I don’t think we (currently, I do not make the case for me-living-in-1490s) live in a world of scarce opportunities to apply yourself to something. Yes, things that turn out to be good can sometimes not be done with good intentions of the majority of people doing them. But also, most (?) bad things are done by people with bad intentions (or bad beliefs). I would be surprised if in a world where you can choose to apply yourself to movements that exercise effort to have good intentions & good beliefs you wouldn’t be better off assigning some weight to this heuristic.
In other words, people involved trying to do something good is not a prerequisite, but I would guess it is a non-negligible predictor. (You don’t explicitly state that you disagree that it is an significant predictor, so maybe we agree on this actually, but your last paragraph seems to imply that taking mission alignment into account for harm forecasting does not improve its quality, which is a bit counterintuitive for me).
I do agree if your alternative is “having goals of a corpse” you probably should try to make American colonisation less-bad or its results more-good instead of just doing nothing.
I don’t think we (currently, I do not make the case for me-living-in-1490s) live in a world of scarce opportunities to apply yourself to something. Yes, things that turn out to be good can sometimes not be done with good intentions of the majority of people doing them. But also, most (?) bad things are done by people with bad intentions (or bad beliefs). I would be surprised if in a world where you can choose to apply yourself to movements that exercise effort to have good intentions & good beliefs you wouldn’t be better off assigning some weight to this heuristic.
In other words, people involved trying to do something good is not a prerequisite, but I would guess it is a non-negligible predictor. (You don’t explicitly state that you disagree that it is an significant predictor, so maybe we agree on this actually, but your last paragraph seems to imply that taking mission alignment into account for harm forecasting does not improve its quality, which is a bit counterintuitive for me).
I do agree if your alternative is “having goals of a corpse” you probably should try to make American colonisation less-bad or its results more-good instead of just doing nothing.