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Neil Kellen's avatar

Seems to me that the standard approach to criticizing any philosophy - personal, political, economic,... - is to use exceptions to negate the rule (except for when your own philosophy is in the firing line).

The hubristic notion that humans can develop (or is it identify?) a rule that can cover all situations is the source of so much animosity AND idiocy. Humans are flawed and limited, so anything that results from their efforts will be flawed and limited.

Why can't we just accept that and "pursue perfection" instead of "demanding perfection". Perfection can never be attained, but pursuit of it is a worthwhile activity.

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Rob L'Heureux's avatar

This is my favorite piece of your writing to date. I share your perception of utilitarianism, and I thought this was a great, timeless meta-summary of the ways it goes crazy but also why EA is good in the short-term. Much of my conflicts with EA come from their self-professed criteria that, for a problem to be suitable for EA, it must be important, neglected, and tractable. Neglect seems like a cop-out from trying to contribute to popular things that are still incredibly important, and tractable is so subjective that it could justify whatever you want (ex: AI safety doesn't seem tractable because we don't actually know if or how to generate machine consciousness, but math PhDs swear it's tractable and thus we have Yud's AI death cult. Meanwhile, permitting reform seems really important, but math PhDs say "not tractable" because you'd have to build a political coalition stronger than special interests and if it's not solvable with a blog post or LaTex, it's impossible.)

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