Hmm, I don't really see EA offering moral imagination in Nielsen's sense of developing "new kinds of good." EA discourse mostly assumes a consequentialist notion of "good," hence statements like:
many previous groups that had focused on the morality of personal donation were often too focused on the donor (e.g. a vow of poverty to rid yourself of the evils of money, or the focus on making sure to be anonymous in your giving).
But a virtue ethicist might disagree. Someone who donates with the intention of feeding their ego and fame (instead of, you know, helping others) is a prick, and their actions have little moral worth regardless of how many lives are saved. This debate is centuries old, and EA hasn't affected it in the way that Hammurabi disrupted divine right.
That said, I think philosophical agnosticism actually makes EA more useful. Even a virtue ethicist would want to donate in the most cost-effective way possible (their intent is to save lives, after all) and to work on the highest-impact application domains. No matter what your values, you'll want pragmatic techniques for implementing them, and EA delivers this in spades~
It's bizarre that MAGA influencers as a whole would hop on the AI acceleration bandwagon. I know some conservative Christians who oppose "having machines think for us" and are super worried about the effect AI is having on literacy and critical thinking. (To say nothing of their outrage at AI-generated church sermons.) Some even see AI risk as fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy and say things like "I better become a saint before it kills us all." Maybe there is an angle here to appeal to values of human spirituality and agency.
That the executive branch and the military would smear EA, though, is not the least bit surprising...
I also know people who are fundamentalist Christians and MAGA-leaning, have argued with them for a long time... and concluded that yes, the mainstream media often straw-mans their perspectives. You can, in fact, oppose dramatic immigration spikes as a policy without viewing immigrants as "subhuman." You can point out the conflict between empathy and justice/rational thought without becoming an egomaniac (see the book "Against Empathy" by Paul Bloom, Yale psychology prof; and the Lindsay Clancy trial where people are somehow empathizing with a child-murderer). The neighborhood MAGA voters I've met did NOT argue their points with the slightest bit of logic or eloquence... but that also doesn't mean their conclusions are wrong, or that they're racists. It just means we have to put in extra effort into steel-manning their takes. Which is often difficult, I struggled with it for a few years!
I would hope that the obnoxious people on Twitter aren't representative of the movement in general, but of course I could always be wrong about this...
Hmm, I don't really see EA offering moral imagination in Nielsen's sense of developing "new kinds of good." EA discourse mostly assumes a consequentialist notion of "good," hence statements like:
But a virtue ethicist might disagree. Someone who donates with the intention of feeding their ego and fame (instead of, you know, helping others) is a prick, and their actions have little moral worth regardless of how many lives are saved. This debate is centuries old, and EA hasn't affected it in the way that Hammurabi disrupted divine right.
That said, I think philosophical agnosticism actually makes EA more useful. Even a virtue ethicist would want to donate in the most cost-effective way possible (their intent is to save lives, after all) and to work on the highest-impact application domains. No matter what your values, you'll want pragmatic techniques for implementing them, and EA delivers this in spades~
It's bizarre that MAGA influencers as a whole would hop on the AI acceleration bandwagon. I know some conservative Christians who oppose "having machines think for us" and are super worried about the effect AI is having on literacy and critical thinking. (To say nothing of their outrage at AI-generated church sermons.) Some even see AI risk as fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy and say things like "I better become a saint before it kills us all." Maybe there is an angle here to appeal to values of human spirituality and agency.
That the executive branch and the military would smear EA, though, is not the least bit surprising...
I also know people who are fundamentalist Christians and MAGA-leaning, have argued with them for a long time... and concluded that yes, the mainstream media often straw-mans their perspectives. You can, in fact, oppose dramatic immigration spikes as a policy without viewing immigrants as "subhuman." You can point out the conflict between empathy and justice/rational thought without becoming an egomaniac (see the book "Against Empathy" by Paul Bloom, Yale psychology prof; and the Lindsay Clancy trial where people are somehow empathizing with a child-murderer). The neighborhood MAGA voters I've met did NOT argue their points with the slightest bit of logic or eloquence... but that also doesn't mean their conclusions are wrong, or that they're racists. It just means we have to put in extra effort into steel-manning their takes. Which is often difficult, I struggled with it for a few years!
I would hope that the obnoxious people on Twitter aren't representative of the movement in general, but of course I could always be wrong about this...