Tag: Philosophy
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*Killers of the Flower Moon*
(spoilers below) There’s a criticism of some of Martin Scorcese’s movies that he makes the behavior he’s trying to condemn look cool. Scorcese’s Jordan Belfort may be insane scum, but he also oozes charisma. I think there’s a case to be made that Scorcese’s doing a Miltonian thing to show…
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Friday Links
“You must never lose gratitude for this privileged position that you put each other in.”
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Rawls’ Theology and *The Devil Wears Prada*
I liked this tweet from Zohar Atkins the other day. What Anne Hathaway’s character missed is how her world, the water she swims in, is downstream of the deliberate creations of artists, which are in turn the result of ideas from others that influenced those artists and so on. I…
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Michael Nielsen on ASI
Michael Nielsen published a blog post on existential risks from AI. A lot of AI risk discussion is kind of rote, so it was refreshing to hear Nielsen’s especially first principles-y perspective. Some highlights below– On p(doom) as a “conceptual hazard”: The term “probability of doom” began frustrating me after…
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Liberalism and Desire
Immanuel Kant gets a reputation for having an especially austere theory of the good life. Anyone who has taken an intro to philosophy class might point to his argument that one should never lie, even to a murderer at the door, as an example of the peculiarity of his moral…
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Philosophy and VC
As I was reading Mallaby’s The Power Law, I was tickled to learn that Paul Graham gave his iconic “How to Start a Startup” lecture in Emerson Hall at Harvard. Although the lecture was for the Harvard Computer Society, it was delivered in the philosophy building. And Graham himself was…
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On the Philosophical Foundations of EA
Intro EAs Should Care More About Philosophical Ethics I think EAs should care more about debates around which ethical theory is true and why. The EA community is really invested in problems of applied consequentialist ethics such as “how should we think about low probability / high, or infinite, magnitude…
Matthew Mandel 