That's a cool idea. Presumably you would need a relatively uncensored chatbot - when I recently tried to get several to produce arguments in favour of Trump policies they all refused.

I think you raise some good points. Two potential countervailing considerations:

19 year olds are legally adults - they can (varying a bit by country) vote, drink, buy firearms, join the army, get married, raise children.

It's also common for other ideological movements to target much younger people. For example, both environmentalism and feminism are taught in elementary schools.

I think the repeated guilt-by-association posts pointing out that someone in EA associated with someone who has some right wing views are pretty negative.

Thanks for sharing this interesting and (at least to me) novel argument. It strikes me as a way of mitigating Winner's Curse issues.

Thanks for sharing, very clear writeup.

Notably bargaining between worldviews, if done behind a veil of ignorance, can lead to quite extreme outcomes if some worldviews care a lot more about large worlds.

Maybe worth noting this is by Max Tegmark?

Thanks for sharing both the original and this version of the argument!

I realize this is basically an aside and doesn't really affect your bottom line, but I don't think you can draw this inference:

Humanity-caused climate change and land use have contributed to a loss of 69% of wildlife since 1970.

Quoting Our World In Data:

the LPI does not tell us the number of species, populations or individuals lost; the number of extinctions that have occurred; or even the share of species that are declining. It tells us that between 1970 and 2018, on average, there was a 69% decline in population size across the 31,821 studied populations.

This paper also argued the methodology is systematically biased downwards, but I haven't evaluated it.

The LPI indicates that vertebrate populations have decreased by almost 70% over the last 50 years. This is in striking contrast with current studies based on the same population time series data that show that increasing and decreasing populations are balanced on average. Here, we examine the methodological pipeline of calculating the LPI to search for the source of this discrepancy. We find that the calculation of the LPI is biased by several mathematical issues which impose an imbalance between detected increasing and decreasing trends and overestimate population declines.

It seems like the vast majority of the people who attended the conference do meta EA work and/or work at a large EA org (e.g. OP, GWWC, CEA). 

Isn't that what you'd expect from a Meta Coordination Forum? It's the forum for meta people to coordinate at. There are other forums for people doing object-level work.

I don't understand what the title has to do with the body of the text. 'Meme' either means a unit of cultural information or a funny picture with text; EA is definitely not 'just' the latter, and it is the former to the same extent that environmentalism or any other movement is.

It's probably to do with the fact that being in finance (banker, consultant, whatever) is pretty much something any jackass can do. Pushing money around, dealing with people, risk assessment, you can pretty much just turn your brain off really, especially compared to technical fields. But banking is not only not a very useful job, it's also incredibly morally dubious to work for companies that do fuck all for the world aside from scam customers and invest the money in fossil fuel industries and terrorist organizations. Like OK, yeah, better you have the job than some schmuck who wouldn't donate anything and would spend the money on cars and luxury homes, but there are other jobs you can get that are not only useful, but comparative in their income.

This is probably the single most ignorant paragraph I have ever read about the financial industry.^[1] The sort of finance job EAs do for EtG are not easy, they are some of the most competitive and challenging jobs in the world. Nor is it the case that scamming, fossil fuel investment and investing in terrorist organizations (how would that even work? Does Al-Qaeda pay dividends?) is all they do. This guy is apparently aware that financial companies invest in fossil fuel companies - does he think there is some other industry that handles investment in all other types of firms, including green infrastructure? Finance plays a number of important roles in society, from facilitating transactions to matching savers and borrowers to allowing people to adjust their risk to vetting and due diligence to forecasting the future. These are valuable services and people voluntarily pay to use them. There are some valid criticisms of the industry but this guy is just so ill-informed I seriously think your ""friend"" should start by reading a basic wikipedia article on the subject.

... and medicine and STEM are only comparable in income to the extent that you can compare them and observe them to be lower.

1. ^{^}

   Or possibly the management consulting industry? Who knows, not the author, that's for sure.