not drinking, but also not explicitly anti-alcohol. That the more generational shift in Gen Z that I've seen. But, those sentiments can certainly change over time.
1. health concerns mean moderate drinkers drink less, but heavy drinkers have not changed their habits
2. young people seem to go more to extremes: either drink a lot or be teetotal.
A common consequence of taking GLP-1 receptor agonists is losing interest in alcohol.
Now, I agree that’s not the only factor — there’s something else going on reducing alcohol consumption even in people who’ve never taken GLP-1RAs — but when you have >10% of the population taking them, that’s another significant factor contributing to falling drinking rates.
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