I think the personal responsibility mindset is healthy for individuals, but not useful for policy design.

If we’re trying to figure out how to prevent obesity from a society-level view, then I agree with your overall point – it’s not tractable to increase everyone’s temperance. But as I understand it, one finding from positive psychology research is that taking responsibility for your decisions and actions does genuinely improve your mental health. And you don’t need to be rich or have a PhD in nutritional biochemistry to eat mostly grains, beans, frozen vegetables and fruit, and nuts.

Similarly, I think there’s only so much that marketing can do to influence a society’s culture. We can and should taboo unhealthy foods, through simple decisions like what restaurant to go to with friends or what food to buy for a party.

When you’re doing effective altruism or policymaking, then I agree that corporations pushing processed food is the relevant factor to focus on. And the public should not be misled about this. But in your personal life, I think personal responsibility becomes the relevant way to think about it.

How long does the Elta MD sunscreen last?

Having kids does mean less time to help AI go well, so maybe it’s not so much of a good idea if you’re one of the people doing alignment work.

I love how it has proven essentially impossible to, even with essentially unlimited power, rig a vote in a non-obvious way. I am not saying it never happens deniably, and you may not like it, but this is what peaked rigged election somehow always seems to actually look like.

(Maybe I misunderstood, but isn’t this weak evidence that non-obviously rigging an election is essentially impossible, since you wouldn‘t notice the non-obvious examples?)

Are there any organizations or research groups that are specifically working on improving the effectiveness of the alignment research community? E.g.

• Reviewing the literature on intellectual progress, metascience, and social epistemology and applying the resulting insights to this community
• Funding the development of experimental “epistemology software”, like Arbital or Mathopedia

I'll end with this thought: I think you can probably use these ideas of moral weights and moral mountains to quantify how altruistic someone is.

Maybe “altruistic” isn’t the right word. Someone who spends every weekend volunteering at the local homeless shelter out of a duty to help the needy in their community but doesn’t feel any specific obligation towards the poor in other areas is certainly very altruistic. The amount that one does to help those in their circle of consideration seems to be a better fit for most uses of the word altruism.

How about “morally inclusive”?

I would find this deeply frustrating. Glad they fixed it!

One year later, what you think about the field now?