I agree. I pass up pieces with those titles. But I don’t think it applies to this piece. The author didn’t pitch it that way, I did. And in fact I think it is true and important, and that there is a lot of emotional hang up and resistance to accepting that we are all falling far, far short of the level of ethics we’d like to imagine we have. I have not taken the giving what we can pledge, so I don’t exactly agree with the author’s conclusions and I don’t think the logic is nearly tight enough. But I think the question of whether we should all take that pledge or similar things is very much an open one; the claim that we’d be happier if we did seems quite plausible to me and very much worthy of debate on lesswrong. I’m disturbed to see it get downvotes instead of debate; I think if a less sensitive and equally important topic was written about this poorly it would be treated much more kindly. The claim that this has been debated to death already so we need not engage with repetitive and bad versions seems simply false to me. I have lived on less wrong for the last 3 years and seen no serious debate of this topic in that time, nor a hint of an accepted consensus.
I happen to think that solving alignment trumps all other ethical concerns, so I’m not going to be the one to do a better treatment here. But I am disappointed in the community for being so hostile to this person’s attempts.
I agree. I pass up pieces with those titles. But I don’t think it applies to this piece. The author didn’t pitch it that way, I did. And in fact I think it is true and important, and that there is a lot of emotional hang up and resistance to accepting that we are all falling far, far short of the level of ethics we’d like to imagine we have. I have not taken the giving what we can pledge, so I don’t exactly agree with the author’s conclusions and I don’t think the logic is nearly tight enough. But I think the question of whether we should all take that pledge or similar things is very much an open one; the claim that we’d be happier if we did seems quite plausible to me and very much worthy of debate on lesswrong. I’m disturbed to see it get downvotes instead of debate; I think if a less sensitive and equally important topic was written about this poorly it would be treated much more kindly. The claim that this has been debated to death already so we need not engage with repetitive and bad versions seems simply false to me. I have lived on less wrong for the last 3 years and seen no serious debate of this topic in that time, nor a hint of an accepted consensus.
I happen to think that solving alignment trumps all other ethical concerns, so I’m not going to be the one to do a better treatment here. But I am disappointed in the community for being so hostile to this person’s attempts.