Yep, this is all correct. However I think most value functions people would adopt are either altruistic or egoistic, and the egoistic ones are quite bounded for most people (Elon Musk being the main exception since his aspirations seem larger) and so you land on the unbounded ones being altruistic and thus EAs make up the vast majority of RAMP impact mass (ignoring Elon who might dwarf EA on his own).
Musk is sort of interesting because when he explains why he doesn’t donate to charity, he justifies it by saying that building his companies will be a larger benefit to humanity. This would be an unacceptable to answer to Rand because she would say this implies he feels a kind of indebtedness to ‘humanity’ and he is not acting purely for his own “rational self-interest”. A Randian hero would say something like “because I want to”. I find it hard to pin him as either “maximalist-utilitarian-but-I-don’t-like-the-EA-causes-and-will-do-my-own-thing” or pure “rational self-interest” egoist.
Maybe I’m speculating too much on Musk’s psychology but it seems to me like being the hero of humanity is part of his own egoism, in that it seems important that he is the one to do it, whereas for EAs for example I don’t think they really care about the glory of being “the guy” who aligns the AGI or whatever.
How do we land on unbounded ones being altruistic and thus EAs make up the vast majority of RAMP impact mass? This might be comparing the best case of EA with the average or worst case of egoists. EA’s scope of problems and impact centers on ‘planned goodness’ (work whose impact is legible in advance) which I think is narrower than what egoists end up doing out of curiosity, mastery, profit, status, and other forms of self-interest. Those motives drove most historical inventions that turned out to matter, and Musk looks less like an exception to the pattern than its most visible current example (assuming he acts out of his self-interest).
Yep, this is all correct. However I think most value functions people would adopt are either altruistic or egoistic, and the egoistic ones are quite bounded for most people (Elon Musk being the main exception since his aspirations seem larger) and so you land on the unbounded ones being altruistic and thus EAs make up the vast majority of RAMP impact mass (ignoring Elon who might dwarf EA on his own).
Musk is sort of interesting because when he explains why he doesn’t donate to charity, he justifies it by saying that building his companies will be a larger benefit to humanity. This would be an unacceptable to answer to Rand because she would say this implies he feels a kind of indebtedness to ‘humanity’ and he is not acting purely for his own “rational self-interest”. A Randian hero would say something like “because I want to”. I find it hard to pin him as either “maximalist-utilitarian-but-I-don’t-like-the-EA-causes-and-will-do-my-own-thing” or pure “rational self-interest” egoist.
Maybe I’m speculating too much on Musk’s psychology but it seems to me like being the hero of humanity is part of his own egoism, in that it seems important that he is the one to do it, whereas for EAs for example I don’t think they really care about the glory of being “the guy” who aligns the AGI or whatever.
How do we land on unbounded ones being altruistic and thus EAs make up the vast majority of RAMP impact mass? This might be comparing the best case of EA with the average or worst case of egoists. EA’s scope of problems and impact centers on ‘planned goodness’ (work whose impact is legible in advance) which I think is narrower than what egoists end up doing out of curiosity, mastery, profit, status, and other forms of self-interest. Those motives drove most historical inventions that turned out to matter, and Musk looks less like an exception to the pattern than its most visible current example (assuming he acts out of his self-interest).