Your bot seems pretty prone to making things up. Here is an extract of a conversation I had:

Every single link in the screenshot lead to dead end links like this one. You can look at the actual paper it's talking about here: there is no 69% figure, and the passage quoted by your bot does not exist. 

You have basically created a lying propaganda bot. 

I'll continue to defend the 'standard reading'. I think the story can be critiquing our lack of imagination of utopia and also be against standard utilitarianism and third world exploitation and so on. I don't think the two are opposed, I think they actually link up. 

I think what's missing from your interpretation is the climax of the story, which is also the title: the ones who walk away:

They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and theydo not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us that the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas

I don't think this finale works, if the story is only about Omelas being absurd. I think LeGuin is arguing that the type of society described in Omelas is wrong, and is arguing that it should be rejected. 

LeGuin was a left-wing anarchist and anti-capitalist. I'm guessing she was probably gesturing to western society as analogous to Omelas, as a place of plenty that benefits from the exploitation of others in the developing world. She was saying that people justify an unjust status quo with utilitarian arguments that exploitation is justified on greater good grounds. I see the story as an attack on peoples inability to think that a world without exploitation and inequality is possible: an attack on fatalistic acceptance of pain and suffering as inevitable. 

I'm guessing that you are not a left-wing anarchist anti-capitalist, which is fine. I think your interpretation is a valid one, but I would guess that it is not the one that is intended by the author, which is also fine. LeGuin was an excellent writer but nobody is obligated to agree with her politically. 

I think it's kinda weird to call the meaning that the vast majority of people, including LeGuin herself, ascribed to her work as a "misreading". Isn't it more likely that you have found another interpretation of the work that the author didn't intend? 

My interpetation is that Leguin did indeed believe in utopias, and in the passage you cited was indeed critiquing peoples inability to concieve of them. Her excellent book "the dispossessed" has the subtitle "a flawed utopia", and describes an anarchist society that is not sustained by torture or inequality. 

However, "Omelas" is a critique of "Utopias" which are not truly utopias, because the provide good lives to the majority at the expense of bad lives for a few. Under many forms of utilitarianism, a society like the one described in Omelas would be described as a very good one: LeGuin disagrees, and so do I. Omelas is about rejecting fake utopias, and pushing towards real ones. 

Figuring out whether money spent on philanthropy is effective is one of the central tenets of effective altruism. Everybody here critiques each other all the time. Why should private billionaires get a free pass? 

And the author very much does criticise billionaires spending money on "politicians and votes and social media platforms". The author is focusing on the philanthropy side because, well, that's the subject of the article. 

Great post! I think a ban on "brain farming" is extremely tractable, as I expect it to have a severe "ick" factor among the general population (as it did for me). 

There's a case for trying to get a ban as early as possible, before there is any entrenched opposition in place, or any economic penalty for existing industries. 

I would say the main people "shaping AGI" are the people actually building models at frontier AI companies. It doesn't matter how aligned "AI safety" people are if they don't have a significant say on how AI gets built.

 I would not say that "almost all" of the people at top AI companies exemplify EA-style values. The most influential person in AI is Sam Altman, who has publicly split with EA after EA board members tried to fire him for being a serial liar. 

One hundred dollars for a single tweet is a huge reward when you compare it to the amount of effort that goes into it, and would have no trouble motivating plenty of people. 

Ten thousand dollars for a tweet is outrageously high, and could end up as another PR disaster. 

The size of a typical computer virus is on the order of a few megabytes or less. This makes them very easy to share around and download without anybody noticing. 

In contrast, the full version of deepseek-R1 takes up 400 gigabytes, which could take several hours to download on a typical household computer, and would not fit on a typical laptop computer. Deepseek is nowhere near the state of the art as far as AI goes, and we could expect future AI to be orders of magnitude bigger than this. 

Therefore, it is unlikely that future AI systems will be able to hide themselves in any way comparable to computer viruses. 

Generally when people turn away from traditional media, they instead get their information from social media, podcasters, youtubers, and influencers, all of which have even lower standards for scientific truth than the media does. This is how anti-vax conspiracy theories spread. I don't think it'll be particularly hard for the meat industry to turn a large segment of these alternative information ecosystems against cultured meat. 

There are ample openings for the attacks on either side politically: To the right wing they can claim that cultured meat is attacking traditional values and culture, while to the left-wing they can claim that cultured meat is a monopolistic big-corporation enterprise.