timorl @timorl@qoto.org

@brion Bad advice, a circle is terrible topology, so you shouldn't be finding a new one.

@nomi Yes! I have minor quibbles with some of the things your wrote, but this is the general line of reasoning I would like someone to follow, only in a more formal philosophical language (unfortunately none of these assertions are sufficiently well supported a priori from a formal point of view). Why no one has is exactly what annoys me.

@Alon I know that post, but I'm pretty sure it only argues against credentialism, not against education itself. I've never met anyone who would consider it to be against education, the closest thing I have seen in the community to being against education is the dislike of schools, as they are currently organized, but even that was for much more organizational reasons (essentially children's lib, but the whole community suffers a terrible unawareness of actual leftist politics, so they wouldn't call it that... and I do agree that is a problem) rather than education itself.
@escarpment @emilymbender @timnitGebru

@cappallo Unfortunately I am quite averse to podcasts as a format, and this one additionally seems to start with quite some unrelated stuff – do you know of any transcripts? Even if not, thanks anyway, I might end up listening to this at some point.

@modulux Yeah, I understand why this looks like the default to them, I even think that most of the time assuming things are time-invariant at first is the reasonable approach (e.g. I strongly suspect that the correct decision theory will end up being time-invariant), I'm just mystified why no one examined this assumption with regards to morality among so many critiques.

Augh, I just read a huge list of critiques of longtermism, reading a couple of the more interesting-sounding ones in detail and skimming a couple more, and **not one** mentions the core of the issue with treating future people exactly the same as currently existing ones. (Vaden Masrani in https://vmasrani.github.io/blog/2020/against_longtermism/ comes the closest, although he also accidentally invalidates all epistemology with one of his arguments. Anyway, credit to him for coming the closest.) I don't think this is correct, for two kinds of reasons, anthropics and the fact that people are beings existing in time, so it shouldn't be surprizing that our values are not time-invariant. Why no one(?) is properly criticizing this part is beyond me, am I really the only one who sees these specific problems? Seems extremely unlikely.

Oh, and to be clear the criticisms of the _effects_ of longtermism are on point – the dangers of the ideology should be clear even to its proponents – the criticisms of the practicalities are pretty good (I would put more stress on the fact that a big part of the problem is that thinking about sufficiently small probabilities almost surely hits the problems with resource limited reasoning, in which case it's well known that Bayesianism ceases to be optimal, but in general the points are good) the criticisms of utilitarianism mostly suck (although mostly inasmuch as they conflate utilitarianism in general with the total utility variant, and it's hard to blame them for that since this is important as a basis for longtermism), it's just the complete absence of criticisms of the core idea described above that worries me and likely makes proponents of longtermism feel secure in these assumptions, which they really shouldn't.

For reference, the list I'm referring to: https://www.longtermism-hub.com/critiques .

@Alon Hm, this is the first part of your characterization I disagree with, unless you are talking about a very specific subgroup. I've been in this movement (excluding longtermism, which I always had philosophical misgivings about and which I believe is the source of most current problems with EA) since very early on (although remotely, perhaps these approaches are much more popular in the Bay Area?) and while criticisms of the education system or academia are common I have seen literally no one arguing for either a or b. c I have seen and uh, this would require a long post to explain, suffice to say I think it's obviously bad but does not discredit the whole movement -- it's mostly the fucking neoreactionaries which most of the rest of the community shuns, but not too loudly lest fucking Thiel stops throwing money at them.

tl;dr as often is the case, I blame billionaires, they ought not to exist

@escarpment @emilymbender

Oh, since I am already tagging @timnitGebru , thanks for the link to the critiques, I'll definitely read it carefully, do you by any chance also have something that's less focused on longtermism, since this is the part I already disagree with?