I’m quite surprised you guys don’t sneer at the GPI more, it seems to me that they are the philosophical core of what EA and rationalist-adjacent people espouse and preach. Not to mention that a lot of their researchers explicitly state that they post on other sites like LessWrong.
They have papers defending fanaticism, some about AI risk, and others by Nick Bostrom which in and of itself is a pretty big red flag. Plus all the stuff I’ve read there is very big on reducing everything down to math. Some of it seems at least minimally sneerworthy to me.
Do you guys think they’re sneerworthy?
As long as it isn’t another round of bagging on anyone who isn’t a breadtube communist who hates maths and Peter Singer, because the jokes get so bad when people here don’t actually really know what they’re talking about
If so, a ton of mainstream philosophy is also sneerworthy… which isn’t necessarily something I’m opposed to, but still
EA is obviously not a sufficient characteristic in and of itself for sneering
I mean shit, even the name is sneerworthy.
I didn’t even know that’s a thing that exists. If you have something sneerworthy that’s in the scope of the sub, then why don’t you post it yourself?
Sure. What is Good can’t be reduced to math
These guys do good work. Not a good subject of sneer
GPI seem pretty good to me. I’m fairly sure you know but in case others don’t: “fanaticism” in these kinds of contexts means “taking some principle to its logical conclusion even if that ends up in really weird places”. In academia lots of types of fanaticism come up, usually for EA stuff it’s fanaticism about the idea that “expected utility maximisation is always correct even if it takes you to making bets that feel really weird” e.g tiny % of winning huge amounts. FWIW they also have papers criticising this kind of fanaticism and trying to see what dropping it as a principle does. In these contexts “fanaticism” has nothing to do with the kinds of charged usage it has irl
Also they explicitly target economics as a big research area so I don’t think it’s surprising or bad that a lot of their papers are to reduce things down to math - economists always try to build math models for stuff, most good economists I’ve talked to are pretty upfront about how they’re obviously a simplistic approximation for the world, but they can still be useful anyway
Here’s their Twitter: https://twitter.com/GPIOxford
This seems right up this sub’s alley.