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Sunyshore (personal blog)
BrownHairedEevee
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It’s really refreshing to finally see a website that’s not all blue and white 😅
According to CEA guidelines, “effective altruism” isn’t capitalized. I’ll change it back if no one minds.
I’ve found this interview fun and enlightening to listen to. Coming from the EA movement, I was initially skeptical of the progress studies movement because I thought it was pretty much only about human prosperity or economic growth. But it’s more general: it’s the belief that for any problem we face, we can use our minds to come up with solutions, and that we need to preserve and improve the institutions that drive innovation so that we can solve these problems. As you said in the interview, advancements in safety (whether in AI, biotechnology, etc.) are a form of progress.
One concern I’ve had is that progress so far has only benefited humans, and come at the expense of other sentient beings and the natural environment. As the human population has grown, so has the population of farmed animals, the vast majority of which live in cruel conditions. (And we’re just beginning to address wild animal suffering.) But animal suffering on factory farms is another problem that humanity can solve, whether it be through new technologies (e.g. meat and dairy substitutes) or new institutions and laws to protect farmed animals. And moral progress is part of progress too. 🙂
P.S. It would be nice if we could embed Our World In Data charts, as on the EA Forum 🙂📈
Interesting topic! Holden Karnofsky writes here that economic growth likely cannot continue forever, but he’s talking about the next 5,000 years or so rather than the next 100. Assuming exponential growth continues, we’d eventually be squeezing billions of dollars of economic value out of every atom in the galaxy, which seems difficult, to say the least.