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drethelin comments on 'Effective Altruism' as utilitarian equivocation. - Less Wrong
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Most people do not have identical values. This means that if you're trying to help a lot of people, you have to rely on things you can assess most easily. It's a lot harder to tell how much truth beauty or honor (ESPECIALLY honor) someone has access to than how much running water or whether they have malaria. I say we should concentrate on welfare and let people take care of their own needs for abstract morality, especially considering how much they will disagree on what they want.
Effective altruism doesn't say anything about general ethics, and I don't know why you're claiming it tries to. It's about how to best help the most people. It's about charity and reducing worldsuck. I think this is pretty obvious to everyone involved, and I don't think people are being fooled.
The issue is whether people like the OP and myself, who are interested in reducing worldsuck, but not necessarily in the same kind of way as utilitarians, belong in the EA community or not.
I'm quite confused about this. I think my values are pretty compatible with Yudkowsky's, but Yudkowsky seems to think he's an EA. On the other hand, my values seem incompatible with those of e.g. Paul Christiano, who I think everyone would agree clearly is an EA. Yet those two seem to act as though they believed their values were compatible with each other. Now both of them are as intelligent as I, maybe more. So if I update on their apparent beliefs about what sets of values are compatible, should I conclude that I'm an EA, despite my non-endorsement of utilitarianism or any other kind of extreme altruism, or should I instead conclude that I don't want Yudkowskian FAI after all, and start my own rival world-saving project?
Could you expand more on the incompatibility you see between Yudkowsky and Christiano's values?
Christiano strikes me as the sort of person who would embrace the Repugnant Conclusion; whereas I think Yudkowsky would ultimately dodge any bullet that required him to give up turning the universe into an interesting sci-fi world whose inhabitants did things like write fanfiction stories.
Nobody actually acts like they believe in total utilitarianism, but Christiano comes as close as anyone I know of to at least threatening to act as if they believe in it. Yudkowsky, having written about complexity of value, doesn't give me the same worry.
Except when it talks about fairness, justice and trying to do as much good as possible without restriction.