Benjamin Ross Hoffman

I want to make sure it's said that effective altruism is intertwined with the rationalist movement (Scott Alexander[1], Eliezer Yudkowsky[2], Robin Hanson[3]) and that, among these so called rationalists and the parts of the effective altruist community where they hold sway, there are a lot of advocates of AI risk mitigation research (what this means, who knows). These people see AI as the greatest risk to humanity, if you agree to a very long list of tenuous assumptions and implications. I don't think the one paragraph in this article where this is mentioned does enough to emphasize this part of the community. Many members of effective altruism use it as a front to recruit people into their belief system, which is centered around devotion to / fear of future AIs that exist solely as thought experiments. And while their leaders don't necessarily explicitly endorse it, the communities they foster tend to also be fairly right wing / race realist / misoginistic / bigoted. Many of the people in the rationalist and effective altruist community believe that if they don't help create AI any future AIs will create a hell and punish them in it. Seriously. That is a serious belief. Check out more: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Effective_altruism http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending… [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rules-for-life… [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-spec… [3]…

Related reading: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stanford-marsh… http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertised-as-produ…

This brings to mind Compass Rose's piece Shabbat Hard or Go Home. http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/sabbath-hard-and-go-home/

Nothing. Sabbath hard and go home: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/sabbath-hard-and-go-home/ Chag Pesach samech. Ramadan mubarak. Happy Easter. What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families. Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way.

aka wait vs interrupt culture http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/wait-vs-interrupt-culture/

An article [0] that takes a critical stance on Paul Graham/Y Combinator, specifically Graham's advice that you should stop focussing on passing tests, despite Y Combinator being entirely built around passing tests. [0] http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertised-as-produ…

Another article in favor of the Sabbath: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/sabbath-hard-and-go-home/

http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/ Personally, I think making AI tech broadly available could be a bad idea if AI tech changes warfare so that offense works better than defense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10721621 (This is already true, but I think it's likely that further technological development will make it even more true.)

Our inherently isolating automobile-scaled environments will always be a stressful, mental illness-inducing lifestyle. Humans are built for complete walking-distance communities, not subdivisions and collector roads. People cling to city centers because they are the only places it is legal to build the kind of pedestrian-scale density we would have recognized as home through most of human history. I found this piece on "Sabbath as alarm" [0] through Slate Star Codex, and it resonated for me: >One more useful attribute of the Jewish Sabbath is the extent to which its rigid rules generate friction in emergency situations. If your community center is not within walking distance, if there is not enough slack in your schedule to prep things a day in advance, or you are too poor to go a day without work, or too locally isolated to last a day without broadcast entertainment, then things are not okay. [0] http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/sabbath-hard-and-go-home/#Sabbath_as_al…