Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id525483547
There’s very little discussion of, for example, whether we should put a tax on rich people—after all, if you want to maximize the amount of good, it’s much easier to just have the state take the money from all the people who work on Wall Street, than for you, one person, to go to work on Wall Street and just donate your income while everyone else doesn’t.
✏️ A reasonable extrapolation of what effective altruists think, and yet not something they would ever suggest or agree to. 🔗 View Highlight
id526338450
longtermist ideology will lead true believers to minimize, trivialize, or ignore the contemporary problems because one ought to be focusing instead on the very far future, millions, billions, trillions of years from now
id526338457
“justify” in the minds of true believers extreme, potentially violent, actions today for realizing this kind of techno-utopian world among the stars, full of astronomical amounts of value
id526338538
if what matters most is how things go in the very far future, then you should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over the lives of people in poor countries. And the reason is that rich countries have more economic productivity, innovation, and so on. And these are the things that will influence the very far future, not trying to help individuals who are struggling to eat three times a day to actually get those meals.