lanfeust6

You're not clear on what you're driving at, but EA adherents are pro zoning reform and increasing the housing supply.

> Start applying solutions to real problems people face. That's rational.

Done, that's what the charity and grass-roots movements for housing is for.

> actual problems people rationally face every day

Actual problems can be qualified instead of being referred to in abstract. Food in the developed world is effectively a solved problem. Housing should be, but it remains inelastic owing to bad policy.

> All the problems they present (AI, pandemics, whatever) is a hypothetical consequence of the capitalist system.

If some other wink wink system couldn't possibly introduce novel externalities, it is tautologically regressive and imposes more barbaric ones.

> EA does not ask such profound questions about actual political and social structures affecting our lives and therefore in my view silences the actual solutions to actual problems we face.

Adherents do ask that. You'd have known that if you'd bother to look. But no, it does not reduce all concerns and solutions to your pet ideology.

Your ideological slant isn't much of a mystery, and reveals a conceit that EA itself has an overt political ideological alignment. Demographic surveys show EA is 70% left-leaning. Your far-left sensibility probably more represented than in average population, though still not that much. This is a projection partly owing to high-profile individuals associated you don't like, but mostly because you're not interested in charity, these improvements and what it means to people, because it doesn't satisfy your worldview.

Donations for malaria nets and direct cash transfers lead to tangible immediate difference in peoples' lives. Meanwhile, you sneer at concerns like climate and AI you deem too abstract, while lamenting that EA isn't fixated on some other abstract notion: that a total upheaval of the system, of doing away with Liberalism and private property, solves every problem (the unsaid corollary to the conceit that any solution doesn't matter if it doesn't mean overthrowing Capitalism). You can hand-wave anything and everything as a symptom of Capitalism, as if to say they couldn't happen otherwise, but it's not a compelling argument to most who haven't forgotten 20th-Century Communist experiments. Yeah they sure could sleepwalk their way to success (and to that we hear "oh, they weren't real Communists", or "they failed because of the Capitalists", depending on the day. Completely unserious). Anarchists have even less credibility.

It's greedy to donate a percentage of your income?

What "behavior", and why are you cherry-picking some actors over others?

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Buying mosquito nets through e.g. the Against Malaria Foundation was popularized through EA!

> overwhelmingly outranks

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. How are you "ranking"? The most high-profile EA-adjacent personalities are guys like Scott Alexander, Benjamin Todd.

> I am not familiar with their beliefs (open to learning)

That much is clear. No one "owns" or "leads" EA, it's not a monolith; people have their own beliefs and co-opt it, including crazies. The only common tenet is in the name.

Notwithstanding that "shrimp welfare" and the like is in the margins, it does not preclude the overwhelmingly anthropocentric charitable giving by most members.

I mean, the most popular writer associated with that world, Scott Alexander, donated his kidney just to help others. Knowing the good people are trying to do, it's unseemly to me for EA not only to be discarded but viciously attacked because of "vibes" and weirdos who associate themselves with it.

You used the term "an excuse" twice; for what, a hidden motive to do harm? I think some types like Bentham's Bulldog are wrong or misguided in some respects, that doesn't mean you can leap to some notion that they want to harm humanity in the most stupid way possible: donating a meagre sum to shrimp welfare.

> Show us the counterexample, then. Preferably more than one.

The thousands who donate to charity like Against Malaria Foundation or direct cash transfers, and many who pledge to donate a large percentage of their income?

The guys who were obsessed with maximizing efficacy of charitable giving, and then later AI risk, are "justifying bad behavior". Right.

There's more. It's also the ones who align with the blue-collar tribe.

That's not what an Economist does. They can tell you that a specific policy is likely to have an impact along one or two dimensions (e.g. interest rate), but they don't know what policymakers at home or abroad are going to do, e.g. Trump's trade wars, or impacts of innovations across industries, e.g. AI leading to RAM shortage and data centres.

It's childish to pretend like Economists are supposed to anticipate everyone's every move in order for their work to be given credence. If you think tariffs are bad for consumers, an Economists worked that out for you.

Chekhov is great

Similar sentiment, have not read the book but I imagine I've absorbed some of it through rat/ea circles and here. I can appreciate an argument that rapidly-improving AI, with mere probabilistic output, could lead to bad outcomes owing to neglect and complacency, or aiding at wreaking havoc. What I don't buy is the argument that sentient super-intelligence could "accidentally" manifest itself through recursive self-improvement, which is along few dimensions. I'm not sure it would be even possible to intentionally create one, but it would be redundant; you don't need RSI to generate the value people want from AI. We could pass strict laws against that, but it wouldn't satisfy the doomers who are already arguing that human minds are "just an algorithm", as though AI sentience is a foregone conclusion