It doesn’t feel deliberate to me, and I think there are genuine asymmetries between the rider and the elephant; among other things, the elephant is much larger, and I think an elephant with no rider is still human and still has moral value (corollary: I think all of the EA work on understanding consciousness in order to understand which things have moral value is misguided, because to me consciousness is not a necessary condition for moral value), but a rider with no elephant is basically nothing.
I don’t claim that the way I’m set up is optimal; probably I have some growth to do in the direction of incorporating the rider into my self-concept. One reason I treat my rider with some suspicion is that it often speaks for Moloch, not for me.
It doesn’t feel deliberate to me, and I think there are genuine asymmetries between the rider and the elephant; among other things, the elephant is much larger, and I think an elephant with no rider is still human and still has moral value (corollary: I think all of the EA work on understanding consciousness in order to understand which things have moral value is misguided, because to me consciousness is not a necessary condition for moral value), but a rider with no elephant is basically nothing.
I don’t claim that the way I’m set up is optimal; probably I have some growth to do in the direction of incorporating the rider into my self-concept. One reason I treat my rider with some suspicion is that it often speaks for Moloch, not for me.
All right. It sounds like I misunderstood some of your previous comments about this.