Noah Birnbaum
Bio
Participation7
I am a rising junior at the University of Chicago (co-president of UChicago EA and founder of Rationality Group). I am mostly interested in philosophy (particularly metaethics, formal epistemology, and decision theory), economics, and entrepreneurship.
I also have a Substack where I post about philosophy (ethics, epistemology, EA, and other stuff). Find it here: https://substack.com/@irrationalitycommunity?utm_source=user-menu.
How others can help me
If anyone has any opportunities to do effective research in the philosophy space (or taking philosophy to real life/ related field) or if anyone has any more entrepreneurial opportunities, I would love to hear about them. Feel free to DM me!
How I can help others
I can help with philosophy stuff (maybe?) and organizing school clubs (maybe?)
Posts 18
Comments40
A few things come to mind:
- It's not clear that their lives are going to be positive (or that they'll have experiences at all), so you can argue on that front. It seems more clear in the human case because of trends + technology and growth.
- You probably shouldn't be super certain of moral theories that lead you to this like Utilitarianism, and you probably want to act robustly against multiple moral theories. Doing something that is bad on most theories and good on one or two (even if they individually are your most confident theories) seems somewhat naive.
- Perhaps an ethical theory saying humans should go extinct is just a good reason to reject a theory.
My personal view is that if you are a totalist you probably have to accept something like this argument in the limit, though.
Probably(?) big news on PEPFAR (title: White House agrees to exempt PEPFAR from cuts): https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5402273-white-house-accepts-pepfar-exemption/. (Credit to Marginal Revolution for bringing this to my attention)
Reading this only (as I am considering writing a piece on cause prioritization and deferrence), but wow this is a great piece. At UChicago, I think people have a healthy level of skepticism against EA beliefs, for the record. Maybe I'm just anchoring and adjusting from wha I do myself/ am used to, though.
There's a large difference (with many positions in between) between never outsourcing one's epistemic work and accepting something like an equal weight view. There is, at this point, almost no consensus on this issue. One must engage with the philosophy here directly to actually do a proper and rational cause prioritization -- if, at the very least, just about conscilliationism.
It is possible to rationally prioritise between causes without engaging deeply on philosophical issues
I mean, any position you take has an implied moral philosophy and decision theory associated with it. These are often not very robust (i.e. reasonable other moral philosophies/ decision theories disagree). Therefore, to then engage about an issue on a rational level requires one to take these sorts of positions -- ignoring them entirely because they're hard seems completely unjustifiable.
Some of the arguments I make here are similar.