i'm sorry but if you have convinced yourself that you need to devote your life to enabling 10^54 simulated consciousnesses to come into being, you are in a cult and you need to stop and take stock of the life choices that brought you to this point

i'm sorry but if you have convinced yourself that you need to devote your life to enabling 10^54 simulated consciousnesses to come into being, you are in a cult and you need to stop and take stock of the life choices that brought you to this point (https://twitter.com/grapesmoker/status/1591637936067706880)

posted on November 13, 2022 01:07 PM by u/JohnPaulJonesSoda

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u/DELETED 69 points at 1668354902.000000

[deleted]

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u/MadCervantes 36 points at 1668356126.000000

The singularity and transhumanism are the Rapture for people who are no longer theists. I'll admit growing up conservative evangelical, enders game had an effect on me.

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u/Soyweiser 53 points at 1668346748.000000

(from the tweet they are reactiong to)

Jesus christ

I think people really underappreciate how, prior to EA, the foreign aid consensus was allergic to a) rigorously measuring outcomes b) giving no strings attached basics, like cash and malaria nets, rather than trying to do paternalistic convoluted reform programs

These mfuckers are now pretending they came up with the idea of measuring outcomes and giving out free stuff.

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u/den_the_terran 37 points at 1668361610.000000

Having previously been involved with charitable organizations, there is a LOT of resistance to measuring outcomes and giving out free stuff. Convincing charities to do that is genuinely impressive IMO.

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u/pusillanimouslist 15 points at 1668366415.000000

Tbf, a non trivial number of charities are about creating jobs for a certain social class, not the official top level goal.

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u/Soyweiser 30 points at 1668364180.000000

> Convincing charities to do that is genuinely impressive IMO. Sure, it would if they actually did that. They just made a charity of their own who gave out malaria nets, and then they floundered. Remember that a constant EA problem is 'we don't have enough good causes to donate our vast wealth to'. They just lost billions of dollars. They could have solved world hunger for a year.

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u/titotal 27 points at 1668367879.000000

>Sure, it would if they actually did that. They just made a charity of their own who gave out malaria nets The Against Malaria Foundation predates EA by a number of years I believe. Whether or not you believe the EA math on it being the "mathematically best" charity, it's still a very good one, and I'm glad that a lot of money got funneled into it. I think even if the EA reasoning around global poverty evaluation is a little shonky, it was still way better than the previous status quo, which was often either a total waste of resources or even actively harmful. It's a moot point though, the global poverty parts of EA are rapidly becoming obsolete, as the core group of EA fall one by one to AI doomerism.

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u/Soyweiser 19 points at 1668368949.000000

Yeah my point is more that they didn't really do A nor B. The malaria nets predating them makes this even more clear. Combine this with the stories of them going 'we want to use Smaugs horde of gold but we just can't find the causes' while sitting on the gold like a bunch [of dwarves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5-TRnZxIsk) because like a bunch of rightwingers the worry that some of the cash might not end up in the right place paralyzed them into just reinvesting it in risky investments. So the tweet was more of a bailey argument.

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u/den_the_terran 5 points at 1668368114.000000

Yeah...as they get more money, they have no defense whatsoever against people who are attracted to that money, as many here have repeatedly pointed out.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart 10 points at 1668383207.000000

I’m genuinely curious, EA has been around for 10+ years now, is there any longitudinal work on the difference they’ve made overall to the provision of important materials and monies to charities worldwide? Like I know they have numbers, but it’d be interesting to see what they’ve done that’s *better than how things would have gone*

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u/supertucci 10 points at 1668351622.000000

Uh sorry lamo here…but would you be able to ELI5? With gratitude

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u/Apocalyte 48 points at 1668354959.000000

EA adherents, the kinds of people who spend a lot of time and energy on thinking of the "most rational" way of doing things, started off by labeling every logical line of thinking as Bayesian, which is a very specific form of reasoning. From there, it became more about saying a specific line or signal, called a shibboleth, in order to let other people know that you were a "rational" type. And by sticking to this way of doing things, they encouraged more and more cultlike behavior, forcing the idea of Effective Altruism into the same space as AI doomsaying, weird logic traps, and similar nonsense. All the while, they're claiming that they invented these very common means of examining the data reasonably and with a process. In short, Effective Altruism became just another thing you say to signal that you believe in weird hypotheticals about simulated brains while also fluffing your own sense of superiority up.

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u/supertucci 5 points at 1668365895.000000

TY!

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u/supertucci 1 points at 1668365930.000000

TY!

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u/RandomAmbles 1 points at 1672030176.000000

I’ve been wondering about this.

I know it sounds strange/insane of me to ask, but are you quite sure?

I don’t want to be in a cult and would like very much to be pulled out of one if I am.

But, well, I unironically am interested in just this sort of thing.

Without sneering, could you maybe explain where you think I’ve gone wrong here? I’m willing to have a little lighthearted fun poked at my expense in exchange for a better understanding of a which point I’ve gone wrong/been led astray.

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