Sure. That's why I said: "I welcome alternative theories" (including theories about there being multiple different reasons which may apply to different extents to different people). Do you have one?
I have personally felt the same feelings and I think I have pinned down the reason. I welcome alternative theories, in the spirit of rational debate rather than polite silence.
It's because talking about the singularity and end-of-world in near mode for a large amount of time makes you alieve that it's going to happen. In the same way that it actually happening would make you alieve it, but talking about it once and believing it then never thinking about it explicitly again wouldn't.
It all depends on how small that small chance is. Pascal mugging is typically done with probabilities that are exponentially small, e.g. 10^-10 or so.
But what about if Holden is going to not recommend SIAI for donations when there's a 1% or 0.1% chance of it making that big difference.
I suspect that Holden would also consider Robin Hanson a competent critic. This is because Robin is smart, knowledgeable and prestigiously accredited.
But your comment has alerted me to the fact that even if Hanson comes out as a flat-earther tomorrow the supporting posts are still weak.
The issue of the two most credible critics of SIAI disagreeing with each other is logically independent of the issue of Holden's wobbly argument against the utilitarian argument for SIAI. Many thanks.
But if there's even a chance …
Holden cites two posts (Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally and Maximizing Cost-effectiveness via Critical Inquiry). They are supposed to support the argument that small or very small changes to the probability of an existential risk event occurring are not worth caring about or donating money towards.
I think that these posts both have serious problems (see the comments, esp Carl Shulman's). In particular Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally was heavily criticised by Robin Hanson in On Fudge Fa...
As Moldbug has convincingly argued on his blog, intellectual fashion among the ruling class follows intellectual fashion on Harvard by an offset of about one generation. A generation after that the judicial and journalist class exiles any opposition to such thought from public discourse
then
creationism is still around
Contradiction much?
because creationism is not a serious threat to The Cathedral
If the "judicial and journalist class" only attacks popular irrational ideas which are "a serious threat to The Cathedral", then wh...
But as I said in my comment, there are numerous issues (creationism, moon landing hoax, antivax, global warming denial, and I should add theism) where a large amount of public opinion is highly divergent from the opinions of the vast majority of academics. So clearly the elite universities are not actually that good at proselytizing their output.
Perhaps it has been downvoted because people see elite universities with large endowments and lots of alumni in congress? But still, that money cannot be spent on proselytizing. And how exactly is a politician who ...
It seems unfortunate that this got downvoted so much. I got a lot out of it.
Perhaps it should just be clearly labelled as "Frank Adamek makes sense of axiology, human psychology and instrumental rationality: a personal journey"
I think labelled as such, people would not feel the need to downvote it. If you don't want to read a personal story, then don't come here!
Are the elite universities so marginalized and powerless that they need help from a blog run by amateurs to spread the word about their output?
Vladimir_M, what makes you think that elite universities have the desire and money/power to proselytize their "output"? I mean, you surely know about the trouble they are having trying to win the propaganda fight against creationism, and against global warming denial. And then there's anti-vaccination and the moon landing conspiracy.
In fact the statement that I quoted seems to so obviously deserve the...
Vladimir_M, what makes you think that elite universities have the desire and money/power to proselytize their "output"?
Mencius Moldbug has convincingly argued on his blog, that intellectual fashion among the ruling class follows intellectual fashion on Harvard by an offset of about one generation. A generation after that the judicial and journalist class exiles any opposition to such thought from public discourse and most educated people move significantly towards it. A generation after that through public schools and the by now decades long e...
Sorry I wasn't implying very strong confidence. I would give a probability of, say, 65% that my reason is the principal cause of the feelings of Cousin_it