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> People can follow a value systems and still understand that other value systems exist. I'm aware of this! I am fairly anti-utilitarian, and understand that the EA folks I've talked to are deeply utilitarian. What is so frustrating is that they don't seem to be able to understand me back. Any conversation about the ethics or character, duty, or virtue is translated back into utilitarianism, a framework in which non-utilitarian motives can't possibly be valid. Of course I'm not characterizing every EA-ascribing person, but it's ... very common in the community, to say the least, and it makes e.g. engaging with their forums / comment sections / subreddits agonizing. > This is a quite uncharitable view of things. EA utilitiarians aren't spending their life on optimizing numbers, they're trying to use numbers to guide decisions on how to better impact life. "better impact life".... as determined by... numbers. This is a group of people who look at the world and think that the best things to do are things like optimizing QALYs or the number of animal lives or, in extreme cases, their personal lifespan including cryogenic extension in the offchance it works, or "the number of humans who will die when a superintelligent AI Roko's Basilisks / Pascal-mugs them", or other sorts of things like that. And in a world where you are only capable of measuring worth by holding up numbers against each other and comparing them, those arguments become seductive. But outside of that framework, for instance in a moral philosophy in which the best thing to do is not "the thing with the highest +EV" but "the most noble action", those stances are absurd. It's not, IMO, a person's job to single-handedly have a highest +EV on lifespans or net-suffering; it is (to some approximation) to live a good life and do the right thing in your local journey. I would reject the notion that a person is directly responsible for far-away people's suffering. I think the world is direly short of leadership, character, and compassion, and for me goodness is about those things. When it comes to large institutions, like governments or large charities, I feel differently, and the calculus switches over to being more +EV --- but ultimately is still about the moral compass of the organization. Like I think SBF was a scumbag and totally wrong, and would still be wrong if his bets had worked out. It is not common that people are operating at a scale where utilitarianism starts to become morally appropriate, and even when it becomes appropriate it's never entirely appropriate, because actual leadership is ultimately about morality even if the organization is doing practical things. If the human race was completely moral, and then eventually died out due to some X-risk, that is mostly a Fine Result to me and we would all be able to sleep well at night. (but if like, the dying out was because we didn't do our moral duty and handle e.g. climate change or AI or nuclear war or building an asteroid-defense system or dealing with our own in-fighting and squabbling, then that wasn't completely moral, was it?) To be clear, I have a lot of respect for the kidney donation stuff, a slight amount of respect for giving money to charity, and massive disrespect for the hordes of smart people who have divested from the real world and instead smugly pat themselves on their backs that they're doing important work on AI safety. |