And a brief addendum: it is vastly both telling and unsettling that the core movement 1) recognizes that their most brutal “calculations” would be looked on in

And a brief addendum: it is vastly both telling and unsettling that the core movement 1) recognizes that their most brutal “calculations” would be looked on in horror and absurdity (rationalized no doubt as those who simply are not enlightened or intelligent enough to understand) and therefore 2) work to silence adherents who start to explore them in any type of open forum, necessitating 3) a PR campaign that blithely pays lips service to welcoming all ideas and open discussion at the same time that 4) it is clear there are aspects or implications of their philosophy that they are only willing to talk about behind closed doors. It really, really, is not hard to see where applying quasi mathematical calculation will get you when you start weighing hypothetical future lives against the resources directed today towards various EA projects. Anything can be justified when you’re trying to do mathematical ethics against vastly unlikely but catastrophically bad scenarios, all while ignoring the fact that if you don’t address the “right now” systemic and intractable problems we’ll get to much more likely existential crisis long before we have to worry about runaway ai-complete malevolent entities causing harm. And that is actually an apt example— there is a certain amount of overlap between the EAS movement and the rational discussion communities that came up the idea of Roko’s Basilisk.