Do you consider this intuition to be a reason that people should be wary of making this type of argument? Or maybe specifically avoid the word "colonize"?

Maybe something like "populate the galaxy" would be better, as it emphasizes that there are no native populations whose members would be harmed by space colonization?

3. was discussed here. My impression of that discussion is that many of the forum readers thought that it's important that one familiarises oneself with the literature before commenting. Like I say in my comment, that's certainly my view.

I agree that too many EA Forum posts fail to appropriately engage with relevant literature.

Cool. Any special reason for 7?

There's even a specific term I can't recall for intentional changes in the environment that a social group would make to domesticate a landscape and provide services for future. It will take me some time to find it.

On the other hand, besides the specifics of strong longtermism, I guess that the conjugation of these ideas is pretty recent: a) concern for humanity as a whole, b) a scope longer than 150 years, c) the existence of a trade-off between present and future welfare, d) the balance is tipped in favor of the long-term. [epistemic status: just an insight, would take me too long to look for a counter-example)

In some cases, I think people feel that they have a nuanced position that isn't captured by broad labels. I think that reasoning can go to far, however: if that argument is pushed far enough, no one will count as a socialist, postmodernist, effective altruist, etc. And as you imply, these kinds of broad categories are useful, even while in some respects imperfect.

Unfortunately, that means that those of us with our reputations on the line are the ones who have the most skin in the game to keep people from doing stupid unilateralist things that make everyone in the community look bad.

Surely if someone doesn't identify as an EA, their actions incur less reputational risk for the movement?

I recently wrote about post on procrastination related to my EA work here. Feel free to just check out the references at the end.

I enjoyed his podcast with Tyler Cowen on it which touches on AI risk

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/niall-ferguson/

"FERGUSON: I think the problem is that we are haunted by doomsday scenarios because they’re seared in our subconscious by religion, even though we think we’re very secular. We have this hunch that the end is nigh. The world is going to end in 12 years, or no, it must be 10. So I think part of the problem of modernity is that we’re still haunted by the end time.

We also have the nasty suspicion — this is there in Nick Bostrom’s work — that we’ve created a whole bunch of technologies that have actually increased the probability rather than reduced the probability of an extinction-level event. On the other hand, we’re told that there’s a singularity in prospect when all the technologies will come together to produce superhuman beings with massively extended lifespans and the added advantage of artificial general intelligence.

The epistemic problem, as I see it is — Ian Morris wrote this in one of his recent books— which is the scenario? Extinction-level events or the singularity? That seems a tremendously widely divergent set of scenarios to choose from. I sense that — perhaps this is just the historian’s instinct — that each of these scenarios is, in fact, a very low probability indeed, and that we should spend more time thinking about the more likely scenarios that lie between them.

Your essay, which I was prompted to read before our conversation, about the epistemic problem and consequentialism set me thinking about work I’d done on counterfactual history, for which I would have benefited from reading that essay sooner.

I think that if you ask what are the counterfactuals of the future, we spend too much time thinking about the quite unlikely scenarios of the end of the world through climate change or some other calamity of the sort that Bostrom talks about, or some extraordinary leap forward. I can’t help feeling that these are — not that we can attach probabilities; they lie in the realm of uncertainty — but they don’t seem likely scenarios to me.

I think we’ll end up with something that’s rather more mundane, and perhaps a relief if we’re really serious about the end of the world, or perhaps a disappointment if we’re serious about the singularity."

Thanks a lot for this pointer!

An odd observation: He cites someone who's done such stuff before -- John Nolt, a philosopher. He himself is professor of the psychology of music. I think the calculations of both of them are extremely useful (even if extremely speculative). But there's a big question here: what prevented *scientists* from offering such numbers? Are they too afraid of publishing guesstimates? Does it not occur to them that these numbers are utterly relevant for the debate?

I have exactly the opposite intuition (which is why I've been using the term "EA-aligned organization" throughout my writing for CEA and probably making it more popular in the process).

"EA-aligned organization" isn't supposed to mean "high-impact organization". It's supposed to mean "organization which has some connection to the EA community through its staff, or being connected to EA funding networks, etc."

This is a useful concept because it's legible in a way impact often isn't. It's easy to tell whether an org has a grant from EA Funds/Open Phil, and while this doesn't guarantee their impact, it does stand in for "some people at the community vouch for their doing interesting work related to EA goals".

I really don't like the term "high-impact organization" because it does the same sneaky work as "effective altruist" (another term I dislike). You're defining yourself as being "good" without anyone getting a chance to push back, and in many cases, there's no obvious way to check whether you're telling the truth.

Consider questions like these:

• Is Amazon a high-impact organization? (80K lists jobs at Amazon on their job board, so... maybe? I guess certain jobs at Amazon are "high-impact", but which ones? Only the ones 80K posts?)
• Is MIRI a high-impact organization? (God knows how much digital ink has been spilled on this one)
• Is SCI a high-impact organization?
• Is the Sunrise Movement a high-impact organization?

It seems like there's an important difference between MIRI and SCI on the one hand, Amazon and Sunrise on the other. The first two have a long history of getting support, funding, and interest from people in the EA movement; they've given talks at EA Global. This doesn't necessarily make them most impactful than Amazon and Sunrise, but it does mean that working at one of those orgs puts you in the category of "working at an org endorsed by a bunch of people with common EA values".

*****

The fact that people can say "I do ops at an EA org" and be warmly greeted as high status even if they could do much more good outside EA rubs me the wrong way. 

I hope this doesn't happen very often; I'd prefer that we greet everyone with equal warmth and sincere interest in their work, as long as the work is interesting. Working at an EA-aligned org really shouldn't add much signaling info to the fact that someone has chosen to come to your EA meetup or whatever.

That said, I sympathize with theoretical objections like "how am I supposed to know whether someone would do more good in some other job?" and "I'm genuinely more interested in hearing about someone's work helping to run [insert org] than I would if they worked in finance or something, because I'm familiar with that org and I think it does cool stuff".

Oh, I would have thought it's the other way around - sometimes people don't want to be known as EA-aligned because that can have negative connotations (being too focused on numbers, being judgmental of "what's worthy", slightly cult-like etc). I think "high-impact organisation" may be a  good idea as well.

Can you elaborate on the criticism? There have been a ton of bad decisions made by all kinds of groups affecting all kinds of other groups who have not been involved in the decision making process. The most charitable argument, I can come up with, is something like this: 

1. Group X has acted badly in some way.
2.  EA is sufficiently similar to Group X.
3.  Sufficiently similar groups are likely to act the same. 

          C: EA is likely to act badly in some way.

So group X needs to be specified and "white people" seems far too general.