Why am I being downvoted for asking a question?
It’s an important question to me since it can feel like you’re completely blind on important and complex goals in life, unable to know for sure whether any of your actions are even helping.
And obviously we want to have more instrumental rationality...
Because human utility functions are not just composed of “the beautiful and holy”. It would be hard to even disentangle the beautiful and holy from the primitive and selfish parts, since after all, they came from the same place, not like they’re fundamentally different. There is something unnatural, disturbing, abstractly distasteful to me about a being which artificially has its utility function maximized through powerful optimization, even if that being is myself. I gave the example of wireheading an ant.
Attempting to revitalize the rationalist community on discord. Join us: https://discord.gg/d5fdXheJ3t
I think that normal people should never be in charge of online communities.
The reasoning for this is that online communities naturally attract lowbrow sorts of people, so one can expect the majority of any online group to have shitty normie opinions. If you allow this majority to have power, they’ll be able to bully anyone they dislike. The alternative is to have a gated group structure which only allows decent people, but you can expect those people to be very few and so you would have a teeny tiny group. Decent norms need to be enforced from above by a decent individual.
It’s analogous to the leftist motto, “Never let liberals lead.” You need to have liberals in your movement, but if they control your movement they’ll fuck it up.