Architeuthis @ Architeuthis @awful.systems Posts 5Comments 163Joined 2 yr. ago
Hi, my name is Scott Alexander and here's why it's bad rationalism to think that widespread EA wrongdoing should reflect poorly on EA.
The assertion that having semi-frequent sexual harassment incidents go public is actually an indication of health for a movement since it's evidence that there's no systemic coverup going on and besides everyone's doing it is uh quite something.
But surely of 1,000 sexual harassment incidents, the movement will fumble at least one of them (and often the fact that you hear about it at all means the movement is fumbling it less than other movements that would keep it quiet). You’re not going to convince me I should update much on one (or two, or maybe even three) harassment incidents, especially when it’s so easy to choose which communities’ dirty laundry to signal boost when every community has a thousand harassers in it.
Once [a company] can make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job becomes a fait accompli.
If they open their APIs so I can coordinate different brands without downloading a bazillion different apps and as long as I can do it without my data leaving the house, I'll think about it.
Not sure if it's a NSFW assertion, but to me the p-zombie experiment seems like the result of a discourse that went off the rails very early and very hard into angels on the head of a pin territory, this lw post notwithstanding.
Like, as far as I can tell, imagining a perfectly cloned reality except with the phenomenon in question assumed away, is supposedly (metaphysical) evidence that the phenomenon exists, except in a separate ontology? Isn't this basically like using reverse Occam's razor to prove that the extra entities are actually necessary, at least as long as they somehow stay mostly in their own universe?
Plus, the implicit assumption that consciousness can be defined as some sort of singular and uniform property you either have or don't seems inherently dodgy and also to be at the core of the contradiction; like, is taking p-zombies too seriously a reaction specifically to a general sense of disappointment that a singular consciousness organelle is nowhere to be found?