WOOOOOOO MORE AXE GRINDING LETS GO!
Okay enough of that, so I was doing a little bit of a foray into the GPI cesspit to look at the latest decision theoretic drivel they've been putting out recently. And boy oh boy did I come across something juicy.
Basically this 36 Page paper is one big 'nuh uh' to all the critics of longtermism. Think Crary and the like; it explicitly states that critics dismiss longtermism out of hand by denying broadly utilitarian principles. This is all fair enough, but the the philosopher tries to defend longtermism by saying that denying it on broadly normative grounds incurs 'significant theoretical costs'. I've checked what these 'costs' would be and to may admittedly quite dumb eyes they look like they're only be 'costs' if you are a utilitarian in the first place! The entire discussion is predicted on utilitarian principles, the weighing of theoretical costs and benefits the consistently bullshit new principles and what I've always thought were completely as hoc new rules that they make up to make anything fit the criteria and get longtermism out the ass end as well making the discussion impervious to criticism cos insert brand new shiny principle here it's fucken dumb.
Not to overstate my case, I'm kinda dumb, which means I could be very wrong here, but even with that in mind I woulda expected better from a PhD.
Anyways to end off, are there any resources that actually go through their math and fact check that shit? Actually wanna see if the math they use actually checks out or if it's kinda cobbled together.
@gerikson Yeah, that’s a point well made. In this particular instance - did a bit of digging and the “Global Priorities Institute” is funded by… Open Philanthropy, which is run by… EAs. Lordy.