Paging @ed_hagen

I think it’s because capitalism is easy to see it as morally suspect (e.g., it’s all about self-interest). That makes it easy to signal one’s virtue by opposing it. It’s a kind of moral unintuitiveness in particular.

Many signals have this problem. Very underappreciated problem imo.

Sure but what percentage of consumed content is utilitarian reports/documents? I would guess a small percentage. And there's even a case that those reports/documents have social dimensions as well (e.g., signaling political affiliation by reading/making a climate change report).

I would disagree that most text/images/music is utilitarian, and I would therefore disagree that most of it will be done by AI. "Some" is more defensible. I think the mere fact that people are saddened by AI creative content is evidence of a preference that markets will cater to.

I think this implicitly assumes a dubious psychological theory about creative content. It assumes this content is utilitarian rather than deeply social—driven by various forms signaling, identity, and affiliation. Creative content is very different from physical products / tools.

Really? Maybe we travel in different circles but from my pov people get very emotional about the war in Ukraine.

I don’t think this is bizarre. Ethics is a fundamentally emotional thing for Homo sapiens. What’s bizarre is the small group of weirdos who think ethics is about cold logic and calculation. I like/support those weirdos but they’re clearly the weird ones.

Yes could not agree more. I talk about this in my piece on AI doomerism and how this should make us skeptical of doomer arguments grounded in folk concepts like “intelligence” and “goals.”

I think it’s largely an incoherent concept, though there may be some potential meanings relating to institutions and economic systems that make sense. I write about this in my post “AI Is Not the End of the World.”

Nice to see some evolutionary psychologists tapping the sign: "Intelligence is not a general, all-purpose capacity that allows for adaptive processing of all types of information across every domain." sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

I’m hopeful that the introduction of AI into the behavioral sciences will, by making it easier to answer any question, push us to ask better questions.

Self-censorship means political outcomes are more likely to be shaped by publicly expressed beliefs rather than privately held beliefs, which is bad insofar as the latter are more likely to be correct than the former.

Respectfully, I think "nothing remotely presumptuous" is an overstatement. When it comes to equating any external criticism of your subculture with criticism of goodness itself, there is something in the vicinity of presumptuous there. It's prudent to recognize how one comes off.

It seems like you are ruling out the possibility of any *external* criticism of EA. I’m not even sure how such external criticism could be pursued under your view. Declaring one’s group to be immune from external criticism is where the presumption lies.

This strikes me as a case of motte and bailey, where the motte is a set of specific claims, ideas, practices, and preoccupations, and the bailey is “we just want to do good.” It insulates EA from any kind of broad-level criticism. I like EA but there’s room for such criticism.

Sure, bad takes abound, but it can be hard to tell the difference between a justifiably low prior on X and a stance of loutish ignorance/incuriosity toward X. I’m sure the folks discussing the possibility of ancient aliens think we’re being ignorant/incurious about the topic.

Yes in this case it would be pseudo-heterodox stances, reflecting a similar number of limited epistemic options, making it no better. Agreed this kind of chicanery is a thing. Genuine heterodoxy, insofar as it exists, might be good though.

There’s no psychological difference but there may be a difference in terms of what kinds of social incentive structures are more vs. less likely to lead to ossification around a sacred orthodoxy.

Also a good argument for being kind to animals if you can at low cost (yes, even bugs)