You may want to tell my ancestors in the Rhineland killed during the First Crusade that. I'm not coming from a Protestant perspective. Anyone with passing familiarity with the history of Jews in the Middle Ages knows that pogroms and blood libels occurred in Catholic areas more than anywhere else. While some forms of Protestants were better, the groups who actually treated the Jews well were generally Muslims. The history of Spain is the most extreme example, where in Muslim Spain, Jews and Christians lived as taxed and legally disadvantaged minorities. When the Catholics took control, it didn't take them long to expel all the Jews from Spain, and set up an Inquisition in Spain.
Every single country which expelled the Jews in the Middle Ages (around 15 of them at one time or another) was Catholic, not a single Muslim did so. While some Orthodox and Protestant countries treated Jews very badly, they didn't generally go as far as the Catholics.
Moreover, it is in Catholic England where the blood libel originates, where the claimed victim became a saint with a feast day celebrated throughout England (thankfully no longer).
And focusing on Jewish and Muslim deaths from the Crusades itself is misleading, because there were other groups who the the Inquisition killed almost to the last person, thus making no one pay attention to them today. Few remember the Albigensian Crusade which resulted in the complete destruction of the Cathars.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not arguing that the Catholic Church has never done good, nor am I arguing that they were the most violent group in the Middle Ages, the problem is the claim that the Catholic Church has an "absurdly good historical track record when it comes to doing good for humanity" and in that context, the Crusades and Inquisition are pretty damning evidence.
From your first link:
...The massacre of the Rhineland Jews by the People's Crusade, and other associated persecutions, were condemned by the leaders and officials of the Catholic Church. The bishops of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms had attempted to protect the Jews of those towns within the walls of their own palaces, but the People's Crusade broke in to slaughter them. Fifty years later when St. Bernard of Clairvaux was urging recruitment for the Second Crusade, he specifically criticized the attacks on Jews which occurred in the First Crusade. [...] Albert of
I'm skeptical about trying to build FAI, but not about trying to influence the Singularity in a positive direction. Some people may be skeptical even of the latter because they don't think the possibility of an intelligence explosion is a very likely one. I suggest that even if intelligence explosion turns out to be impossible, we can still reach a positive Singularity by building what I'll call "modest superintelligences", that is, superintelligent entities, capable of taking over the universe and preventing existential risks and Malthusian outcomes, whose construction does not require fast recursive self-improvement or other questionable assumptions about the nature of intelligence. This helps to establish a lower bound on the benefits of an organization that aims to strategically influence the outcome of the Singularity.
(To recall what the actual von Neumann, who we might call MSI-0, accomplished, open his Wikipedia page and scroll through the "known for" sidebar.)
Building a MSI-1 seems to require a total cost on the order of $100 billion (assuming $10 million for each clone), which is comparable to the Apollo project, and about 0.25% of the annual Gross World Product. (For further comparison, note that Apple has a market capitalization of $561 billion, and annual profit of $25 billion.) In exchange for that cost, any nation that undertakes the project has a reasonable chance of obtaining an insurmountable lead in whatever technologies end up driving the Singularity, and with that a large measure of control over its outcome. If no better strategic options come along, lobbying a government to build MSI-1 and/or influencing its design and aims seems to be the least that a Singularitarian organization could do.